lumiera

[homy06]

I just heard about the project Lumiera.

its a revamp of cinelerra from the ground up to be more usable and better looking.

its still an infant but definitely something to keep your eye on as a Non linear video editor

i personally still have to use another OS just for video editing. its a bummer


i think we linux users need to show all other OSes who their daddy is.

i mean c'mon shake was originally for linux before apple bought them out.

their site is http://www.lumiera.org

[Sean4000]

Hello there,

I too have been keeping my eye on this baby for a while now and it looks very promising. From what I can gather, the engine is well under way and the GUI is up for grabs.

This is finally what Linux has been screaming for. Ardour is a VERY impressive piece of software for audio. We already own the VFX industry, now let's show editing the power of open source!!!!!

[keykero]

It's in good hands. The developers involved are very sharp (they are mostly the ones who produce the Community Version of Cinelerra -- the version that is actually stable & usable) and they are looking to create something that professional video editors will use every day. You can follow along with the thought processes & proposals here:

http://www.pipapo.org/pipawiki/Lumiera/DesignProcess

[homy06]

thanks.

any idea of when it might come out? rough ideas of course like 09 or maybe late 08?

pretty soon we can be like

someone "oh you edit your own films? looks good, you must have used a mac"

me "oh no, i'm not just messing around, i use linux"

pretentious? sure, but definately not as bad as mac fanboys

[Sean4000]

This is what we've been waiting for.

I can see the day when Lumiera takes on Avid/FCP/Premiere. Finally we'll have it all. Blender will trounce 3DS and Maya. Ardour will leave Nuendo, and ProTools in the dust. And Pixel/Krita/GIMP will make Photoshop a thing of the past.

Linux will reign!

[keykero]

It will be some time before there is even an alpha version for testing, but if you follow the lists or related documents, you can see that a lot of planning is going into this to get it right the first time. The devs truly wish to avoid mistakes that other projects have made. And you're right, it's likely that the final Lumiera will be on the level of a Final Cut Pro or an Avid solution. At least that's the goal.

[homy06]

so not even early 09 you think?

[Sean4000]

I'm guessing Late '08 we'll see some alphas at the earliest. Maybe working demo betas in early '09.

If there is anyway I can join this project and speed it along I will.

[Sean4000]

Letting this app cook in the development pot as long as possible will only benefit us. However, Linux is hungry (ravenous) for an NLE so dinner better be served soon.

[Sean4000]

I am working on my concept image for a splash screen for Lumiera.

[homy06]

awesome. by the way sean, those are some nice pc specs, what do you use to edit video (OS and software and camera)? and how much was that rig? I want build the same thing (i'm waiting for true quad cores from intel though).

i'm on a p4 and 2gig ram, i'm using xp with vegas, on a dvx100b. love the dvx btw.

i tried cinelerra again, its nicer when you use likeable formats like raw dv, but its still sketchy.

[Sean4000]

I use OME, KDENLive, Cinelerra, Kino, and Lives. All of them are garbage compared to Avid, FCP, and Premiere. I hate all of them. That's why I'm putting so much hope in Lumiera.

This rig cost me about $3000USD actually. Ram is dirt cheap now, as are HDDs. The hardest part was finding the right motherboard. This Tyan model is fabulous. I had to wait until the 8000series of cards was officially supported by ubuntu, thus xubuntu.

My concept image. If anyone can connect me to a Lumiera developer I would appreciate it. I want to see if they'll make this a splash screen image somewhere in the app.

I call it "Feeding The Baby Tux"

http://photos-a.ak.facebook.com/photos-ak-sf2p/v238/239/43/45701421/n45701421_31291768_5956.jpg

[Sean4000]

When the software doesn't cost a thing and works better than off the shelf apps...life is good!

[Sean4000]

I have access to an HVX200, and a DVX100b as well. I also have a palmcorder that plays nice with Kino.

[homy06]

nice. have you considered temporarly moving to windows or using the mac x86 (if it works for you, the drivers didn't for me)?

I think by the time linux is ready your hardware might be on the lower to medium end. just a suggestion.

I really like your splash btw, never seen that concept put to use so well. have you tried joining the IRC channel? its your best bet i think

[Sean4000]

lol, NEVER will I return to Windows of any form. I am going to get a decent Apple machine for FCP/AVID and use that to chop my film in the mean time.

I have no clue how to use an IRC channel though.

[homy06]

hah I don't either.

[bayvista]

Great news! I have struggled with Cinelerra and Kino and welcome something really good.

[Sean4000]

This is going to be big. Linux has starved for this type of app forever now.

[Sean4000]

They must want only the most serious of developers to get in on this. I can't find many ways in.

This had better be good.

[-Curtains-]

I'm actually quite keen to do some work for the icons for this but I'm not sure who to contact or if anyone's already working on 'em...

[Sean4000]

Hey,

I am sure they could use the help but they don't have an avenue in. What a bummer.

[Sean4000]

I think they should rename this the Manhattan project because if it is as big as they say, this could very well be the nuclear bomb to Avid and FCP.

[Sean4000]

http://lumiera.org/

The website is evolving, check it out!

[homy06]

I hope its native to ubuntu. I hate having to compile it or using alien command to get it to migrate to ubuntu, they say it works the same as the distro its meant to work on, but it never does. I wish people would be more honest about that. they should just say "yea its meant for rpm so yea I guess you can get to work on .deb but its going to be sketchy" (obviously some programs migrate better than others)

[Sean4000]

I was so disappointed that smoke and flint were rpm files and also could not run on AMD64 architecture. That is total bull. They needed i386 to run. Alien could not help me, sadly.

Lumiera is going to explode. I do not care what any "analyst" or Avid/FCP fan says. Lumiera (NLE) + Blender (Animation) + Ardour (Audio) = I never touch a Windows PC again as long as I live.

