Video Editor OpenShot Wants To Kickstart Windows, OS X Versions 55
There have been video editing apps available for Linux for years, from ones meant to be friendly enough to compete on the UI front with iMovie (like the moribund Kino, last released in 2009, and the actively developed PiTiVi and Kdenlive) to editors that can apparently do nearly anything, provided the user is a thick-skinned genius — I'm thinking of Broadcast 2000/Cinelerra. Then there's VJ-tool-cum-non-linear editor LiVES, which balances a dense interface with real-time effects for using video as a performance tool, and can run on various flavors of UNIX, including Mac OS X. Dallas-based developer Jonathan Thomas has been working for the last few years on a Free (GPL3 or later), open-source editor called OpenShot, which aims for a happy medium of both usability and power. OpenShot is Linux-only, though, and Thomas is now trying to kickstart (as in, using a Kickstarter project) a cross-platform release for OS X and Windows, too. I've been tempted by dozens of KickStarter projects before, but this is the first one that I've actually pledged to support, and for what may sound like a backwards reason: I like the interface, and am impressed by the feature set, but OpenShot crashes on me a lot. (To be fair, this is mostly to blame on my hardware, none of which is really high-end enough by video-editing standards, or even middle-of-the-road. One day!) So while I like the idea of having a cross-platform, open-source video editor, I have no plans to migrate to Windows; I'm mostly interested in the promised features and stability improvements.
It probably wasn't your hardware (Score:5, Informative)
I saw his presentation at SCALE and he owned up to many stability problems in the old code. That was the reason for the ground up rewrite. The old code depended on third party libraries, and many of the bugs were not accessible to him, so he's written his own engine. And he says it's much more stable--his demos at SCALE seemed to demonstrate that.
Re:More for existing (Score:5, Informative)
You don't even have to do that. The Kickstarter is not for development of a Windows version, it's for development of OpenShot. It will be released under Windows, Mac and Linux.
Re:More for existing (Score:2, Informative)
If you actually RTFA (yeah, I know, novel idea) you will see that it isn't for making it cross-platform per se. It's actually for integrating a new, mostly complete engine, and the engine is cross platform. The new engine will provide new features and greater stability. So it will improve the program for Linux as well.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Pipe Dream (Score:4, Informative)
I did edit some stuff on my linux laptop a while back and I have to say it's gotten a lot better although I tend to agree with you somewhat. I've edited some stuff with kdenlive and openshot on linux and both worked okay but I keep Macs around for video work. It's just so much easier to work with the applications there. Since I bought a Quad I-7 mini video editing has become drastically quicker as well as easy.