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Software Linux

OpenShot Video Editor Reaches Version 1.0 128

An anonymous reader writes "After only one year of development Jonathan Thomas has released version 1.0 of his impressive NLE for Linux. Based on the MLT Framework, OpenShot Video Editor has taken less time to reach this stage of development than any other Linux NLE. Dan Dennedy of Kino fame has also lent a helping hand ensuring that OpenShot has the stability and proven back-end that is needed in such a project."
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OpenShot Video Editor Reaches Version 1.0

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 09, 2010 @07:24PM (#30710928)

    I make porn videos. There's something about using "Openshot" to edit them that just adds some credibility to my artistic vision.

  • by afortaleza ( 791264 ) on Saturday January 09, 2010 @07:48PM (#30711116)
    Finally an open source project that reaches 1.0 !
    • Re:1.0 ? Amazing ! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by selven ( 1556643 ) on Saturday January 09, 2010 @08:12PM (#30711284)

      So they already beat Google?

    • Finally an open source project that reaches 1.0 !

      I can only hope that one day Linux reaches this benchmark.

      Oh, hang on. Just a second while I check my diary ... Oh yes, "1994 : start working in geologging ; decide to put off buying a copy of Xenix to see what this new Linux thing looks like ; prepare for Holland jobs ; get rid of lodger ; Linux reaches version 1.0 ; Xmas and New Year on the Central." Two OS projects making version 1.0 in 16 years - that's even worse than Duke Nukem Forever.

  • Obligatory Princess Bride quote:

    You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - The most famous of which is "never get involved in a land war in Asia"...

    Oh wait... that's not it. Try again:

    Sonny, true love is the greatest thing, in the world-except for a nice MLT - mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe

  • TLA Overload (Score:5, Insightful)

    by recoiledsnake ( 879048 ) on Saturday January 09, 2010 @07:52PM (#30711144)

    TLA overload. Since the summary is so short, couldn't the submitter or editor expand them?

  • Deb and PPA (Score:2, Interesting)

    by arhhook ( 995275 )

    This is pretty neat, they also provide a .deb and ppa for installing. The demo video looks cool, I've never heard of this software before but it's good to see something new come out of the woodwork and do something halfway decent.

  • Hopefully the Ubuntu devs come around soon and agree to include Openshot in the next release instead of PiTiVi. Last time I checked, PiTiVi couldn't do transitions or any other fancy effects - all it did was cut and arrange the clips. I don't use it, but it doesn't look like it has changed in the entire year that Openshot has been being developed!
    • by Yfrwlf ( 998822 )
      OpenShot and Shotwell to replace Pitivi and F-Spot/Mono (Tomboy can easily be replaced with Gnote or something) FTW? :P They griped about how Gimp took up 5 MBs if I remember right, but Mono takes up 10 AFAIK.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 09, 2010 @08:10PM (#30711268)

    It looks like the author of this program spent(wasted?) a lot of time trying to use Gstreamer as the back-end for his project but basically ran into a brick wall [openshotvideo.com].

    If I remember correctly the developers of another Linux NLE called diva [archive.org] finally gave up on Gstreamer after years of struggling with it and subsequently abandoned their project altogether. Didn't the Diva developers also clash with the Gstreamer developers?

    So it appears that the above developers put a lot of effort in writing Linux NLE's using Gstreamer but still ultimately failed at their attempts. Is there something inherently flawed with Gstreamer/Gnonlin? If Video software using Gnonlin as its back-end(Pitivi) can only be written by its author(Edward Hervey), Gstreamer must be too cryptic for mere mortal programmers. I wonder if anything formidable will ever come of Pitivi.

    • by Pecisk ( 688001 ) on Sunday January 10, 2010 @05:29AM (#30713678)

      "It looks like the author of this program spent(wasted?) a lot of time trying to use Gstreamer as the back-end for his project but basically ran into a brick wall."