[kepardue]

This does look awesome. My dependence on Final Cut Pro (and probably my lesser inclination to bang random commands out in a terminal that I won't remember next week) are keeping me away from using Ubuntu for work use. Couple this with a replacement for DVD Studio Pro (does anything exist?) and the sound editing programs mentioned before and things look very prosperous for a complete front-to-end Linux-based work environment for creative professionals.

[chillyair]

awesome
I really hope that this turns out to be what everyone is expecting. And please, don't use those awful effects icons from cinelerra. They make me want to throw up everytime i see them

[Sean4000]

Fortunately they seem to be redesigning everything. I mean EVERYTHING!

I plan to use this software extensively when I re-remaster Star Trek The Original Series. The project is called ST:TOS-R 2.0. It has already begun but I need an editor for my Linux station when it comes time to start putting this all together.

[homy06]

Hey guys. I joined the IRC channel (not too difficult to do)

My method using pidgin.

create a new acct under IRC pick a screen name. I connected with the server irc.freenode.org, but I think you can just join with the default irc.ubuntu.com.

then it'll ask you to verify your screen name. type /nick (your nickname)
then to join lumiera channel its /join #lumiera

that should get you in. Nice people, they said beta wouldn't be out in early 09.
that's a bummer, but I guess when it does come out it'll be good.
I wish I had money to burn like a lot of rich a-holes. I would definately pay these people to development a kickass free NLE.

[Sean4000]

I think they'll get a kick out of my artwork pic.

[Sean4000]

Homy06,

Good detective work. I'm going to chat with them when I get off of work later this evening.

[Sean4000]

can't get on freenode. going to bed.

[Sean4000]

We have to help this project along in any way we can. Please take the time to talk to the freenode group and share ideas. That way we can all benefit from the collaborative effort.

[Sean4000]

Here's a small clip of the early version of the GUI I found on the developer's forum. It is from June 19th and has surely changed but it's a nice tidbit.

[homy06]

ughhhhh.... I hope they learn from their mistakes. i mean that's a clean setup, but it looks like a poor man's adobe premiere rip off. They really need to step it up and go the extra mile to make it completely user friendly yet professional

[Sean4000]

ughhhhh.... I hope they learn from their mistakes. i mean that's a clean setup, but it looks like a poor man's adobe premiere rip off. They really need to step it up and go the extra mile to make it completely user friendly yet professional

True, but this is pre-alpha so I don't know what to expect.

[homy06]

yea no i get it, its really early and thanks for posting, but in the end I want adobe/fcp people to say wow I wish we thought of that. Instead of linux end users saying well at least its free, or hey for the price its a good comparison.

[Sean4000]

We need a sword that's for certain. I think that with Ardour and Blender, we'll have a trio that can compete with the big wigs. Lumiera is also a "professional-level" compositor as well but that aspect seems to not be getting much play at all. I wish Robin Rowe would get back on the cinepaint wagon and make it the open-source killer of Apple program Color. Then we'll have a force too large to ignore.

[Sean4000]

I have spoken to the leader of the Lumiera project and have compiled a list of concerns and needs they have:

I just want to let everyone who is into Linux know that a new NLE is in the works and they need our help. I know Blu-ray support might be a to to ask in the nature of open source philosophy.

================================================== ==========

From the site: www.lumiera.org

"""""Lumiera is a Free/Open Source Non-Linear Editing (NLE) application project for Linux developed by the CinelerraCV community.
It was born as a rewrite of the Cinelerra codebase called Cinelerra3 but it is now an independent project with its own name.

Project objectives

To create, as a community, a non linear video editing and compositing FOSS application for Linux/Unix/Posix Operating Systems, suitable for professional and quality oriented work, building on common open source video, sound and GUI toolkits and libraries, providing flexibility and a high degree of configurability and full control of all parameters, but at the same time a smooth workflow which scales well to larger and more complicated editing projects.

Lumiera is still in an early stage of development. It is not usable yet."""""""

================================================== =======

Please join us on Facebook and Myspace too.

http://groups.myspace.com/lumiera
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gi...9771291&ref=mf

================================================== =======

The Lumiera project also needs your help. We are in need of documenters, coders (internal testers), infrastructure work as in shell scripting and administration is in demand too. Please spread the word to everyone you think would be qualified and if you are interested, please contact me. As always visit www.lumiera.org for the latest information. Come join me on AIM: embryoniccineon or join the lumiera project on IRC.

Instructions:

Create a new acct under IRC pick a screen name. I connected with the server irc.freenode.org,

Then it'll ask you to verify your screen name. type /nick (your nickname) then to join lumiera channel its /join #lumiera

That's it.

Take care,
Sean Burns
"Sean4000"

[swmiller6]

If you guys remember diva-project, that would be a killer interface, simple and powerful...

[Sean4000]

They are walking a fine line between streamlining and usability. The interface will look obviously something like a mix between FCP, Smoke, and Avid.

A hot topic now is the feasibility of integrating Red cam workflow into the lumiera matrix.

[waloleles]

¿Anyone knows when Lumiera is going to be ready?

[kayosiii]

Firefox from Netscape took about four years to be usable - Blender took a similar amount of time to get its **** together after being open sourced. I will be pleasantly surprised if Lumiera takes less time than that.

[waloleles]

but lumiera is based on cinelerra and cinelerra is already written. isn't it?

[Stochastic]

but lumiera is based on cinelerra and cinelerra is already written. isn't it?

My understanding is that they've decided to do a massive re-write of cinelerra's code. Major work that will take some time but surely be worth it in the end.

[ichthyostega]

My understanding is that they've decided to do a massive re-write of cinelerra's code. Major work that will take some time but surely be worth it in the end.

