The Current State of Linux Video Editing 223
An anonymous reader writes: The VFX industry has for most of the last 30 years been reliant on Macs and Windows machines for video editing, primarily because all of the Linux-based FOSS tools have been less than great. This is a shame, because all of the best 3D and 2D tools, other than video, are entrenched in the Linux environment and perform best there. The lack of decent video editing tools on Linux prevents every VFX studio from becoming a Linux-only shop. That being said, there are some strides being made to bridge this gap. What setup do you use? What's still missing?
Blender FTW (Score:5, Informative)
Blender, a 3D animation suite, and a powerful video editor. Have not looked back since using Blender. Also comes with a python console, where really powerful scriptability can be reached. What else could one need?
Re:Blender FTW (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Blender FTW (Score:4, Informative)
Now all I need is a 10 button mouse and an interface reference!
This just in: Specialty software requires (or is more useful) with specialty hardware. Film at 11.
It's like the SpaceNavigator and SpacePilot never existed for CAD/modeling. It's as if all those 16 button tablet pucks never existed.
Also complex software requires documentation/references. Blender != MSPAINT.EXE
--
BMO
Re: (Score:3)
Simple:
It doesn't have Blender in my boot process yet.... just think of all those extra seconds I could be rendering while my PC booted going to waste.
Re: (Score:2)
I second this: blender's VSE mode is great (Score:4, Informative)
It's daunting for the first few days (yep, days) but you'll get used to the blender workflow.
To edit video you need to go into VSE mode. You have to learn it, you can't just brute force and guess your way around, so go watch a bunch of tutorial videos (search: blender vse or blender visual sequence editor) and you'll be flying.
Re: (Score:2)
Nuke Studio is designed for VFX facilities (Score:2)
Blender is not going to address the needs of a VFX facility. Having a python checkbox isn't enough to handle the sorts of scenes and needs of a feature film vfx shot in most situations. There is a reason CG supervisors still pick Max, Maya or Houdini over "free" software and that's the cost of productivity. $3,000 is a small price to pay compared to being even 10% more productive. The average VFX artist is paid at least $65,000. So if you need 10% more artists to do the same thing in the same amount of
Kdenlive is getting stable (Score:5, Funny)
Tried it again recently, and I was able to add a four-minute video from my phone, cut out a chunk, add a transition and a fade-in and fade out, and took me less than half an hour.
It's true, that would have taken me five minutes in iMovie in 2000, but at least it didn't crash, which is what happened every previous time I've tried that.
Re:Kdenlive is getting stable (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I played with it a little, but the poor state of support for multichannel audio was a major issue for me.
What I want:
Record video with my camera along with a "reference" (for timing) audio track
Record audio with a Zoom H2
Replace "reference" audio track with multichannel (surround) audio from the H2
Edit the various clips after I've synced/replaced the audio
Export to H.264 + AC3 surround
Last time I tried that with kdenlive, it was pretty much impossible
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe its time for a change. (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe its time to try something new, can SystemD help with this?
Re: (Score:2)
download enough ram
Mount an NFS share to /dumbidea then dd a huge new file to /dumbidea/superslowswap and mkswap /dumbidea/superslowswap ; swapon /dumbidea/superslowswap
This might not run as desired.
Kdenlive (Score:5, Informative)
I've found kdenlive is great - I've had to make a couple of small videos recently,it was a breeze with a couple of minor hiccups
1. As mentioned figuring out how to do transitions was hard - they're there, just hard to figure out
2. Ubuntu .... grrr .... their last distro has broken libraries (libav+melt - broken for lots of video editors, not just kdenlive) you can happily edit away but when you try and make the final stream, no audio -apparently all they need to do is to rebuild their binaries
Re: (Score:2)
Kdenlive is fine (Score:3, Informative)
I confirm KDE is OK. I just finished a 2-hour project, with 3 cameras plus an audio recorder, and bad video that I had to fix from any imaginable point of view (chromatic aberration, colors, contrast).
