Open Source Video Editor Pitivi Seeks Crowdfunding to Reach 1.0 79
Posted
by
timothy
from the tantalizingly-close dept.
from the tantalizingly-close dept.
Eloquence writes "Pitivi is perhaps the most mature, stable and actually usable open source video editor out there. They're now looking to raise funds to support the project's ongoing development. The lack of decent open source video editors has been one of the things keeping people locked into proprietary platforms, and video editing has been identified as a high priority project by the Free Software Foundation. 2014 may still not be the fabled year of the Linux desktop, but here's hoping it'll be the year of open source video editing." Work continues as well on the crowdfunded transition to cross-platform, open-source video editing with OpenShot, and developer Jonathan Thomas is presenting the work done so far at SCALE this weekend.
Pitivi is such a POS (Score:3)
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Re:Pitivi is such a POS (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Pitivi is such a POS (Score:5, Informative)
While Cinelerra is very capable, it also seems to be an unmaintainable code dump. The community project can just about get it in a state that it builds, but I am not aware that they have added any features to it. IIRC the community devs though it would be better to start again from scatch, with a project called something like Luminara, but I can't find much about that now.
On the other hand Pitivi is build on a solid base of libraries that are used widely in other peices of software. Even if pitivi were not to succede then it would have created the tools for other people to build an editor. It also provides a base of libraries for experimental editors like Nova cut.
Re:Pitivi is such a POS (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed - it's a POS.
I installed Pitivi .15.2 from from the repos. It literally took me less than 2 minutes to crash it. It died as soon as I imported an mp3 to use as audio. (NOTE: Their website says not to report .15.2 bugs. They are evidently not supporting it anymore)
Then, following the suggestions posted here, I grabbed the latest version from source (which through trial and error, I found required adding a source repo and installing build dependencies before attempting to install from source). I configured it, built it, and tried to run it. It immediately errored out, complaining that I need to install yet more missing dependencies (GES this time). I googled the problem, saw lots of people complaing about this, and found some vague instructions on the pitivi wiki (http://wiki.pitivi.org/wiki/Building_with_GES) explaining how to install it.
At this point, I threw in the towel.
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If I were to fund the continued development of one Linux-based video authoring/editing tool it would be Cinelerra [sourceforge.net]. Between that and Avidemux [fixounet.free.fr], all my video editing needs are completely met.
Err... What about Kdenlive? Worked pretty well last time I checked...
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I'm surprised ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'm surprised ... (Score:4, Interesting)
I've used Avidemux for a long time, tried KDEnlive before and it was hard to understand and kept crashing - but a recent version of KDEnlive is quite different - easy to use, reasonably stable, does more than I want and will use all six cores of my CPU for rendering if I ask it to. I don't know about Pitivi, but you'd have to work very hard to convince me to throw development money at that when KDEnlive is apparently so far ahead.
As mentioned above there's also Cinelerra. I found that hard work to understand but I suspect it's very powerful.
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Re: I'm surprised (Score:3)
I'm using it all the time :)
Most of the "professional" features are there, you have tons of filters and exporting is really easy although I usually export to qp 0 h264 and then encode it myself using ffmpeg/x264.
It seems that it is using the same libraries though so I might be able to do it from within now too.
Anyway.. I'm never paying for another video editor as long as Kdenlive is maintained.
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Wasnt Kdenlive the one where the main developer walked away and they thought he was dead for a while?
Yeah, because instead of picking up the phone, they posted a death story to Slashdot.
Sadly, I've found the software to be as reliable. Oh, the latest build is stable? Yes, I keep hearing that.
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fedora+rpmfusion - 6'3" and manly. ;)
I try the current build of all the linux video editors about every six months. Usually I try to import an h.264 video and edit out a couple clips and export that as my test. Almost always everything crashes. The underlying tools (ffmpeg/mencoder/gstreamer, etc.) are stable in other applications.
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I use kdenlive all the time (Score:1)
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Kdenlive is awesome, and has been awesome for a long time. Even when it was horrifically unstable it was still better than anything else on linux (and usually resumed right where you left off when it crashed). And it's been awesome all this time without constantly begging for money.
It seems like another tragic blind spot in the larger linux community for superior KDE based software, thanks to ubuntu and other distros with their gnominess.
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All the videos I've compiled and uploaded to YouTube have been made using Kdenlive. I don't labor under the notion that it's perfect, but I found it much better and more accessible that anything else I tried.
Kdenlive's most annoying bug at the moment is that the sound in the final compiled video will sometimes drift, i.e. in an hour-long video, the sound will start off in sync with the video but, by the time you get to the end, it's as much as 1.5 se
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not a fan (Score:4, Informative)
Python is not suited for every task and video editing is one of the things that should be exclusively in native code.
Re:not a fan (Score:5, Informative)
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And that's why python is only used for laying out the user interface, and all the heavy lifting is done by GStreamer and gst-editing-services. I invite you to research that ;)
it's fine for stock widgets but when it comes to custom gui elements, it's a cpu drain. the video/audio track representations are completely custom.
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You're absolutely wrong. Why do you even bother posting? Your misinformed posts are doing nothing but hurting.
