Lightworks Is Not As Open As Some Would Like

[Elv13]

Cinelerra is still the only professional OSS video editor. Jashaka was also there for a while, but died of. The problem with Cinelerra(-cv) always have been suspicious code origin and total lack of any form of stability. It simply always crash after a few minutes. Too bad it was mostly feature complete to compete with pseudo-professional apps.

KDenLive is currently the best hope. Their current under the hood push to turn the amateur codebase into a future proof one is a clean sign that they have long term plans to be competitive. They also recently added a lot of advanced features like color-space based advanced color management and object tracking for layer synchronization.

[BO$$]

You of course are a developer of *some* successful opensource project and that's why you are throwing 8055 advices, ha?!

I do not have to start writing video editing applications or be successful in any way in order to recognize failure. Something tells me you're not an expert in absolutely everything you have ever criticized yet you were able to find flaws and criticize it. But yes I would like lightworks to wipe the floor with pitivi. I fucking hate that application.

[yogi_berra]

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These nutjobs want a replacement for Final Cut Pro (which Lightworks isn't and won't be as it is useless without their hardware) not a dedicated solution for a Hollywood Studio.

[ninez]

These nutjobs want a replacement for Final Cut Pro (which Lightworks isn't and won't be as it is useless without their hardware) not a dedicated solution for a Hollywood Studio.

Where do you get this notion that Lightworks is 'useless without their hardware', exactly?

I'm running Lightworks right now in both Ubuntu and Archlinux. The test machine has an nvidia card, Phenom II x4, 8gig of ram ~ which is nothing crazy, so i don't see why i would need their hardware. You can do most things with a keybaord, so that doesn't slow you down and aside from (currently) disabled features, and the odd (known) quirky behavior, LW runs quite nice...

It's crashed twice on me, both times i wasn't able to reproduce the behavior - but already in the 2nd alpha release/download bugs have been fixed.

I think that gnome-dev is wasting his breath. Lightworks is going to be great for users and of benefit as a whole. for chose whom want/need some of the licensed codecs/plugins - they are free to upgrade. ie: lightworks is not crippled in that way... The code is supposed to be eventually opened, so let's let most of the common bugs worked out and have LW hit the masses - may be once there is a stable release, the source code will follow. after all, it's still early in the the alpha (even if LW has been talked about for the last couple of years)...

[Setlec]

I've been following the lightworks project and discussing on their forums about the source code and such. They have a roadmap and they are focussing atm to port lightwork to linux then to MacOSx according to some employees they are getting some big difficulties since their source code entirely windows APIs dependent forcing them to rewrite most of the code. With millions of lines of code and 20ish years dependent on MS shit it ain't a easy thing to do.

[Mr_Alien_Overlord]

I have used kdenlive for my editing needs, and I would like to know exactly why I should use anything else. Maybe somebody can shed light on what it is that I am missing out on?

When Kdenlive works, it's beautiful. Not perfect, but an interface and workflow that I love (far more than that of Lightworks). That said, for many video formats, they look fine when you're editing, but lose more and more sync between audio and video as you get past about a minute of rendering. I've tried for literally *weeks* to fix problems with this, more than once over many years (including just a couple of months ago). The problem is that it doesn't just shift the audio earlier or later, but also speeds it up or slows it down. It makes it into an absolute nightmare to try and fix, and of course you often don't even discover the problem until you're just about finished a project, have invested a lot of time into it and now don't have the time to migrate elsewhere.

This isn't something that's happened once or twice for me. It's happened every. single. time. I've tried to use Kdenlive for a serious video (at least 8 distinct projects each at least 6 months apart). Infuriatingly, it usually looks just fine when you do a simple quick test. Then you do all your work only to find out it's unusable.

I would *love* kdenlive to get these issues fixed once and for all (yes, I've tried filing bugs on their tracker and discussing with devs across various channels). Sadly, every time I try to actually help get these issues solves, they get brushed off as either "Works for me!" or "upstream's problem". I'm having trouble accepting that this is always the case though, as I've tested across around 7 machines, 5 distro's (not just new releases of 1 distro), both ATI/Nvidia cards with both open and closed drivers, more versions of FFMPEG than I care to recall (including compiled straight from trunk) over around 5 years now.

These problems just keep coming back consistently. If they didn't I would *gladly* switch to Kdenlive for all my editing needs. Heck, I even would have happily set up a bounty with the money that I ended up having to spend on a commercial editor and Windows. I just don't trust that it wouldn't break again 2 months later. It's just a case of burned too many times to waste my time trying again until I hear a reason to believe it may actually be different now. I had high hope for the restructure, but if you read the mailing list, the developer basically ran out of money leaving the refactoring, and I quote: "far from complete". He promises he'll have more time to work on it "next week" (this was in May) and has never posted anything on the subject again.

*sigh*

Anyway, that's what *I* found I was missing out on with Kdenlive. The ability to actually render a project with working sound.

Lightworks on Windows (sadly) by contrast, actually works. Hopefully the Linux version will, too.

[GreatEmerald]

When Kdenlive works, it's beautiful. Not perfect, but an interface and workflow that I love (far more than that of Lightworks). That said, for many video formats, they look fine when you're editing, but lose more and more sync between audio and video as you get past about a minute of rendering. I've tried for literally *weeks* to fix problems with this, more than once over many years (including just a couple of months ago). The problem is that it doesn't just shift the audio earlier or later, but also speeds it up or slows it down. It makes it into an absolute nightmare to try and fix, and of course you often don't even discover the problem until you're just about finished a project, have invested a lot of time into it and now don't have the time to migrate elsewhere.

See, it really does work for me just fine. I have never encountered such an issue, and just two days ago I rendered two 10-minute long videos that required near frame-perfect synchronisation. And when rendered, it came out exactly as what was shown in the program. Maybe you're using some other output format or transforming some of the clips in an odd way.

[Del_]

When Kdenlive works, it's beautiful. Not perfect, but an interface and workflow that I love (far more than that of Lightworks). That said, for many video formats, they look fine when you're editing, but lose more and more sync between audio and video as you get past about a minute of rendering.

I haven't seen this issue, but I have experienced trouble with various formats. What did the trick for me was to follow the tip in that link I gave, just move to the second part, under Notes on video formats here:
http://opensource.com/life/11/11/adv...iting-kdenlive
and convert everything to lossless Matroska before starting editing.

They did have a fund raiser before summer where you could sponsor your own feature for $1000 (if I remember correctly), so they are definitely willing to listen to money

[vanag]

I've been following the lightworks project and discussing on their forums about the source code and such. They have a roadmap and they are focussing atm to port lightwork to linux then to MacOSx according to some employees they are getting some big difficulties since their source code entirely windows APIs dependent forcing them to rewrite most of the code. With millions of lines of code and 20ish years dependent on MS shit it ain't a easy thing to do.

Why don't they make a release for mingw then for the community to help?

[kiddo]

Seriously its not even released yet, after its released and then its not as open as It should be then complain not before, It would take along time to comb through millions of lines to make sure its sutable for release as a open project.

The code is supposed to be eventually opened, so let's let most of the common bugs worked out and have LW hit the masses - may be once there is a stable release, the source code will follow. after all, it's still early in the the alpha (even if LW has been talked about for the last couple of years)...

I think you guys just missed the point of the original author's article entirely. Go re-read it (and the comments section is interesting too).

You think that gnome dev isn't aware of the legal mess EditShare is in when it comes to opening a 1M+ LoC codebase with 20 years of history? Come on, that guy isn't dumb