KDE started to fall apart badly when I began to have three levels of nested projects: my main project uses virtual clips that are in fact projects, which in turn use virtual clips that are smaller projects. When you do this, with many tracks in each project, and complicated effects that have lots of keyframes
Kdenlive, SlowMoVideo, Pencil (Score:5, Informative)
Kdenlive
Kdenlive is great if you just want to edit some holiday movie or pictures. In my experience, the resulting movies look good, and any ugly problems can be associated with the limitations on my camera, not Kdenlive. It's an easy user interface, and it only gets complicated when you want to do more advanced effects (the complexity comes from the number of options, meaning you have to go through some menus and try out a bunch of things). Btw, last time I used Kdenlive, I used Linunx Mint 16, and had no problems with audio (or any problem in general). Also, the crashes that I used to experience in 2012 seem to be gone completely.
SlowMoVideo
I also used SlowMoVideo, to make slow motion videos and to speed up videos (which I then put into Kdenlive to become part of a larger project). It works, although its user interface has a rather steep learning curve (not the most intuitive interface). It lacks a simple method to just slow down or speed up a movie by a factor two. It appears that the makers expect people to want to use the full range of options all the time. (I realize that asking for less options will upset some people... sorry).
Pencil
Finally, I also used Pencil to make some animations. In my case, quality was poor, but that says a lot about my drawing skills, and little about the program. What I missed a lot was an easy method to stitch a series of pictures together into a movie. I think that Pencil claims to provide one, but I never got it to work. In desperation, I used some awful command-line tool and it took me ages to figure out the exact code to type in to get the desired effect.
Re: (Score:2)
Attitudes (Score:3, Insightful)
Things won't improve until two things are addressed. First FOSS devs drop the attitude that "It crashes sometimes" is an acceptable condition for software intended for productive work. This is compounded by FOSS users being tolerant of crashy software because it suits their ideology. Second, UI/UX need to be more than an afterthought or secondary consideration. People tolerate KiCad and Audacity's god-awful UIs because they're FOSS. There's no reason FOSS can't have consistent operation and polished presentation, other than clashes of ego.
Re: (Score:3)
As a FOSS user, crashy software makes me give up things. Crashy games make me give up gaming (or well, most FOSS games are either from 1979 or are empty shells or have terrible artworks that would have been rejected in 1994), crashy music-player-with-library makes me stay with playlist based music players, quirky combination of dosbox and software midi synth makes me give up using dosbox.
Re:Attitudes (Score:4, Insightful)
Second, UI/UX need to be more than an afterthought or secondary consideration. People tolerate KiCad and Audacity's god-awful UIs because they're FOSS.
This. This is why FOSS video editing sucks beyond compare. I recently had to perform a simple video editing task which consisted of extracting a short segment from the middle of a longer clip, removing the audio, and saving it so it could be played in the background as someone was speaking. I'm a sysadmin, so I don't have years of experience in using these things, I just wanted to do a quick cut&paste of a video segment and save it without audio.
After about three or four hours of trying one FOSS video editing app after another I gave up. Utterly incomprehensible user interfaces, constant crashes, wading through tedious processes that seemed to do the right thing but didn't produce the expected results, it was a nightmare. Eventually I fired up a Windows machine and did it in about five minutes with some commercial trial-ware that nagged me with ads when I installed it.
That was the result from the point of view of a computer geek (specifically one with no prior experience in video editing software who couldn't fall back on years of experience in using this stuff). The person who wanted the video clip, a retired neighbour, wouldn't have made it past the first FOSS video-editing app before giving up. My conclusion from the experience was that if you're a typical user wanting to do video editing, use commercial software on a Mac or Windows.
Re: Attitudes (Score:2)
I just use mplayer/mencoder for simple stuff like that.
Re: Attitudes (Score:2)
I understand the frustration, sort of. If you do it for a living, you are not exactly the kind of user I was speaking to when I mentioned mplayer/mencoder.
If the parent poster spent more than 20 minutes on one software package with a broken UI, he could have figured it out how to get the desired effect with mencoder in less time. That's all I was saying.
I understand the discussion is about poor UI, I do. I get it. But sometimes the cli is faster, and easier. If you're an experienced linux user, and are havi
Re:Attitudes (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason being that Windows is more than an OS and a collection of predictable platforms. A video on Windows is a video, accessed through the appropriate API. You don't dynamically link to half a dozen libraries, hope they are there, and crash (or demand installation) when it isn't. You install the codec and now everything can deal with it.
This is ultimately the problem with linux. There is no defined platforms anywhere. Software that wants to use anything can't ever guarantee that it will be there. They aren't part of the OS, but rather, part of the users defined installation.
