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Software The Almighty Buck Linux

Open Source Video Editor Pitivi Seeks Crowdfunding to Reach 1.0 79

Posted by timothy 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.
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Open Source Video Editor Pitivi Seeks Crowdfunding to Reach 1.0 More

Open Source Video Editor Pitivi Seeks Crowdfunding to Reach 1.0

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  • Pitivi is such a POS (Score:3)

    by barlevg ( 2111272 ) on Saturday February 22, 2014 @10:24AM (#46310697)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Mathieu_Du ( 3547027 )
      Did you at least try the 0.9X series ? It has completelely and radically changed, and I'm not sure how calling it a piece of shit will help the discussion.
      • The Pitivi version I have (through Ubuntu 12.04) is 0.15.2. I'll check out the new one when I upgrade to 14.04 in a few months. But wow, fine--maybe my title was a bit hostile, but the point was just that there are better tools out there that I think are more deserving of support.

    • Re:Pitivi is such a POS (Score:5, Informative)

      by ssam ( 2723487 ) on Saturday February 22, 2014 @12:22PM (#46311269)

      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)

      by Raul654 ( 453029 ) on Saturday February 22, 2014 @09:54PM (#46313801) Homepage

      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.

    • 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...

      • Haven't tried it in a couple of years. You know how things go--when you finally find a set of tools that work, you're loathe to try anything you.

  • I'm surprised ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rambo Tribble ( 1273454 ) on Saturday February 22, 2014 @10:29AM (#46310723) Homepage
    ... Kdenlive doesn't get more love. Although you have to get newer builds to get stability, it's long had a strong feature set and very approachable interface. The video formats it works with constitute a most impressive list.

    • Re:I'm surprised ... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by fendragon ( 841926 ) on Saturday February 22, 2014 @10:54AM (#46310823)
      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.

      • I fully agree with your comments. Perhaps Kdenlive lost some potential admirers with those earlier, unstable builds. I know it was frustrating to get the editing done, only to have the software crash every time you tried to render. Hopefully people will get the word that it is now a stable, capable and accessible alternative to costly proprietary products.

      • 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.

    • Wasnt Kdenlive the one where the main developer walked away and they thought he was dead for a while?

      • 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.

        • What is your platform and what is your build, (taking software; nothing personal)?

          • 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.

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by ffkom ( 3519199 )
              I import h.264 clips into kdenlive all the time, and I cannot say it has crashed on me doing so. (I use a self-compiled binary of the latest stable version.)
            • Well, for what it's worth, I settled on Kubuntu 12.04 some time ago. The version of Kdenlive from the repos maddeningly crashed every time on render. I got the PPA version, its now 0.9.6, and have only had a very infrequent lockup. Maybe two or three times in the last several years.
    • I am using kdenlive a lot, and have even tutored others on how to use it, with a consistent reaction of "wow, it's really good, once you know how to use it". The documentation/tutorials available for kdenlive are somewhat lacking, they are either outdated, shed light on only a few features, or are simply sloppy work. But kdenlive is really feature-rich and very, very good. At the time I had to choose, Pitiwi was by no means a competitor, and I wonder if that has really changed.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ragica ( 552891 )

      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.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ewhac ( 5844 )
      Gratuitous plug for my YouTube "Let's Play" playlist. [youtube.com]

      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

    • I totally agree. Kdenlive is a good option.

  • not a fan (Score:4, Informative)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Saturday February 22, 2014 @10:36AM (#46310741)

    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)

      by Mathieu_Du ( 3547027 ) on Saturday February 22, 2014 @11:25AM (#46310927)
      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 ;)

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Gravis Zero ( 934156 )

        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: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          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

    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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)

    by BradMajors ( 995624 ) on Saturday February 22, 2014 @10:50AM (#46310797)

    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)

    by MindPrison ( 864299 ) on Saturday February 22, 2014 @10:57AM (#46310839) Journal
    ...which is as far as I know, one of the most stable and compatible Video Editors out there (free & open source & GPL and all that jazz). www.blender.org

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by arielCo ( 995647 )

      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.

      • Actually, that's very easy. All you have to do - is to go to the TOP MENU BAR - and click on DEFAULT (it's a drop-down menu) and select VIDEO EDITOR instead. And you're good to go. Just drag and drop your videos, as many as you like...sound files to...nearly any format, and edit till you drop ;)

    • Re:You already have Blender 3D... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ssam ( 2723487 ) on Saturday February 22, 2014 @12:31PM (#46311317)

      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.

      • Actually, Blender (the last few years) also lets you Drag & drop videos directly on the timeline. You really should give it a try! ;)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ssam ( 2723487 )

          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

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        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

        • I believe you have a valid point (for once, Anonymous Coward) ;) The audio synch is an issue with different framerates, I already noticed this when I was working with my 50FPS holiday videos from my America-trip, very annoying - but solvable, you just need to fiddle a bit with the "skip frames" settings and keyframe settings, and it'll work. I agree - this just isn't acceptable, and I'll probably address the developers on this issue, maybe even fix it myself if it becomes annoying enough. I've just learned

  • Resolve and LightWorks (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Art3x ( 973401 ) on Saturday February 22, 2014 @10:58AM (#46310841)

    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.

  • Lightworks is supposed to go Open Source (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ffkom ( 3519199 )
      But why would I want to use LightWorks instead of kdenlive, which is already open source and for free, plus has tons of features that LightWorks does not offer? The only feature I can see listed that LightWorks has but kdenlive hasn't is support for stereoscopic images.

  • Very enthusiastic about that effort ! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mathieu_Du ( 3547027 ) on Saturday February 22, 2014 @11:33AM (#46310965)
    Disclaimer : I'm one of the Pitivi's developers, and I'm very excited about that campaign. We feel like Pitivi's technological choices (being based on GStreamer), and its large community make it the most promising open source video editing application out there ! I encourage you to visit our website for that campaign at http://fundraiser.pitivi.org/ [pitivi.org] , as we've put a lot of effort into explaining all this in details !

    • Re:Very enthusiastic about that effort ! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Catamaran ( 106796 ) * on Saturday February 22, 2014 @12:49PM (#46311417)
      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:Very enthusiastic about that effort ! (Score:5, Informative)

        by Mathieu_Du ( 3547027 ) on Saturday February 22, 2014 @01:10PM (#46311495)
        I'd much rather have "everything crashing down" than having to debug an inconsistent state where multiple *processes* run and some silently crash .. GStreamer is multithreaded, and that brings us the benefits of parallel execution without the "advantage" that you describe and that I perceive as a drawback. Regarding hardware acceleration, a lot of work is being done by multiple industry players to bring it to GStreamer, it's indeed quite new but things are moving fast !

  • 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.

    • Pitivi developer here, this kind of problems has not been reported to us, please file a bug report and come share your files on our irc, #pitivi on freenode. Freenode is a bit flaky right now, but bugzilla is working all right :)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ssam ( 2723487 )

      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)

    by log0n ( 18224 ) on Saturday February 22, 2014 @05:14PM (#46312677)

    and awesomey.

    http://www.lwks.com/ [lwks.com]

  • 1971 (Score:1)

    by The Cat ( 19816 )

    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.

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