Open Source Video Editor Pitivi Seeks Crowdfunding to Reach 1.0

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.

Re:I'm surprised ...

[fendragon]

It's getting some love here!

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.

Resolve and LightWorks

[Art3x]

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.

Re:Very enthusiastic about that effort !

[Catamaran]

The problem with gstreamer, and anything based on it, is that it is a single-process model. That's fine as long as all the processing elements play nicely, but one poorly written plugin can bring everything crashing down and then you have to sift through lots of rubble to figure out what happened. Also, it doesn't scale like a distributed architecture would. Also, gstreamer is only now starting to think about support for GPGPUs.
Still, gstreamer is the best open-source flow-based framework that we have for now.

Re:Pitivi is such a POS

[Mathieu_Du]

Thanks for answering more kindly. Cinelerra's development looks like it's discontinued, and Pitivi's design makes of it the most promising open source video editing application in my very humble but slightly informed opinion :)

Re:not a fan

[Gravis Zero]

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.

Re:Pitivi is such a POS

[Raul654]

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.