Re: (Score:2)
> A video on Windows is a video, accessed through the appropriate API. You don't dynamically link to half a dozen libraries, hope they are there, and crash (or demand installation) when it isn't. You install the codec and now everything can deal with it.
Sounds vaguely how Quicktime is supposed to work on MacOS. I certainly hope that Microsoft's attempt at a knockoff works better than the original does. I tried the original article and it wasn't quite all it was cracked up to be.
I don't see Microsoft act
Re: (Score:2)
This is ultimately the problem with linux. There is no defined platforms anywhere. Software that wants to use anything can't ever guarantee that it will be there. They aren't part of the OS, but rather, part of the users defined installation.
Not quite: It's the task of a distribution to make sure all needed libraries are in place. I concede there is some difficulty when codecs and formats are not fully standardized. In that case, proprietary distributions stick on their homebrewed format and don't care about compatibility. A problem with FOSS is that users want it to be compatible with any other format.
And who wrote "This is compounded by FOSS users being tolerant of crashy software because it suits their ideology"? I experienced running an
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Either require libavcodec as dependency thru package manager or statically link it. Most freeware Windows transcoders include a version of libavcodec, no Windows specific video API is used.
Re: (Score:2)
For simple editing like that, I use avidemux.
Re: (Score:2)
This.
I used to use Kino, but this doesn't work on 64-bit. I believe the developer has transferred his efforts to Kdenlive. Kino worked well, but required format conversion in most cases.
All I want is an effective non-linear editor.
I have never managed to do anything with Cinelerra. Usually, it crashes within seconds of starting, but I haven't even figured out how to open a file containing video. The "documentation" (I use the word loosely) seems to assume that you have already opened the video.
Kdenlive seem
Re: (Score:2)
You're doing it wrong then. You could've done that in Avidemux or OpenShot. Extract the audio with Avidemux and edit it in Audacity and put it all together in OpenShot. Simplest thing in the world, you don't need Windows for that.
Re:Attitudes (Score:5, Interesting)
Things won't improve until two things are addressed. First FOSS devs drop the attitude that "It crashes sometimes" is an acceptable condition for software intended for productive work.
Really? That's the attitude of FOSS developers? I call that BS.
I think chances are spoiled users of proprietary software mistake being able to communicate directly with the developers with entitlement that a developer has to jump directly when a user discovers a bug.
No, bugs are handled with different priorities and just because a bug annoys you the most, it is not necessarily the most crucial bug to fix first.
If you want bug priorities to change, just announce to give 100 bucks to whoever fixes a bug you run into.
Bug bounty programs are quite common in FOSS.
Re: (Score:2)
So the expectation that an application doesn't randomly crash-to-desktop makes one "spoiled"?
Your attitude to claim that all FOSS developers just accept crashes makes you spoiled.
Not every bug is reproducible everywhere. If a bug does not occur or the developer's system, it's not his fault.
Re: (Score:2)
What kind of horse shit is this? I can think of at least 3 examples off the top of my head that make this false.
First, please provide proof that FOSS developers in general do not care about stability, as you claimed in your first post.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What developers care about:
What businesses care about:
This is why FOSS will always be buggy and crashy.
Re:Attitudes (Score:4, Insightful)
What businesses care about:
Re: (Score:2)
This is why FOSS will always be buggy and crashy.
No, this is why Developers will always be miserable working for 'the man'.
Re: (Score:3)
drop the attitude that "It crashes sometimes" is an acceptable condition for software intended for productive work
Welcome to video editing.
I've seen the same with Premiere and Final Cut Pro. While what you say is true of FOSS in general, multi-track video editing is a beast to program around anyway.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Consistent and polished doesn't necessarily mean beautiful. To pick on KiCad some more, sometimes you right-click to end a command, sometimes you push escape, sometimes you push a specific letter. Sometimes moving an object will bring the connections with it, sometimes not. "Grab" and "Move" are slightly different, but this isn't explained or illustrated within the UI. Sometimes dragging a selection fence includes elements that overlap the fence boundary, sometimes not. There is no visual or audible feedbac
Misleading. DreamWorks, ILM, etc use Linux too (Score:2)
TFS could be slightly misleading. DreamWorks, Industrial Light and Magic, and other major studios have been using Linux for a long time, along side MacMac and some Windows. It's not that they don't use Windows, they are multiplatform, where the person doing hair on a character may use a completely different software stack from the person doing the mouth.