Hi all,
thanks for your continued interest for our project... :-D
Let me explain the relation to Cinelerra a bit. Cinelerra is a verry powerful and capable application which gives you a lot of freedom (if you manage to get past the entry barrier of getting it compiled/installed/running and found a combination of input and output media formats which work for you). We think that the basic approach of Cinelerra is just right and this kind of freedom is crucial for an professional application. For the Lumiera project this means that we don't have to "discover" all the possibilities of video editing and compositing; rather, we start out at a level of awareness, which makes us cautious for stability, performance and scalability issues.
To add to this somewhat problematic situation, we are all rather power users of Cinelerra and know its shortcomings quite well. Indeed, we tried to repair some of them and found this extremely hard to achieve. Lets put it this way: almost everything in the Cinelerra source code base shows a sort of happy self-confidence, which we can't share anymore after having seen a lot of it break, crash, being fixed or turn out as imposing intrinsic limitations. Especially I want to mention the following insights:

the core video/audio processing functions should not be part of the project; rather we should use a general open source library maintained by a larger community. Just keeping up with the evolution of media data formats is a full time job in itself.
similarly, we should not develop or maintain our own GUI framework (as Cinelerra did)
it is clear that a NLE will not end up as a "small application", i.e. we expect more then 80000 lines of code. Which means inevitably it will be to large for a single person to comprehend. So we need to care for a bit of architecture, define clear interfaces, write specs, document our code and write unit tests right from start. This isn't something which can be fixed afterwards.
robust and seamless support for proxy editing is mandatory; our expectation is that for some time into the future, the processing demands for high quality media will be far to high for real time processing in full resolution (just think of 4k, 8k video, higher frame rates, 3D...)
scriptability and possible extension by plugins should really be possible on all levels.


If you put these demands together, the net result is that not a single part of the existing Cinelerra code base remains, which doesn't need to be done differently (regarded on a low technical level) in order to achieve these goals. When looking back now, I see we've achieved quite something and made continuous progress, while, admittedly, not much of this is visible on the surface. Honestly, sometime this project feels as being a huge dry sponge ;-) -- anyway, even if I can't tell you any date for a first 0.1 alpha (it is ready when it's ready), currently we are fine with the state of affairs, the project feels healthy and is making progress all the time. At the current stage, what would help us most would be people willing to get deeply involved. At the moment, we don't have much "small jobs" which can be done on a weekend or so. But I expect this to change in future, when we've completed the first basic rounds and actually can start adding features.

As mentioned in the previous posts, you are allways welcome when visiting on #lumiera at freenode.net. Moreover, whe've now a public mailing list; of course it is currently rather development centric, but prospective users are always welcome and we encurrage discussions regarding usability questions. For example, most of the discussion accompaning our Logo contest happened there. See http://lists.lumiera.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lumiera
Hermann Voßeler
(aka "Ichthyostega")

[KtotheExtreme]

oh man this app is going to be amazing. I'm totally keeping my eyes on it!

[waloleles]

how is lumiera? any news???

[Ubuntiac]

Personally I feel this project is going to totally rock.

I just wish they'd get a community manager or someone on board to communicate regularly what's happening. It seems like the most promising black hole of news in the FOSS world... :confused: Still I guess I'd rather this than Jahshakaware.

May you succeed, amaze and dazzle us all.

[woodybrando]

i know there's probably a lot of work ready to be done on lumiera but I compiled it the other night and I know it's early but it looked exactly like openmovieeditor. And I was so disappointed because I have spent the last five months determined to find an open source alternative to avid MC and FCP.

Now I've been hanging with this linux experiment for so long cause I was a mac fan for a couple years, but Apple pissed me off. Because I liked having multiple desktops on my MacPro which had leopard installed on it, but if I wanted to have multiple desktops on my year old macbook pro then I had to pay another 120 dollars to upgrade it to leopard. I mean I hadn't even had tiger for a year, and it was out of date and there was no 30 dollar upgrade path, nope, just 120 bucks or 2bad4u. I mean I'd spent $5000+ dollars on hardware and software in two years and I couldn't have one little feature upgrade, a feature which I knew linux had had for years, because my best friend who's been a gnu/linux n3rd since college, showed it off to me in ~2004. And gnu/linux was free! The whole damned operating system and software was free. So I'd decided to rebel against apple and sell my MacPro And started my tortured journey through the world of non-linear editing in Linux.

And I thought I'd found what I was looking for pretty quickly, I thought blender 2.48a VSE was the answer, but I couldn't get it to work with audio and/or it kept crashing randomly,

then I thought cinelerra was the answer because it looks like it was made by professional video editors, but I kept get 10 to 40 minutes into an edit and it would crash, then it started stuttering on playback, and then strange artifacting started showing up on playback so I gave up on cinelerra.

I was pretty frustrated but just a month after I sold my MacPro my apartment was broken into and someone stole my macbook pro. So i found myself left with just my old athalon x2 3800 box. Which luckily I'd been using it as a media server and kept it in a closest that the thieves didn't look in or actually hell even if they looked in there they would have just seen some old pc in a closest and left it there. But anyway, I had a deadline looming and I needed a functional NLE that I could make a my reel with. And I found myself without the two computer's I'd depended on for making videos with for the last two years.

The deadline was for a film and video grant I applied to some months earlier and they sent me an email saying I fulfilled the grant requirements and could I send them some samples of my work.

Now to complicate things my Avid MC dongle was in the MacBook Pro when it was stolen. And for whatever damned windows bs DRM reason my serial number for my old copy of XP was rejected. And I'm pretty much broke on top of everything else. So I can't just go out and buy new dongle's and XP serials, so I've got two choices if I'm going to get my work sent to the foundation and hopefully win enough money to keep doing what I do. Either I install a bootleg copy of Avid MC on top of a Bootleg copy of XP. And hope for the best. Or else give Linux and it's dozen or so lesser known NLE's a try.

Well, I, of course, went for what I knew. XP and Avid. And I suffered the bugginess for a few days but avid just kept crashing, and then XP started crashing and then it refused boot up, and so hell, what do I have to lose lets give linux a try again.

