SXSW: Pitivi Aims To Bring Real Video Editing to Linux
evolver.fm
evolver.fm
not saying that's bad, i'm also wishing them all the luck in the world, and it's been a while since i followed the topic. but it's also worth noting that lightworks finally released its' linux beta last quarter.[1]
personally i'm not a big fan of either the audio infrastructure or gstreamer in linux. but i guess it will allow them more easily to support many video and audio formats, why not directly use a non free build of ffmpeg though is beyond me.
as a sidenote, the state of audio is not really that great in linux either, there is actually a way to use vst plugins in wine, but afair it depends on jack, and some proprietary steinberg library, which means that in linux tradition the average joe consumer doesn't have access to those things.
i think professional audio and video go hand in hand, but then again what do i know.
[1] http://www.lwks.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=articl...
I personally disagree, after doing hobbyist music production on Windows with Cubase (& friends) for years, I moved to Linux and I found a whole ecosystem well integrated into the OS/distro itself that makes me way more productive with better results.
While the array of finetuned technologies/plugins/samples might not be as extensive as on other more popular platforms, the Jack environment and its freedom is really unrivaled.
I think it has to do with the way of doing things on Linux systems vs other operating systems, while on Windows you have your DAW + ReWire, on Linux you just fire up Jack and a few dozens of smaller applications (+ your DAW, which might be Rosegarden or Ardour or others) that you can tie together with easy-to-use interfaces like patchage or ladish. On that note, ladish is awesome, allowing you to suspend and recover whole jack sessions (with dozens of programs) in a simple click.
Also check out kxstudio, they have some really fancy and nicely built tools that further improve the ecosystem.
When I was running Debian (this was 2 years ago, by the way) I used to need to kill Pulseaudio before launching Jack because the two systems used to conflict and when Jack was running a lot of Pulseaudio applications wouldn't work (so, for example, if you had Jack running you couldn't watch a movie with audio through pulse). Nowadays I use Manjaro as desktop distro and I can just launch qjackctl (or resume a ladish session) without needing to manually stop pulse myself, it's all done automatically and it's really seamless. I use jack only when I'm doing sound production/recording, for everything else Pulseaudio is great.
- Low volume levels, and all the means I have tried to amplify cause quality degradation - Random devices showing up on streaming sites depending on what version of flash I'm running - Complete inability to access certain devices, non-functionality of "monitors" or just confusion about how the hell they work
Back during the times I was trying to deal with this I had attempted to switch over to ALSA/OSS or whatever and it was not a pleasant experience. I recall not even being able to get back to the functionality I had with pulseaudio before, and found no improvement on the low volume levels that have been the primary source of my woes.
One of the main reasons I find myself rebooting back to Windows is so that I can be back in the audio environment. Windows has been perfected to give me ultimate control over all my audio devices, with RealTek's drivers allowing me to duplicate my audio over both my front and back output jacks, monitor my stereo mix on other playback devices, and play with the quality/levels as I please.
I think it's interesting that it's written in Python, that's quite unexpected for such a "heavy-lifting" application. Of course, it's Python on top of the C GStreamer backend, but that sounds really nice.
Disclaimer: www.pitivi.org + their wiki runs on my linux server and I help the project from time to time.
Kudos!
That's one of these bullshit blanket statements. Linux doesn't do video editing because it is an operating system. Its job is to provide a base for applications like video editors to run on. And video editors run no worse on linux than on other operating systems. A few seconds with google brings you a lot of articles about how well video editing works on linux: http://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/dcp/news/linux-hollywoo...
What you meant to say is that the open source, freeware and consumer level video editors are lacking a bit.
Compared to other platforms like Windows and OSX, video editing on Linux platforms at the moment is not on par with them, and this project is awesome because it's trying to solve this issue.
I've been a Linux user for years, I've tried most video (and audio) editing tools on GNU/Linux systems and I can say that the video side is much more lacking compared to the audio side and I would love for it to become more competent and on par with the rest.
If you want to nitpick without even reading the post you're replying to, maybe you should just do it someplace else. Thank you.
I would love you to expand on that if you can.
I am currently settled on kdenlive, which is reasonably stable and features non-linear editing with a number of standard effects (I consider things like fading, zooming, speeding, blue screen to be pretty standard), although it has some rough edges, especially around sound editing (which forces me to use Audacity on the side).
I notably use it on a Mac as well; it is clearly superior to iMovie, although it is clearly inferior to Premiere and Final Cut.
However, I haven't tested the competition for a while…
I don't know. but I hear about all these projects and my mind immediately starts thinking about OSS pretenders (all missing features) to professional/enterprisey apps. GIMP to Photoshop being the canonical example. Aside from the lack of feature parity and the legendarily bad UI (apparently designed by people who do not edit images regularly), the single biggest problem is lack of support. If I'm doing something like a magazine, and something breaks, I get to keep both pieces aaaaand that's about it.
Am I being overly cynical, here? Honest question. Maybe I'm overly sensitive to many years of FOSS advocates proposing solutions ignorant of professional workflows.
I am saying that stating that linux _can't_ do video editing is disingenuous. It demonstrably _can_, because it is an operating system and the capability is there. It _doesn't_ at the moment because no one has written a high-enough quality application to do it yet.
Everyone knows what's meant here - if you work in an audio/video/graphics production shop, Linux is not a viable choice.
If people start clamoring Linus to descend from heavens and bring us video editing, it's just a silly as what grandparent referred to.
I see this might be viewed as pedantic, but Linux is not a distro you used.
Additionally Linux does have Blender with support for video editing, which from what I've heard was used to make Sintel and other movies.
http://code.google.com/p/flowblade/
New compositing tools (both from France):
http://buttleofx.wordpress.com/
I'd say 2014 looks pretty good for FOSS/Linux video editing!