I should preview before submitting (Score:2)
That should say:
It's not that they don't use LINUX, it's that they are multiplatform.
Lightworks, anyone? Not FOSS, but not expensive (Score:2, Insightful)
Lightworks is a Linux-first NLE that added Windows and recently Mac versions. It is the editor of choice for many in the "major motion picture" realm. You've seen its results at your local multiplex. Operationally, it emulates a Steenbeck flatbed film editor. www.lwks.com
Re: (Score:3)
This needs to be upvoted. Lightworks is professional-grade video editing. No hand-holding or easy shortcuts, and the learning curve is very, very high. After years (probably over a decade) of using very amateurish video editing software, learning Lightworks was not easy, but I'm very glad I did. And having said that, I have a ton to learn.
I don't care if it's FOSS, and neither do any major studios. It's free for personal use and not terribly expensive to license.
Article confuses "on Linux" with FOSS (Score:5, Informative)
LightWorks is not FOSS. It works on Linux but so do Maya, Bitwig, RenderMan, and so on. Neither of those is FOSS.
There is professional software available for Linux in this market but just like OSX and Windows you have to pay for them.
Re: (Score:2)
LightWorks is, and they have a free (as in beer) version. Not FOSS, but a professional NLE tool on Linux.
Re: (Score:2)
and none of those are nlve's either, whats your fucking point
RTFA!
The article claims to list "6 free and open source video editing tools" and includes LightWorks in that list.
That's my point. And now GTFO.
Re: (Score:2)
If you actually read TFA, in the introduction he says that with a good video editor, video shops could be all-Linux shops. The intro doesn't say "free free free", it's about something that can do the job on Linux.
Quote from TFA: "I often ask myself what the current state of video editing is for free and open source software (FOSS)."
Does this wording really mean "proprietary software under Linux"? To me it does not but maybe that's because I'm not a native English speaker.
Blender (Score:5, Interesting)
SGI (Score:5, Informative)
The VFX industry has for most of the last 30 years been reliant on Macs and Windows machines for video editing
You seem to have skipped SGI hardware, and software like Discreet Flame/Fire, which defined both video and film editing for a decade.
No video on Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux has the super low end and the super high end well covered, but it has a few serious areas that are lacking.
On the low end, OpenShot definitely beats windows movie maker, and it's about as good as iMovie, so for vloggers, it's all you'd need.
On the high end, Lightworks and Cinelerra are both powerful, comparable to Avid, but less stable, and the learning curve is steep; too steep for an amateur who is just messing around to master quickly.
But for a start up or mid-range video production company, neither option is acceptable. OpenShot is simply not good enough for their needs, and the high end is too much, the training costs for employees would be significant. There is no Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere, or Final Cut 7 for the mid range companies to work with.
I've also had trouble rendering to h.264 in Linux. The files are sometimes corrupt - refusing to load in anything other than VLC, sometimes lacking features, like progressive upload that is youtube friendly, or just plain poor quality - not all renderers are made equal, some look better at a given bit rate than others.
Re: (Score:2)
The files are sometimes corrupt - refusing to load in anything other than VLC
Do people still use players other than VLC? Weird.
Re: (Score:2)
The files are sometimes corrupt - refusing to load in anything other than VLC
Do people still use players other than VLC? Weird.
VLC is to media playback as Reggie Love is to Barack 0bama - It just handles stuff - PERIOD.
Re: (Score:3)
Linux has the super low end and the super high end well covered, but it has a few serious areas that are lacking.
This post sums up everything thoroughly and completely.
From personal experience I can concur that for most NLE needs Sony Vegas (and Premiere for those whose brains work that way) provide the proper ease of use and feature set.
Sony Vegas is easy to self teach. The interface is clean, simple and intuitive. Much more intuitive than Premiere. Sony Vegas should be the target for Linux Video Editing developers. Vegas is up to version 13 right now. EVEN IF developers targeted version 9 or even 6 of Vegas ... that
Re: No video on Linux (Score:2)
Yep. I try various video editors every year or so and for the past 7 or 8 years have kept coming back to Vegas. Stable, does even the most complex things I need to do including fancy title work, and is the fastest, least hardware-hungry NLE I've found. Stable? You bet! I'm running a so-so HP AMD duocore with 4 GB RAM and I can't remember the last crash. "It just works."