And for another quick minute I thought I'd found the answer MainActor, the non-free NLE that had been discontinued in 1997 and I'm told it used to cost $200 dollars. So the close sourced junkie that I am I figured it was probably just what I was looking for. So I started editing in it and it felt right. It was the closest thing to an FCP or an Avid MC I'd yet found on linux. It lets you map all your own keys, it's play head felt snappy, and I started to got an hour into an edit without a crash, and then I tried to export and Crash Crash Crash and then I tried to import some other footage and crash crash crash. So onto the next one, Kdenlive.

And for real this time, I thought I'd found the answer. I tried the one in the repository but it crashed often and seemed too thin on features. But I'd started dorking out on linux podcasts, and I'd heard all this buzz about this emerging multiplatform programming language, qt4. And how it had just been bought by novell or someone and that software developers really liked it, and that kdenlive was written in qt4 and so it seemed to have some momentum behind it. I visited their website which seemed pretty well maintained and enthusiastic, and so I decided to compile the latest source and it still seemed spare coming from Avid and FCP but for about thirty minutes it looked like it might be able to do the trick. Then I tried to save my project, and instant CRASH, dammit! you gotta be kidding me, so off to the forums and I find out that this was a known bug they'd fixed in the latest source, so download the latest source recompile, run kdenlive crash, and crash and I just never got kdenlive to open again.

And so I started sweating a bit, I've got two weeks to get this damned DVD reel together and off to the grant committee. And linux doesn't have many more fully developed options. I tried pitivi, I couldn't get it to work from apt or from compiling it, I can't remember exactly the problem but it was just more of the same. I had already tried lives and it had crashed and it doesn't seem to really be a video editor as much as maybe a video splicer like Avidemux or someone suggested on a forum that maybe it's just for live performances, hence the name?

And days are going by. And all I'm doing is compulsively compiling source, scanning ./configure results and watching programs crash, I'm neglecting my girlfriend, and turning into an anxiety ridden computer zombie and wondering what the hell am I doing with my life.

And the deadline is creeping up and my girlfriends got a macbook with a copy of FCP on it sitting next to me, taunting me, tempting me, and I'm saying to myself just use the damned closed source greedy ******* FCP. I'll be done by tomorrow and then maybe I can make a new video to add to the reel instead of losing the next few days to crashing linux programs.

But I can't give up that easy, this whole time i've been listening to Richard Stallman lectures about open source ethics. And he's got my ideals swelling and I collect my composure, restate my mission, I just need the bare minimum of functions in a video editor for right now, I just need to layout five videos I made last year, add a few FX, titles and sync some audio and that's it, Linux has GOT TO BE ABLE TO DO THIS. It's got a freaking 3d modeling program that's bar none how could it not have a windows movie maker clone!)

So I'm scouring the web, reading every forum and listening to every podcast I can in hopes of finding some linux NLE gem I've overlooked. Aha maybe it's, openmovieeditor. So I pull it from the repositories and give it a try. Again, it's another bare minimum editor and it crashes on me, and I can't help thinking that if all these disparate NLE efforts were consolidated, if these dozen or so half implemented video editors had their efforts combined into one, we'd have a great linux NLE. But they weren't so we don't.

And now I'm starting to doubt the opensource effort. I mean people at apple and windows and adobe, like it or not have made pretty good NLE's. And believe me I'm the last person to root for captialism. As far as I can tell money is, if not the root, then the tool of most evil, but now I was starting to consider that maybe it's a necessary evil, because otherwise we just kind of splinter off and do our own thing at our own pace and don't really get much of anything done.

No it can't be! Freedom has got to be better than wage slavery. It just has to be. It will win in the end, right? I mean imagine the NLE we'd have if open source was mainstream, imagine!

But also, my girlfriend has this macbook with a copy of my old fcp sitting in the next room flirting with me this whole time. Asking me why i bother, and I'm starting to ask myself why do i bother, Am I compulsive and have I just found some unanswerable problem that I can spend the rest of my life calculating that swells me with infinite potential and ultimate frustration. I mean what are ideals worth do I have to lose this grant opportunity because the linux community doesn't really have much need for video editors.

And I'm in my kitchen with just a few days left to submit my reel. And I'm at the breaking point, and I mean I love the idea of linux, i love that people in their spare time follow their curiosity and inspiration and have created this great operating system, with professional audio editing software, and an amazing 3d modeling program, and and i know it's only a matter of time before a professional video editor comes along, but I don't have time, I have till the 5th before I need to submit my work.

But I just refuse to go back to windows or os x. Because ideals have to eventually matter, right? And there's so few opportunities in life to act on them. Kurt Vonnegut's son Mark, said we're here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is. And here's this group of people really living by that philosophy.

And I'm considering betraying them to align myself with that other nasty group of greedy horders.

No, I don't want to do that anymore. I want to join the Freedom and sharing people. But how? I can't play with their software. And I haven't made a video since I started this little experiment. And my hope and enthusiasm come from being able to make these little videos of mine. And I'm feeling like the last few months of my life were all in vain.

And so I'm standing in my kitchen just at my end. I'd just compiled and tried lumiera, the great linux NLE hope that this thread is based on, and it looked exactly and I mean exactly like openmovieeditor but with a darker color pallette, and none of the features turned on yet. So to me it looked like there was no hope.