      He didn't run into brick wall, he just felt that MLT will be better used for his project and he lacked initiative to communicate with Gstreamer/Gnonlin people (I have done it many times and I can say that Gstreamer guys are most accessible in Linux multimedia playground). Problem is also that Gstreamer and Gnonlin is complex for new beginnners who wants just drop the code and go. It requires insight and planning your app around framework actually. Some devs don't like it. Well, it's their choice.

      "If I remember correctly the developers of another Linux NLE called diva finally gave up on Gstreamer after years of struggling with it and subsequently abandoned their project altogether. Didn't the Diva developers also clash with the Gstreamer developers?"

      First, Diva was written in C#, which is not exactly a power horse, and it was also written in time when Gnonlin wasn't quite developed and wasn't ready for prime time. They also rewrote lot of stuff internally and in the end imho it was scrapped because of financial problems of Novell. And I really didn't saw them clash with Gstreamer guys.

      "So it appears that the above developers put a lot of effort in writing Linux NLE's using Gstreamer but still ultimately failed at their attempts. Is there something inherently flawed with Gstreamer/Gnonlin? If Video software using Gnonlin as its back-end(Pitivi) can only be written by its author(Edward Hervey), Gstreamer must be too cryptic for mere mortal programmers. I wonder if anything formidable will ever come of Pitivi."

      Gnonlin is used in at least one other media editor which uses Gstreamer as backend - Jokosher. I have been personally involved in it and can say only kind words of Edward. Sometimes he is sharp, but more or less he helped with every problem we came across using Gnonlin. Jokosher was glitchy also for some time, but for last releases it has been quite stable.

      And most important - Pitivi has serious commercial backing now and there are four core coders (including Edwards of course), all paid by commercial entities, to write it. I really put my money on Gstreamer stuff and apps, because of long term strategy Gstreamer community and app devs have. They are serious about what they doing.

      "Gstreamer must be too cryptic for mere mortal programmers"

      Well, I know hundreds of commercial coders who develop Gstreamer solutions for day's systems, like TVs, DVRs, mobile phones, etc. They must be zombies, because mortals can't handle it. Yeah, right :)

      • Gnonlin is used in at least one other media editor which uses Gstreamer as backend - Jokosher. I have been personally involved in it and can say only kind words of Edward. Sometimes he is sharp, but more or less he helped with every problem we came across using Gnonlin. Jokosher was glitchy also for some time, but for last releases it has been quite stable.

        Is Jokosher that project that started out with a site advertising features that were planned for version 3 and yet still hasn't reached 1.0? Sorry, but i

  • I haven't installed it yet, but this looks better than anything out there so far. Hopefully it's stable and truly supports any format ffmpeg supports. Cinelerra has been stuck in the mud for too long (especially on file formats and titles), avidemux is too limited, as is kdenlive. If it's good, maybe I'll get off my ass and add a gentoo ebuild. I don't edit video very often, but I've always wished the tools were just a little bit better than what we've had.

    • Re:Feaking Sweet! (Score:5, Informative)

      by __aasqbs9791 ( 1402899 ) on Saturday January 09, 2010 @11:04PM (#30712420)

      I just installed it on my Ubuntu 9.10 system and through together some short clips I had laying around and not only did it work exactly the way I expected, but when I exported them in a couple of different formats it was very fast (I tried Kino a while back and not only did it take a long time to import clips, the export was also very slow.) I'm really glad I read this story today.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        Recently I tried Pitivi to make a cheesy Christmas Christmas video. Otherwise all my experience has been with my copy of Adobe premiere Elements 4.0. I looked hard at the advantages of paying for a more recent copy of Adobe Premiere too, but it offered no advantages that I could see. (And it is sloooooooow, at least on my Vista hardware).

        The workflow I developed was to edit using pitivi on Ubuntu, because the speed of Linux on my Quad-core helped make the labor go quickest. Then I exported video in a humung

        • by Pecisk ( 688001 )

          OpenShot will never be in default by Ubuntu, and it is because of reliance to ffmpeg library, which is used by MLT framework.