Improvements in Windows stability over the last few years have admittedly helped. But Vegas gives my clients the best value for their money
Re: (Score:2)
Sony Vegas is pretty much the only program I use that still requires Windows.
It's powerful, easy to self teach, and until 10 came around, it was extremely stable.
But if your video card is anything newer than the GTX 500 series, don't expect any GPU rendering assistance.
Re: (Score:2)
Thank you for the suggestion; I'm installing it in the background and I am going to try this out shortly.
New Cinelerra for Linux on Feb 2nd. (Score:2)
http://cinelerra.org/1/
avidemux (Score:3, Interesting)
If you have a Windows install and you buy Adobe Premiere Elements [amzn.com] for $90, you will discover you must sign in, and Premiere Elements will max out your incoming internet connection for the entire time the program is open. But Premiere Elements works fine for video editing if you disable networking in control panel. So what's it doing with all that bandwidth?!
Not open source, but... (Score:2)
DaVinci Resolve, by Blackmagic Design, is used in actual Hollywood movies (though I don't know if those Hollywood studios are using the Linux version or not).
Re: (Score:2)
High hopes for VideoLAN Movie Creator (Score:2)
Personally, I have high expectations for VideoLAN Movie Creator (because my experience with VLC Media Player has been excellent). Unfortunately, it's been in an "under-development" state for almost as long as I can remember. I just hope they get to a complete, stable release sometime soon. http://www.videolan.org/vlmc/ [videolan.org]
OpenShot (Score:3)
I use OpenShot exclusively for my video projects, except for very simple cuts [1].
It's moderately powerful with multiple tracks, fairly easy to use and has some great filters (effects) - making a video with picture-in-picture boxes for example is trivial.
Where it falls down is that it doesn't remember your encoding preferences, so for large edits it quickly becomes cumbersome having to set all your encoding tweaks every single time.
I also haven't found an easy way to transition the picture from one video track to another and back. There are defined fade transitions but they all seem to depend on the order of the tracks in the stack.
[1] Avidemux with Qt is my quick-cut editor of choice - it lets you cut out parts of a video and, so long as you start on a keyframe, can save it without having to re-encode the video or audio streams. This is a massive time and quality saver.
Re: (Score:2)
quickly becomes cumbersome having to set all your encoding tweaks every single time.
If you have the hard drive space, just export as uncompressed. Send it to Handbrake or a custom ffmpeg script.
Re: (Score:2)
Could do, though I doubt it would achieve much since that is not the default so one would still have to select the container, resolution, frame rate and uncompressed Video and Audio every time.
Re: (Score:2)
True, but at least you wouldn't have to remember any codec details, since uncompressed is uncompressed and you can leave the rest to Handbrake.
Re: (Score:2)
I did not know that.
I see this on his blog, which could be related:
Legal Battle
In late June, OpenShot was sucked into some legal conflicts related to trademarks and intellectual property. While I would love to discuss all the details, I am not allowed to discuss them at this time. However, everything worked out fine for OpenShot, but it certainly took some money and time away from me during the process.
Licensing
After some serious discussions with community members related to licensing for libopenshot, I have decided to officially change the license to LGPLv3. This is still a bit problematic, due to a GPLv3 license of a required JUCE-based libopenshot-audio library. But soon, I will make the GPL components optional during compiling, so it will be easier to maintain the LGPLv3 license on derivative works.
If you have no interest in reading open-source licenses... just know that we are switching the license of our main library to be more open, and allow more people to use it without violating our license agreement.
More reason not to support companies that employ predatory business practises based on broken Intellectual Property laws.
Cinelerra (Score:3)
I'd like to point out Cinelerra [cinelerra.org] even though I don't use it, yet.
In a similar vein though, I am a big user of Ardour, Jack and jammin to produce music. The tools are appropriate for the task and, whilst not perfect, didn't cost me money and allows me to be able to focus on my projects. Since I don't pay for the application my only investment is the time to learn it, the same reason people stick within a certain commercial platform. The difference is the Ardour project allows any financial contribution I make to be in preference of features I'd like added, improving the efficiency of my workflow. Becoming productive in complex software is the biggest factor in using it and the only incentive to change is when one type of software can do things the others can't.