And I want to mention that on my journey through linux NLE land, I came across a guy's blog describing the same frustrations. And how he tried to take no the problem by trying to develop his own linux NLE called OpenShot. And that just made me think I was just really at the end with linux and freedom and sharing. Because here's a guy that seemed to know a lot more about the linux world and he'd determined the only answer was to start developing another open source video editor by himself. And I'm thinking is that what I need to start doing, learning to code? No, I don't think linux is about turning everyone into software developer's, I think eventually folks have to come along and just pick up the software and make the next "Their Will Be Blood", or "American Drug War:The Last White Hope" otherwise what are we doing but like William Shanks writing out pi to 700 digits. And I just felt like I was at a dead end with linux. Which put me at a dead end with film making, which just sort of leaves me at a dead end in my life. So I did what I do when I find myself at a dead end in life, I admit i need some help from whatever it is. So I had this moment of admitting helplessness but knowing that life has the power to fix impossible situations. I know i'm being a bit melodramatic but you know that's okay. And so I left it up to life to help me work it out.

And so I the next day I started thinking, all the problems I'd been having seemed to be audio related. I knew Blender was stable with image sequences. Because I'd just finished a music video where I'd done all the compositing in Linux using .png sequences and laid them in Blender sans audio and they rendered .avi's out no problemo. (Here's the music video if you're interested:)
http://www.oldchildprojects.com/videos/GTWY_030709.mov
(I gave the .png seqences to an fcp editor to do the devil's work of syncing and conforming them.)

So if I could get the audio fixed in blender I just might find what I've been looking for.

Now the whole time I've been using linux all five months,I'd been using ubuntu. I started on 8.04, because 8.10 wouldn't install off the disk and then if I tried to upgrade 8.04 to 8.10 it would install but then the system would just randomly reset. But 8.04 was stable so i stuck with it. Then last week I switched to 9.04 in hopes of it being so fresh and so clean that blender's audio would just work. But again CRASH CRASH CRASH.

And then it dawned on me. What do all three of these versions of ubuntu have in common... they all use PULSEAUDIO !!!!!!! And the clouds parted and the light shone down and the lord sayeth unto me, try gutsy gibbon. Because gutsy gibbon a.k.a. 7.10 was the last version of ubuntu to use ALSA instead of PULSEAUDIO. And I'd had a bit of luck getting Blender's audio to work in 8.04 by playing with alsa in the .profile

Anyway, to bring this whole rant to it's happy conclusion, it worked. And I discovered what I'd hoped for months would be true, LINUX HAS A VIDEO EDITOR! And we don't have to wait for lumiera, or OpenShot or Kdenlive 1.0. Because we have blender 2.48a's VSE.

Anyway, I'm excited and I wanted to share the news. Because I see a thread like this one hoping lumiera is just around the corner and I just had to say you can stop waiting for a linux video editor. You can edit video in gnu/linux today, for real. People are doing it, spread the word!

(Now to editors like me that got real comfy with Avid and FCP. I gotta warn you Blender works a lot differently, but it works. It hurts your head a little to wrap your mind around it. But so did Avid.)

here's my workflow:

hv20 captured with dvgrab
use ffmpeg to turn the hv20 footage into a .png image sequence
use mplayer or faad or ffmpeg to turn the hv20 audio into pcm
import audio and image sequences into blender and edit in proxy mode
mixdown the audio
export the edit in .avi
multiplex the two in avidemux

Or that WAS my workflow before my apartment got broken into and my hv20 was stolen along with my macbook pro. (Which actually i should mention, my apartment was broken into the day after I initially gave up on linux, two months ago. I reformatted my ubuntu partition and reinstalled mac os x thursday night, then friday afternoon my apartment was broken into and my macbook pro with a fresh install of tiger and hv20 were stolen. Linux Karma!)

peas,
jayson
www.oldchildprojects.com

[Ubuntiac]

Hey Jayson,

Glad you eventually found a workflow that worked fo you. I'm glad you're still around to tell the tale!

Blendder truly rocks, although I do wish the VSE would get some more love. At the risk of sounding like yet another "just a little bit longer..." Blender is being developed at a furious pace right now with the biggest redesign it's ever had. Best of all, a lot of the redesign is around making it easier to learn while enhancing it's workflow. If it's half as nice as some of the mockups I've seen we'll be in for a nice time ahead.

I do think to be fair that it needs to be pointed out that each of the tools that didn't work for you have at one time or another worked for others. They all tend to just have some quirks that you need to know and avoid. Cinelerra tends to get unhappy if you're not working in MOV's. Kdenlive often gets pretty flaky around transparencies and FLV. All of them were going through an upheaval with the refashioning of the whole Linux audio stack around Pulse Audio, which I should add used to be my sworn enemy, but recently has become rather nice!

One of the big problems that we face as open source film technologists is that the basic technical tools of our craft (such as codecs) are far more patentable that those of 3d (primitive shapes) or 2d (eg strokes, lines and filled areas of colour). Because of that it is difficult to find people both technically savvy enough, legally unafraid enough, and community minded enough to create great free film tools. Fortunately projects like FFMPEG and Men/transcoder are starting to open that up now, and it really does look like we're just seeing the tail end of it, just as our opensource forebears saw the end of fighting with basic devices like mice and keyboards to get them to work (by compulsory compiling of many sets of dependencies source code!). Thankfully those days are gone now. Yes it's frustrating when we have short deadlines that need a solution NOW, but what's more important (and I think even RMS would agree here) than whether that one demo reel is created with proprietry tools or not, is whether we be strategic enough that we're still out campaigning for freedom 30 years from now rather than taking a "If I have to use 1 piece of proprietry software ONCE the whole movement has failed and I quit!" approach. We need to keep our eye on the goal, even if we have to duck and weave sometimes.

Anyway, I know that there are a lot of people who are still getting caught up in thinking that everything is hopeless because the many outdated threads and posts they read saying it is. As you've seen, it *is* still tough, but there are people making film content in Cinelerra, Kdenlive, Blender and no doubt soon Lumiera. If you're a film maker who's figured out a great pipeline for making films with Free and Open software, right now, then you have something really valuable to teach. Both freedomlovers and businessminded film makers alike I'm sure would love to learn the finer details of that. Better yet, you have a pipeline built now capable of making a product / tutorial to help end the frustration that exists out there (and on these very forums). If you have a solution to a real problem, you have an opportunity.