          Gstreamer have done this right - split plugins and do proper releases for them. Installable seperately, it gives freedom companies to release distros without being frightened by patent nukes ffmpeg will definitely attract. You said: "While it seems Pitivi support for gstreamer export would work really well, in practice I only found 1 maybe 2 useful export formats that Premiere would w

      • I installed openshot here (Ubuntu 9.10/AMD 64 quad) and it hangs at different points after start-up. Several times requiring restart of the X server. Off to post a bug report...

  • Interesting, yes.. but I'm more interested in where that music for all of the demo videos came from. The credits list titles, composers, and the fact that they are Creative Commons but no links or URLs. So are they pieces composed just for the project? Or is there some place out there with lots of "atmospheric" instrumentals under Creative Commons that are suitable for videos?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by tsalmark ( 1265778 )
      Yes, there is tons of free "atmospheric" music available with copy left licenses. Google "creative commons music". For example look at: www.jamendo.com. There are also some rather large collections of European trance/ambient music around. The quality is there, but in a diamonds in the rough kind of way, you may have to search a bit. Or are you asking for a site where someone has prequalified the music for you, if so well, I haven't found it yet. None the less there are some great collections out there, and
    • The very last screen on the main page has a microscopic (not to be confused with tiny) url: www.last.fm/music/Denny+Schneidemesser.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    First of all, I know this is a big achievement, so congratulations to the team of programmers for getting this far!

    But after watching the video and seeing the screenshots, I think this project really really needs a designer that is familiar with what professional video editors want. It looks SO amateur that I wouldn't go near it.

    All the transitions look really cheesy, and the titling tool looks like Corel Draw circa 1995.

    This is all just my smart-ass opinion after spending 10 minutes on the website and with

    • by Yfrwlf ( 998822 )
      I think you're being a bit overly harsh especially not having used it to see how tweak-able the effects are, but if you think so no doubt some others may as well. I'm not trying to invalidate your criticism, but since the features are there now, tweaking the default settings to make them look a bit nicer I'm sure will be something that gets attention in the future. Maybe you should offer your suggestions on that in more detail to them. ^^
  • Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iluvcapra ( 782887 ) on Saturday January 09, 2010 @09:00PM (#30711664)

    Does this thing support negative matchback, 3-perf or RED camera workflows? Or is it just another prosumer tinkertoy, like every other Linux media package?

    Trust me when I say there is a LOT of interest in OSS alternatives (or any alternatives at all) to Avid, Final Cut Pro or Pro Tools, and a lot of money in support contracts if you were able to build the solution. But alas, Linux devs are constantly reinventing iMovie.

    • Come on, it's version 1. I hear Jim Jannard is working with OpenShot to replace RedCode in version 1.2.
    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      I'd be happy to see them outdo iMovie in the first place. My last experience trying to edit movies in Linux was.... unpleasant to say the least, and I wasn't looking to do anything that fancy. Granted, it was HDV footage (but still MPEG2 from what I understand) so not completely mainstream but it'd constantly crash doing simple stuff like splitting up clips and rearranging them with simple crossover effects, or just refuse to recognize it at all and whatnot. I don't remember all the apps I tried but it was

    • The difference in coding for RED camera work flows etc is massive as you well know. If it takes a year or two to get a iMovie clone that runs on Linux, how long would it take to get a full Final Cut clone done? It would be an expensive and very long project without financial backing.
    • Trust me when I say there is a LOT of interest in OSS alternatives (or any alternatives at all) to Avid, Final Cut Pro or Pro Tools

      Too true, and this goes for many commercial closed-source programs. I daresay that open source - or at least open standards - is actually one of the bigger reasons for the interest, certainly in the media companies.

      Unfortunately, however...

      a lot of money in support contracts

      But virtually none in actual development, unless you're an in-house coder.

      if you were able to build the s

      • That said... babysteps. Get an iMovie done and with any luck you've at least got a framework to build upon, to learn mistakes from, and to do better with in the future.