I think the emphasis of these questions does not apply appropriately. It should be 'What is the current State of the Art in Video production in linux" and the answer is it hasn't caught up to the state of the art in audio production under linux.
Now before the criticisms begin, I find Ardour architecturally superior to commercial audio tools because of the underlying jackd infrastructure, not because of its feature set. I have watched the developments in the audio production space over the last decade produce change radically as they became more stable. Nothing interesting is happening in the commercial audio production space, it's all happening in Linux. As infrastructure advancements similar to jackd becomes more common in video editing the application space their will undergo a similar change - just not yet.
Any investment in time to produce an A/V product requires yielding value on a previous time investment in a skillset. When I invest that skillset in proprietary software my knowledge investment can be rendered useless overnight quite easily however, open source tools provide me with a way to protect my knowledge investment because the software has it's own intrinsic rights.
Value on knowledge investment is the value proposition of open source. You may have to put up with some bugs however, tolerating them means not incurring static initialization costs from learning over and over and that results in a permanent knowledge base, the basis for radically inventive ideas.
What setup? (Score:2)
Premiere Pro and FCP on MACOS/X
And the OSS freaks forgot about things like Motion, After Effects, Logic Pro (and a very large community of audio and synth plugins) that goes with media production. Video editing is just the tip of the iceberg.
If I want a Unix box I will just use one. What is this zeal to Linuxify everything? Mac is very good at Media editing. And it IS a Unix box, and yes, I do spend most of my life on a command line.
Just buy? (Score:2)
Tracktion is an awesome DAW (Score:2)
And it's for Linux.
http://www.tracktion.com/ [tracktion.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Lightworks is a fantastic NLE.
http://www.lwks.com/ [lwks.com]
It's almost as if the OP isn't really aware of how powerful the tools are on Linux. Or maybe isn't that much a power user..
Re: (Score:2)
(fwiw, I've used Lightworks quite a bit. It's very similar to old school Final Cut Pro & Express circa ver4/5 (before they started iMovie-fying it))
15 years behind. At least. (Score:2)
Video NLE on Linux or, more preciseley, in the FOSS department, is lacking. In recent years there are some tools that have become feasible - Pitivi comes to mind - but Video Editing has always been a high-end specialised market. Anybody doing video editing professionally has a full-time job already and no time to programm software on the side.
On top of that, there has been a huge consolidation in the Video NLE market, with vendors and products dropping left, right and center or simply entrenching themselves
Nuke Studio, Flame and Davinci (Score:2)
If we're talking about NLEs for VFX then the obvious choice would be Nuke Studio (http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/nuke/studio/) It's integrated with Nuke which is used everywhere and it's a multiplatform app which runs on Linux, OSX and Windows.
Davinci is also for Linux and it's got pretty decent editing capabilities now. And like Nuke Studio it also has lots of VFX friendly features like handles and solid EDL support.
Another obvious option are the Autodesk (Discreet) systems. Flame Premium 2013 su
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I believe video editing software didn't come out for the Mac until 1986 -- it was something by Sorenson IIRC. I remember seeing a camera with its video out hooked up to the Plus and being amazed. The video was black and white and 512x386 pixels, of course.
And the real powerhorse for video editing 25 years ago was the Commodore Amiga and the Video Toaster (and Kitchen Sync). This setup was used by broadcast orgs and movie editors for a decade (until around 2000) at which point digital video started to tak
Re: (Score:2)
but no one serious uses it
After trying their now free version, I can see why. To close a window, you drag a shark onto it? Seriously?
Re: (Score:2)
You are correct, Lightworks is available for Windows, Linux, & OSX.
Re: (Score:2)
I'd still rather use Cool Edit from 1998 than Audacity. I'm glad we have a free tool like Audacity, but I currently use Adobe Audition 1.0 (they bought Cool Edit way back) running in Wine, which is a much better solution IMO.
If you want something like Adobe Audition, you should get something like Adobe Audition and not try to use a simple wave editor as DAW substitute. Get Bitwig Studio: https://www.bitwig.com/en/bitw... [bitwig.com]
I heard it's by former Ableton people, so they know their stuff.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Back in the late 1990's, we edited Geeks in Space [archive.org] Slashdot Radio with Cool Edit. It was great for normalizing & compressing the recording levels from Slashdot HQ, we could do noise gates, speed up/slow down audio, etc.