I'd either start putting something together myself or have a talk to the guys at Blenducation if you'd like some help. Heck their business model is entirely sharing video classes with people teaching useful, needed skills in Blender. Sound like a potential match?

I'm sorry you went through everything you did, but maybe just maybe, you might have been given the seed of an opportunity to become part of the solution. :)

Cheers

Ubuntiac

[woodybrando]

Hey Ubuntiac,
thanks for the advice about doing the tutorial, i'm going to make a video and then a tutorial that explains how I did it. And also you made a good point about cinelerra and kdenlive working for other folks. And actually I haven't even tried them since switching to gutsy and Alsa, so I should do that too. I think I'm biased towards using blender because it integrates non linear editing and 2d/3d graphix in a way that even adobe and apple haven't been able to do.
And right on about just trying to make as much opensource work for you now as possible without getting frustrated and quitting the whole movement.
Alright, and before I start another crazy long email I'll end this one and get to work on a tutorial. I'll add a link to it here when I'm done.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
jayson

[conradcliff]

Super exciting to here about Lumiera..just ran across this thread after giving up my boot leg copy of Premiere and wishing there was something better than cinelerra out there. Also, very interesting to hear about editing in blender..I've never used it but I hope to to become well aquainted with it since I gave up after effects to and it seems to be its effective replacement.

I so wish I had the skills or monitary resources to help the Lumiera project along...but I don't :(

Anyway, I can't wait to hear more about all that's going on! Keep up the good work and spread the news!! :p

ps..sorry for any spelling errors, firefox doesn't seem to be checking my spelling for me like it does in windows for some reason.

[GARoss]

Lumiera sounds like it's going to be great! But, how are plugins/codecs supplied? I installed Cinelerra today & will definitely need some plugins for .m2t, mpeg2, h264 ect just to add video to the time line. Will plugins used in other programs work (I edit with Vegas 8 in XP) & were would they be copied to? Is there another source to obtain these from?

[maku-d]

@woodybrando- And the deadline is creeping up and my girlfriends got a macbook with a copy of FCP on it sitting next to me, taunting me, tempting me, and I'm saying to myself just use the damned closed source greedy ******* FCP. I'll be done by tomorrow and then maybe I can make a new video to add to the reel instead of losing the next few days to crashing linux programs.

If there was a rock and a hammer sitting next to you, and you had to hammer a nail through a piece of wood with a deadline, only a fool would choose the rock. I'd say it's the same in your situation. Use FCP for your project. No one will think badly of you for it. There'd be no one at Apple laughing an evil laugh that you succumbed and used their evil closed source software. AND you'd get your project done quickly and could move onto TESTING the creative, free alternatives, and helping make an alternative to those programs FASTER, so maybe next time you're in the same dilemma, you have to choose between this hammer-
http://www.hammersource.com/Framing_Hammer_Titanium/IMAG004A.GIF
and this one- http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/tritooth/tritooth0711/tritooth071101570/2160809.jpg

...and maybe one day, hopefully sooner than everyone expects, you can choose the FREE one we've all been dreaming of for so long-

http://www.hammersource.com/Framing_Hammer_Titanium/IMAG038A.GIF

[conradcliff]

I'm just so danged excited about this software I almost don't know what to do with myself..being a newbie, I'm not too sure if this is a very widely known project and whether or not they need more help and so I'm wondering if anything more can be done as far as promoting it more here on the forum and if there is a way to donate to the project and if there is if that could be promoted as well. If this is everything it's cracked up to be I wouldn't mind scraping the bottoms of my pockets for whats left to help out in some small way.

Are the main developers regulars on this site? If so could they start a thread to start drawing more interest/help from the community? I want this so bad I can hear the chirping of my scratch drives already!

[conradcliff]

I know lots of people have seen this thread but I just had to bump it..I hope I don't get in too much trouble.:roll:

[Labello]

hello!

i am also looking forward on cutting some footage with lumiera. but i am rather satisfied with cinelerra. i produced several music-clips with the following pipeline:
1. import dv-stream with kino. save it as *.dv
2. cut video with cinelerra
3. render video with cinelerra. save it as *.dv
4. convert video to any fileformat with fuoco-tools.

this is pretty good because you diont lose any quality untilyou actually convert it.

well i didn`t really care about the look and feel of cinelerra. as long at it does what i want i dont care what it looks like.

[Regele IONESCU]

i know there's ...

tition and reinstalled mac os x thursday night, then friday afternoon my apartment was broken into and my macbook pro with a fresh install of tiger and hv20 were stolen. Linux Karma!)

peas,
jayson
www.oldchildprojects.com

I shortened the quote for the sake of others.

Woody, your post is very impressive. It is like reading an action/thriller movie script. Definitely you are an artist and a great scriptwriter. You should transform your post into a short movie. I am convinced you are a great movie maker too and the result would be amazing. Keep fingers crossed!

I am interested in NLE on Linux, I am desperately searching free alternatives to Afx and Pr. I have to try the NLE capability of Blender. I have played a bit with Cinelerra but not enough.

God, help us all!

[kayosiii]

hello!

i am also looking forward on cutting some footage with lumiera. but i am rather satisfied with cinelerra. i produced several music-clips with the following pipeline:
1. import dv-stream with kino. save it as *.dv
2. cut video with cinelerra
3. render video with cinelerra. save it as *.dv
4. convert video to any fileformat with fuoco-tools.

this is pretty good because you diont lose any quality untilyou actually convert it.

well i didn`t really care about the look and feel of cinelerra. as long at it does what i want i dont care what it looks like.

DV streams are OK but they do cause generation loss at each stage... High quality MJPeg tends to less damage than DV (file sizes are larger).... YUV4Linux Streams provide no loss but are very large files basically dvd format without the compression. You get about 2 mins 18 per 2 GB working at pal DV resolution. (Gephex will mix multiples of these streams in realtime).

