
SXSW: Pitivi Aims To Bring Real Video Editing to Linux - yiedyie
http://evolver.fm/2014/03/08/sxsw-pitivi-aims-to-bring-real-video-editing-to-linux/
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rjzzleep
the title is incredibly misleading. pitivi has been around since 2004. i don't
think any of the linux editors really got the traction they needed. this is
more of an awareness campaign for their fundraiser.

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...](http://www.lwks.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=98&Itemid=209)

~~~
Morgawr
>the state of audio is not really that great in linux either

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.

~~~
j_s
What is your experience with Pulse Audio? I don't know much about Linux audio
but my understanding is that various transitions between technologies were a
source of many frustrations. What is running under Jack on your system?

~~~
Morgawr
Pulseaudio used to be kind of troublesome back in the day but nowadays it's
been much much better. It works out of the box on all the distros I've tried
(Arch, Manjaro, Debian and Ubuntu).

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.

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Morgawr
Video editing is one of the few things that Linux really can't do well. Years
ago we had problems also in the music production area but nowadays it's much
better, there are a lot of awesome projects (Ardour, Soundgarden, Hydrogen,
Kxstudio products, etc etc) which really makes it shine. I wish we had this
also in the video production department. This might be the step towards the
right direction, definitely going to donate to this campaign.

Kudos!

~~~
Tmmrn
> Video editing is one of the few things that Linux really can't do well.

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...](http://www.creativeplanetnetwork.com/dcp/news/linux-
hollywood/44656)

What you _meant_ to say is that the open source, freeware and consumer level
video editors are lacking a bit.

~~~
Morgawr
I think you really need to chill. What I meant to say is that the environment
on Linux systems doesn't do video editing that well _at the moment_. This
doesn't mean that the Linux _kernel_ cannot do video editing at all.

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.

~~~
deathcakes
In fairness you said can't and not doesn't, which implies that video editing
is not possible on linux.

~~~
Karunamon
Professional-grade certainly isn't, at least not until there's enough demand
for it, for tools like Vegas and Final Cut to be ported.

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.

~~~
deathcakes
Sorry, you have also missed the point - I'm not defending the gp's point by
saying that there is in fact software available currently that you can use to
video edit on linux.

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.

~~~
Karunamon
Are we talking about Linux the kernel or Linux the operating system? The
kernel can do whatever it's programmed to do, of course - but I think we're
splitting hairs here. It would be like me saying OSX can't do mainstream
gaming. Sure, it's an OS, it'll do whatever it's told to do, but the games
library available is downright abysmal.

Everyone knows what's meant here - if you work in an audio/video/graphics
production shop, Linux is not a viable choice.

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buovjaga
Here are some newer contenders in the FOSS video editing arena:

[http://shotcut.org/](http://shotcut.org/)

[http://code.google.com/p/flowblade/](http://code.google.com/p/flowblade/)

New compositing tools (both from France):

[http://natron.inria.fr/](http://natron.inria.fr/)

[http://buttleofx.wordpress.com/](http://buttleofx.wordpress.com/)

I'd say 2014 looks pretty good for FOSS/Linux video editing!

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skbohra123
[http://kdenlive.org/](http://kdenlive.org/) works really really well and is
fairly stable, I have been very happy with it all these years!

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yeureka
Baselight, IMHO one of the best film non-linear grading systems, was developed
and runs in Linux.