1. Take Pitivi and Openshot as examples. Both are written in Python. Pitivi (IIRC) uses Clutter for its timeline. Openshot uses Webkit. Both of these libraries (Clutter and Webkit) are written in C. Python code provides a simple wrapper that makes call to these (fast) C libraries.
2. If you were to completely write your own custom widgets, you'd do it with something like OpenGL or an X toolkit, and o
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I agree. I used kdenlive and pitivi. The last named one simply sucked donkey balls and crashed whenever possible.
This has been my experience as well, sadly.
I think I'm going to go install SheepShaver, MacOS 9 and iMovie 2. That was good enough for editing home video back in the 90's and the linux desktop still has nothing half as usable. I can set up netatalk to get the video files in and out and carefully limit the firewall to that service.
Linux mentality today (Score:2)
More scripts that call other scripts. Look at the mess systemd has become. If something doesn't work god help you because its not all logged or logging is done in binary. Look at GNU radio, Instead of doing something natively it all relies on slow as fuck python scripts.
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Where the hell did you get that idea? All performance critical code is in the media framework and codecs layer (Gstreamer for Pitivi, MLT for KDEnlive and Flowblade). Python code does things like "add clip to track","seek to frame 3452","start playback from current frame". There is zero need to to do CPU intensive tasks in Python code when programming video editors.
other crowd sourcing (Score:3)
The most popular website for crowd sourcing for open source appears to be: http://www.freedomsponsors.com... [freedomsponsors.com]
Pitivi seems to be having better results crowd sourcing than many other open source projects.
You already have Blender 3D... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes yes...it's 3D software, but it has a very functional, totally unlimited video-editing suite built right in, very easy to use too...you don't need to learn how to use Blender, but you need to learn a bit about video formats, compression and such.
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Good to know this. Still, isn't it a bit like starting your car to play some music on the stereo?
Just imagine one's proverbial parent firing up Blender just to edit some Little League videos.
One would hope it could be run as a standalone program.
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Re:You already have Blender 3D... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think pitivi is aiming to be usable for a different set of users than blender. Pitivi lets you just drag video clips into time line without worrying about resolutions, frame rates or codecs. Achieving the same process in blender requires quite a bit more work.
Vim and emacs are great tools, but it does not mean that we don't need gedit and kate.
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If you open blender on a fresh install you see a 3d view of a cube, and nothing that looks much like a time line. I tried dragging a video file into various bits of the interface and nothing happened. A bit of hunting finds me a 'video sequence editor', that sounds right, but when I drop a clip on it says "Error: file '/foo/bar.mp4' could not be loaded". Useful. Ok, so lets assume that it actually meant 'I don't have a codec for MP4', so i'll try a webm. now I have a block with the name of my file on the ti
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Well, I'm a heavy blender user and a blender sequence editor (the video editor part in blender) user.
While it is awesome, Blender does not attempt or want to be a full fledged video editor, to take a small example: rate conversion.
if you import a (to take an extreme) 300 fps video into a 30 fps project in blender, you will get one to one frames so the video clip will seem 10 times longer, if it has audio it will go out of sync.
If you do the same in pitivi it will magiclaly do rate conversion in the back end
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Resolve and LightWorks (Score:5, Interesting)
There's also DaVinci Resolve [blackmagicdesign.com] and and LightWorks [editshare.com]. Both with free Linux versions.
DaVinci Resolve is mainly for color tweaking but since version 10 also can cut [fstopacademy.com]. LightWorks has been used in Hollywood a lot.
In light of these two offerings, I'm surprised that PiTiVi is called the most mature. I haven't used any of them, though.
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LightWorks is not for free. (Score:1)
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Eating. Beer. Coffee. Hardware for building & testing.
Perhaps hiring freelancers to help or not having to work freelance themselves.
But most likely beer [xkcd.com].
Lightworks is supposed to go Open Source (Score:1)
http://www.lwks.com [lwks.com] Lightworks has been around since the late 80s, but has recently come out with a Linux port. They also stated that at some point they are going to Open Source it. Besides, with the low price point of $80/yr, it's not a bank breaker compared to an Adobe CS subscription or Final Cut Pro.
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Very enthusiastic about that effort ! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Very enthusiastic about that effort ! (Score:4, Interesting)
Still, gstreamer is the best open-source flow-based framework that we have for now.
Re:Very enthusiastic about that effort ! (Score:5, Informative)
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immature (Score:2)
I tried installing it in Ubuntu 13.10. Segfaulted on the first file I tried to import and complained about not being able to find video/x-surface decoder on the second. I have all the gstreamer good/bad/ugly plugins installed. I know free video editors routinely have problems but this certainly can't be the most mature.
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Ubuntu still as the 0.15.x series. You should have a look at the recent improvements in 0.92. There is a PPA https://launchpad.net/~gstream... [launchpad.net]
Lightworks is Linuxy (Score:3)
and awesomey.
http://www.lwks.com/ [lwks.com]
1971 (Score:1)
Was the year of the Linux desktop. Pretty much every intelligent computer user has done their development and real work on a Linux or UNIX machine for the last 40 years.