Cinelerra is a reasonable editor (a picture of an old rusty hammer would probably be more appropriate than a plastic toy hammer) but you do have to feed it formats it likes... It's also a good idea to do your final compression in something else. I wouldn't trust the distribution formats apart from h264.

[homy06]

since starting this thread I'm amazed to see the number of participants grow. as well as getting the attention of the lumiera devs.

I hope the devs take another look at this thread to see how eager we are to see this materialize. I also hope they get this right the first time. I say this bc linux is in a unique position to stand alone as an ideal video editing OS, its ability to adapt and be optimized for certain operations would make lumiera shine. Imagine vidubuntu that has a kernel optimized for video editing. It would crush apple with their fcp and windows with their vegas, premiere, or smoke. It's free, adaptable, and optimized attributes would drives herds of people to linux.

I know what I'm hoping for isn't an easy task, but if they can come through they would make significant mark in the OS market share. THis would come with a program that HAS to have a very intuitive UI, not something were people say "at least its free", but rather "why would I pay money for propriety software when this is better and free". As well as support for the codecs that drive the industry today. Again I know this isn't an easy task, but I hope they come through, and best of luck.

also, can we get some updates?

[conradcliff]

Amen to that!!!! My gosh, I sure hope this comes through. I find myself dreaming about all the possibilities!!

[Sean4000]

http://www.pipapo.org/pipawiki/Lumiera/GuiBrainstorming?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=screenshot090418.jpg

Screen grab from a week ago! thanks Lumiera!

[DJonsson2008]

2 or 3 Questions

* Is Lumiera available somewhere?

* I've been wrestling with Cinerella, for my
basic needs on the surface it has all that
I need. The problem though is my rendering
QuickTime output all appears as if it has
had all green and blue striped out of it.

_Will rendering in DV give me better results
in terms of color stability?

_Where is cinerella actively discussed, is
there a mailing list, google group somewhere?

Thanks

[homy06]

awesome thanks sean!!! I saw your logo on the lumiera site, congrats. this screenshot looks pretty good. I see the gui is cleaned up, looks like they're grouping the audio and video channels together like Autodesk Smoke as to Adobe Premiere. Still kinda looks simplistic as to powerful, but it may just be my biased (wrong) view. I really hope its a beast like Autodesk Smoke is, sans the huge price tag. thanks again man

DJ, lumiera is in its early developments, pre-Alpha. you're going to need to hold on for a while. As for cinerella, I'm not sure, I gave up with the same problems you're having. good luck.

[JeevesBond]

You chaps itching to get your hands on Lumiera will like this: http://twit.tv/floss68

There's an interview with one of the guys working on Lumiera. The bad news is, he declines to offer a timeline. The good news is, work is steadily progressing, and it sounds like the guys working on this really know their stuff. Unfortunately, I don't think they're anywhere near a release yet, he mentioned that the GUI isn't hooked up to any of the backend yet, for example.

I think we'll probably end up with two good NLE options for Ubuntu: Kdenlive, for simple stuff; Lumiera, for the professionals

[homy06]

sweet thanks, i tried the irc channel, but it must have been a bad time. no one was there. I want drop some suggestions.

the interview itself was good. glad they could elaborate on the project.

[Sean4000]

They are in serious need of programmers. I wish there was a way to spread the word out beyond the confines of user forums.

[kayosiii]

2 or 3 Questions

* Is Lumiera available somewhere?

* I've been wrestling with Cinerella, for my
basic needs on the surface it has all that
I need. The problem though is my rendering
QuickTime output all appears as if it has
had all green and blue striped out of it.

_Will rendering in DV give me better results
in terms of color stability?

_Where is cinerella actively discussed, is
there a mailing list, google group somewhere?

Thanks

Cinelerra has it's own mailing list. this site (http://cvs.cinelerra.org/)
will have links to most things with the community version. Do you mean striped or stripped both are possible video artifacts... striped can happen when an alpha channel is not being taken into account. (png based mov files are broken this way at the moment)...

For stripped it is probably a colourspace conversion issue....

[DJonsson2008]

Thanks for your reply, when I say all red and green is
stripped I was meaning removed. I'm not at the machine
now that I was having this problem with but the output
seemed to be missing part of the colors from the
spectrum.

I'm not a video expert but it seemed to me this was
an output profile problem, likely related to the
selectable outputs and the parameters given to
the rendering process. For now I'd settle for
a DV or MPEG or anykind of tested output
rendering profile parameter set/list that
would at least allow be to get my edits
rendered into any form, QT or otherwise.

[Labello]

2 or 3 Questions
_Will rendering in DV give me better results
in terms of color stability?

Thanks

Definately!

contact me via PM, i can give you some details.

[Michael Jackson]

Man, I really can't wait for this! Anyone have any updates?

[homy06]

maybe we can get shuttleworth to donate some money to them to hire developers. I mean c'mon, if you want people to take linux seriously on the desktop they need a good video editor. plus you can get the college art students hording to this.

[homy06]

btw guys have you seen this?

http://www.openshotvideo.com/

It's some ill stuff. definitely a cinelerra contender, and may do til lumiera comes out. it does compositing and editing.

[Puzzlenoise]

Looks promising, but... how can I get it to work on my Ubuntu? :(
I wanted to edit some (HD)-Videos and Kdenlive crashes almost every time.

[homy06]

compile the source code. yea kdenlive is a lot of hype

[Puzzlenoise]

How can I compile it? Sorry, I'm really new to this stuff... :(

[Stochastic]

Puzzlenoise, please start a new thread for technical problems unrelated to lumiera.

Thanks.

[Sean4000]

Here is an email from Raffaella, a developer on Lumiera. It details the ongoing artwork on the lumiera icons and logo:

================================================== ======
Hi!