        Yeah I know, they never will add to it though. And when someone like me comes along and wants to add some glue to it to support timecode, I'll find the source a mess and several underlying architectural decisions that make the implementation impossible.

        • Agreed. I think a solution to this is a media database along the lines of what Avid does whereby media is imported into a database and streams are accessed using some kind of query involving a clip identifier and time description. Possibly with a rate component to handle varispeed/shuttle functionality.

          That would take the export to EDL/shotlist/whatever (it's been a while since I worked in professional A/V) away from the hands of developers of _user_interfaces_ like OpenShot. It could allow various export t

    • I want something that supports rotoscoping, multiple transparent layers, etc. with objects (stills, videos, vector graphics) that have properties that can be keyframed. In other words, I want an OSS After Effects killer. Gimp will one day surpass Photoshop (it's already pretty close), Inkscape will rival Illustrator, and Blender3d is arguably already at the same level as 3ds Max, yet there are no OSS alternatives for video solutions (at least not of the same magnitude as Blender3d and Gimp)...
    • by hazydave ( 96747 )
      One and a half guys working in their spare time for a year doesn't get you that. And really, at this point, a stable, non-crashing clone of iMovie on Linux would be a good first step. The problem with every one of these projects is that the goal is that of one or a few individuals, toward whatever end they have in mind. That's often where they land, years later... a version that did what they wanted, with no other direction, no adequate testing, feedback, and resolution of bugs, etc. Simply put, a guy who
    • ... apart from RED's, supports RED camera workflows?

      In any case, in the words of the director of "New Town killers" (Richard Jobson): RED workflow is a real PITA (so bad that he prefers to use Cannon DSLRs in video mode to shoot now).

  • the export function is somewhat working now.

    always didnt work to select different bitrate etc...

    maybe i can edit my 1080p MTS files soon....

  • -- slightly off topic I have not done video editing, but I did do a full week of video recording and converting to DVD. I did everything in linux, and beat my friend who was using Windows hands down. Any windows video conversions took hours, but ffmpeg did conversions almost as fast as disk would allow. I discovered Handbrake after I did all this, so maybe Handbrake on Windows would be similar.
    • example command line

      ffmpeg -i input -acodec libfaac -ab 128kb -ac 2 -ar 48000 -vcodec libx264 -level 21 -b 640kb -coder 1 -f psp -flags +loop -trellis 2 -partitions +parti4x4+parti8x8+partp4x4+partp8x8+partb8x8 -g 250 -s 480x272 output.mp4

    • Any windows video conversions took hours, but ffmpeg did conversions almost as fast as disk would allow.

      He could've used ffmpeg on Windows, and you could've run Windows Movie Maker in Wine. This anecdote is more CLI vs. GUI, but I agree.

  • But does it run on Lin... Oh. never mind.
  • This thread made me read up on video compression, and I can now articulate more precisely why my favorite video codec is Motion-JPEG - It uses 100% I-frames, which makes editing easy, and which makes fast motion scenes look better than codecs which use P and B frames. The only downside is that Motion JPEG doesn't offer the best compression, but it's still reasonably sized.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by cheesybagel ( 670288 )
      Yeah MJPEG was the codec most people used in the early days of prosumer NLE. Then we all switched to DV25 which is still like this.DV formats are still pretty much like MJPEG in that they do no compression between frames. A lot of camcorders still use the format. Other early editing systems enforced that when you were using MPEG-2 you could not use compression between frames. Do not know how they work internally, but IIRC this is no longer required. Linux editing software could follow this path as well. But
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 )

      ``This thread made me read up on video compression, and I can now articulate more precisely why my favorite video codec is Motion-JPEG - It uses 100% I-frames, which makes editing easy, and which makes fast motion scenes look better than codecs which use P and B frames. The only downside is that Motion JPEG doesn't offer the best compression, but it's still reasonably sized.''

      For some value of "reasonably sized", I'm sure. But you are including a lot of redundant information in your stream if you represent

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