Yet Another Open-Source Video Editor: Novacut

Phoronix: Yet Another Open-Source Video Editor: Novacut

There's a number of open-source non-linear video editor programs that have been going for a few years, including Cinelerra, OpenShot, and PiTiVi, among others. None of these projects have been particularly promising and yet comparable to the proprietary competition in the video editing world. Lightworks is an option since it's a professional software product that was then open-sourced, but it's Linux client isn't expected until late 2011. There is though another new option coming in the Linux video world and that's Novacut. Novacut is an open-source video editor, but at least it's taking a slightly different approach than the other projects...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=OTYyNQ

Why is it distributed? How does this feature improve the nonliniear video editing?

@dacresbu: Novacut is distributed to allow real-time collaboration between artists. During the past year, the team's been talking to artists, and this is something many of them want and have been trying to do with tools that are really poorly suited to the task. Thanks to dmedia it's really low-hanging fruit for us compared to most other editors. It also allows us to take advantage of good version control quite easily, such that you can see collaborator's edits in real time and create snapshots of an edit, roll back to previous versions, merge two cuts, etc. with minimal effort. This should make it much easier for artists to work together and experiment with different ways to tell their story.
Feel free to check out our Editor UX document if you'd like to know more: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Novacut/EditorUX

Cinelerra is very capable and close to being of professional grade. The problem is not even the features, it's the stability and the many unanswered questions about where the code come from.

KDenLive and LightWorks are currently the best bets. KDenLive is "done" when it come to normal users features, they are now working on bringing the professional grade tools. Again, it's not that stable, but better than Cinelerra.

As for LightWorks, I was sure it was a fake until I saw the source myself. So I must admit, ok, I was wrong, this thing really exist. I hope to see a Linux version soon. But I think KDenLive can grow too. Digikam is really good, there is no reasons KDenLive can't. They benefit from some corporate investments in the underlying libraries. I would help, but I am busy on 5-6 projects that come way before in my TODO list (currently trying to make Umbrello modern).

Agree with the above with regards to cinelerra. Feature packed but can be unstable.
PiTiVi is making great progress and is both fast and stable (still no text layer support, though), but is missing some nice compositing abilities (however, given the amount of work being done on it, I expect these things will be fixed before long).
I really don't see what the point of yet another editor is, especially one with an apparently from scratch library.

I've used Cinelerra and even started to try and create a patch or two for it. It seems pretty powerful and exists already. Unfortunately it's very unstable and the maintainers have since moved on to work on a complete rewrite called Lumiera. There seem to be a few bugfix releases here and there, but as near as I can tell, Cinelerra hasn't advanced in three years. If where we want to get is a video editor that's measurably superior to the proprietary competition there's no reasonable way there from here starting with the Cinelerra codebase. I'm not the lead developer of either project, but I've participated in both communities, and it seems that Cinelerra is kind of a dead end.
As for KDenLive, it's a useful tool with some annoying quirks but I use it myself from time to time. I wish them the best of luck at making a great open source video editor, just like OpenShot and Pitivi. Any open source video editor succeeding is a good thing, and in many cases, what makes one editor better can be applied to some others almost for free.
Only time will tell on Lightworks and Linux. My impression of it, trying it out is that the UI is rather obtuse, and it'll either be the most important open source release since Blender or Mozilla or a disaster. I'm hoping it's the former though, fingers crossed.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by liam

I really don't see what the point of yet another editor is, especially one with an apparently from scratch library.

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Jason DeRose has been working on the dmedia library as a major component of Novacut, but it's only one part. It's what handles all the file magic and and edit data storage and sharing. The rendering backend and playback will all be built upon gstreamer. Novacut may seem like it's out of the blue and totally built from scratch, but there's actually a lot of smart code reuse architected in. Even dmedia lets desktop couch do most of the heavy lifting. GStreamer will let us build on all of the great work that's been put into making video decoding and encoding work so well on Linux, and when Novacut needs improvements there, any application building on GStreamer can benefit.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dacresbu

Why is it distributed? How does this feature improve the nonliniear video editing?

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Novacut is distributed to allow real-time collaboration between artists. During the past year, the team's been talking to artists, and this is something many of them want and have been trying to do with tools that are really poorly suited to the task. Thanks to dmedia it's really low-hanging fruit for us compared to most other editors. It also allows us to take advantage of good version control quite easily, such that you can see collaborator's edits in real time and create snapshots of an edit, roll back to previous versions, merge two cuts, etc. with minimal effort. This should make it much easier for artists to work together and experiment with different ways to tell their story.
Feel free to check out our Editor UX document if you'd like to know more: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Novacut/EditorUX

No other video editor allows people across the world to work at the same project in real time like Novacut will be able to do, and anyway I don't really see what is the problem of having "yet another" video editor when it's gonna be better than anything we have now, and maybe contribute to bring a lot of pro people to the linux world. It would really be a shame if they don't reach the target.

There is already codebase using GStreamer, there is no point creating a new one beside the Not invented here syndrome.

Wrting such application take too much time, I have been wrong in the past, but until you call main.c version 1.0, your project will never reach it. Backport your features in existing project, this is the best thing you can do.