The current state of video editing for Linux
Chris Long from opensource.com compares seven six video editing tools for Linux, and guess which one came out first?
I often ask myself what the current state of video editing is for free and open source software (FOSS). Here are my thoughts.
I’ve spent many years in the visual effects (VFX) industry from the perspective of being either an artist, compositor, video editor, or systems engineer. (I’ve even got film creds on IMDB!) In the past, I had the pleasure of cutting on, training people on, setting up, and supporting Avid Media Composer, the cream of the crop of professional real-time video editing tools for film and TV alike—at least before things like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere became useful enough to professionals.
In the VFX industry these three tools are used extensively among studios for cutting video and film and are both very simple to use for noobs and professionals alike as well as can be pushed very far in the hands of guru artists. The VFX industry has for the most part of the last 30 years been reliant on Mac and PC 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, as I discovered over the last few weeks. They are not Hollywood big, production ready strides but they are useful enough for what I need to do which is basically a bunch of build training and demo videos as Senior Systems Engineer for Red Hat’s Systems Engineering EngOps team.
I’ve installed and tested a number of tools before overcoming my fear of learning how to edit video in Blender. (When I first looked at it, the program seemed convoluted.) So, here’s an account of the tools I looked at and what I thought about them. Let me qualify this by letting you know that I’m currently running Fedora 21, KDE, and Gnome (because I can’t decide which to stick with) on a Lenovo T440s with a VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics Controller (so, no accelerated openGL unfortunately). I approached this as I would if I was an impatient artist trying to find THE tool for the job, with no time for messing about for little or no results.
I’m running Windows, but these day i prefer Blender too, it might not be as easy smooth as popular big name video editors. However it allows you to do things exactly as you want them to be, not because its some pre-defined effect. And i like that.. Then if you want to combine it with 3d the steps involved are not that hard to learn. … but i seams a bit out of focus of development, i mean some parts could be done nicer, like selecting fonts for titles,
On the other hand together with magic lantern on a canon, i found only blender able to handle the stream to create hdr movie shots..
Natron not is in list
Shotcut is a promising looking open source video editor not covered in the post.
(in case you didn’t see the link: http://www.shotcut.org/)
I really like blender’s VSE, but I always run into little oddities (bugs) which makes it feel like the VSE hasn’t quite been modernized along with the rest of blender; some parts just don’t work together.
Plus it’s playback is so much slower (without using proxies) than most other video editors I’ve tried, not sure why that would be.
It’s nice having a video editor in blender, but until it get some upgrades I’d like a solid external option too.