Re: (Score:2)
Even though they're kind of goofy, there's some good tech history in those recordings. Those were simpler times, eh?
Re:Not to mention Audio Editing (Score:5, Informative)
Audacity is a simple wave editor, not a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).
Audacity's direct competition are GoldWave, Nero Wave Editor, and so on and Audacity blows them all out of the water in areas that are objectively measurable, i.e. file compatibility, encoding performance, etc.
But comparing Audacity to a DAW is unfair. They are just different things with just some overlapping feature set – kinda like comparing a pure text editor with a word processor.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Audacity 2.0 introduced multi-track editing, but your comment still stands. It's not suited for any realistic workflow or editing audio synced with video.
Re: (Score:2)
Audacity 2.0 introduced multi-track editing, but your comment still stands. It's not suited for any realistic workflow or editing audio synced with video.
Have you ever tried simple wave editing in a surround sound file?
Among the non-professional / low-end tools Audacity is apparently the only wave editor to support that at least to some degree (although the channel mapping window when saving is awkward).
In the end I used ffmpeg and SoX
Re: (Score:3)
In your opinion, which is obviously heavily skewed towards FOSS.
I had to do some simple editing (changing speed and so on) in a 2h audio file a few months ago. GoldWave 5 was completely unusable â" it just crashed. GoldWave 6 beta worked but at super slow speed on a 64 bit Win 8.1 Core i7 system. After 15 Minutes of waiting for the FLAC file to save, I just gave up. (GoldWave was my first wave editing love, so if anything my opinion was skewed towards that.)
Audacity was (and still is) not pretty but unlike GoldWave it worked. I prefer working software over non-work
Re: (Score:2)
Sadly though, Reaper (for Windows only) is the DAW you want to use, not Ardour (Linux) or even Pro Tools (Windows, sort of industry standard for small / amateur projects). You can trust me on that one (because I've used different tools in real projects) or or have a look at a few forum threads to see what others say. No affiliation. It's just better and it makes things easier.
And others say Reaper, the product of former Winamp developers, sucks and you should use Ableton Live instead. Others say Logic Pro.
I'm not a musician myself but I know a few and each has their own preference.
Re: (Score:2)
I got CE for like $30 or $40 back in the day/ Even accounting for inflation, AA is WAY MORE EXPENSIVE. Even after the purchase by Adobe, I think the cost to existing CE users was in the hundreds of dollars. They may have added cool things for power users but for casual users I'd rather wrestle with Audacity.
Re: (Score:2)
That because there where two products, Cool Edit and Cool Edit Pro. When Adobe purchased the software they dropped Cool Edit and turned Cool Edit Pro in to Audition. Interesting that you can run Audition in Wine, I have been running it in a VirtualBox Windows XP VM for some years now, but Wine would have lower overheads...
Re: (Score:3)
frist psot!
looks like you frailed.
Re: (Score:2)
I've been using OpenShot heavily lately. I like it.
It has some bugs but it gets the job done. Surprisingly well. The other big thing going for it is that it is incredibly simple to use.
I started to use Blender but I had to abandon it. It was going to require a significant investment of time to be able to do similar stuff. I just don't have the time at the moment.
Re: (Score:2)
You forgot the excellent InkScape.
Gimp is a joke compared to Photoshop. "Good enough" for small stuff; completely lacking features for anything serious.
Re: (Score:3)
What exactly other 2D and 3D tools are "entrenched in the Linux environment" exactly?
There's always Emacs...
Re: (Score:3)
>all of the best 3D and 2D tools, other than video, are entrenched in the Linux environment and perform best there
Um, no. What a ridiculous statement. Maya is for Windows and OSX only.
Maya has been available for Linux for years. See http://www.autodesk.com/produc... [autodesk.com]: "Available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X operating systems." It's just the free trial that isn't available for Linux.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Maya runs on Linux, and I think this is what a lot of the big VFX houses use it on. Nuke is like that too, along with Houdini. Not sure about the complete list, but there are a lot of high-end 3D and compositing programs that support Linux.
Video editing, on the other hand, tends to be lacking, which is what the article addresses.