Here is a summary of the work done on the logo.

ICONS
Two kind of icons have been proposed. See:
http://www.lumiera.org/gitweb?p=lumiera-artwork;a=blob_plain;f=icons1.svg;hb=6aaa4569d193f 6ec01c05ee7f76e476fd1c26302
I tried the second one on my desktop bar. See:
http://www.lumiera.org/gitweb?p=lumiera-artwork;a=blob_plain;f=icons2.svg;hb=6aaa4569d193f 6ec01c05ee7f76e476fd1c26302
(Firefox can't render it)
I think it needs to get the black details bigger (shadows and holes,
maybe reducing the number of holes to 3?)

FONT
Thorwil is doing a good job integrating the font and the logo. See:
http://www.lumiera.org/gitweb?p=lumiera-artwork;a=blob_plain;f=thorwil.svg;hb=30e073039fd1 928f6bd84dc7e37097403d0bec3e
I like #1 better.

SHADOW
I found out the fine shadow frame was made by me deleting part of a
Thorwil's frame.
http://www.lumiera.org/gitweb?p=lumiera-artwork;a=blob_plain;f=shadows.svg;hb=5b3d31589335 d9824d97a78b301e23e4237a2de1
The fine shadow is still my favourite.
I think most T-shirt printing techniques will reproduce it correctly.
Anyway we can keep a spare bolder version for printing techniques that
won't.

We could probably put some more attention also on frame orientation,
bend and holes.

COMPOSITION
I feel this is the point where some work is still needed.
Here is a collection of some proposed compositions:
http://www.lumiera.org/gitweb?p=lumiera-artwork;a=blob_plain;f=composition.svg;hb=052bfa67 d0ec305fd81234f6e2fb468f89f03461


A note on T-SHIRT PRINTING
If you have experiences and tips to share about printing techniques and
shops, please speak up!


Please, comment!

Ciao
Raffaella
=================================================

[homy06]

yea the fine look is better. I still like your icon the best sean. btw for screen printing photo emulsion is the best method. It's easy and highly accurate

[Sean4000]

Oh man I would love to see them use my Lumiere brothers picture as the logo. Damn, that would be awesome.

Work is chugging along on the project. Still no word on a release date but I would not expect anything this year. Of course the more people onboard, the faster Lumiera will come to be.

I really can't wait for this. Imagine, Ardour + Blender + Lumiera. That would be one killer suite for a total cost of $0.00. Now if only someone would remotely challenge Photoshop, ARGH!

[Sean4000]

The logo is coming along nicely, but I must say that I am partial to the shadow of the film logo tapering off to a fine point like the logo on the credits page of the main site.

http://lumiera.org/lumiera_logo.png

[Sean4000]

The logo, shirts, icons, and other designs are nearing completion. Check it out!

http://lumiera.org/lumi_grad.png

http://www.lumiera.org/gitweb?p=lumiera-artwork;a=blob_plain;f=thorwil.svg;hb=bd84e20bc813 26065b58cabb730262ebc7eb3e82

[rylleman]

That logo looks very good!
But why use a frame of film for a project that deals with digital images from start to finish?
Anyway, looking forward to a working alpha to test out.

[Sean4000]

It's all symbolic my friend. Lumière Brothers begin early pioneers of Film and Lumeira being a breakthrough in Linux editing.

[Ubuntiac]

I have high hopes for Lumiera. It really sounds like every effort is being made to "Do It Right"(tm) I just wish that there was some kind of communication between the dev team and us mortals in the outside world.

The logo competition was a great start that encouraged community participation. Why lock out the people who want to help you succeed now?

Anyway, the new glowing coloured light version of the logo is gorgeous. I'm inclined to agree on the sharp point taper, especially on the left edge as it implies the film strip continuing rather than just being a square. I would have the point go all the way to the end though to make the shape as clear as possible. The B/W only versions work much better than the versions with grey imho.

Go Lumiera!

[homy06]

Anyone here used the blender vse? its the video editor in the blender program.

I've done some reading lately. It's as though the only hurdle is the learning curve to using the UI. Other than that it handles exporting, audio mixing, and sequencing very well. It even has a node based system that handles editing like color correction well. And apparently the upcoming 2.5 release will have a better UI system place.

Maybe the solution already exists, Im willing to take on the program if its there. I haven't read any real problems with the vse other than it lacks an intuitive UI.

So anyone already tried the blender vse and came back with serious setbacks?

If not then using blender as a NLE and compositing program would put it leap years ahead of adobe or fcp. everything in one program and it apparently never breaks.

[Ubuntiac]

it apparently never breaks.

ROFLOL!

As a regular user of Blender I can assure you that yes, it does indeed break. Having said that, compared to Kdenlive, Pitivi and Cinelerra, Blender is rock solid stable (well, on Linux at least. It's much less stable on proprietry OS's).

Blender is an awesome program though. Probably my favourite FOSS project. I just wish they'd put in image and sound thumbnails in the VSE. Other than that and the interface, it's very nice. Oh, and what you've heard about the 2.5 interface is true. It's looking *much* nicer. As a professional level program though I doubt it will ever be iMovie / Windows Media Maker easy. Personally I'm hoping more along the lines of Final Cut Pro easy with Avid power. :D

One big thing in Blenders favour... the node compositor. There is NOTHING open source that gives you compositing as powerful and flexible as Blender. Period.

It's also developing rapidly by a large community and team of professionals. The power being crammed into the game engine in particular is scary (good!).

[homy06]

so why have you not chosen to use the vse instead of waiting for lumiera? I seriously thinking about adopting blender vse. I use premiere pro now, and really want something on linux that can utilize my hardware for rendering more efficiently. I'm curious from a blender user perspective what the shortfalls are. Is it hard edit sound? I see only videos with music being displayed, is syncing an issue in blender and that's why no one uses it for dialogue or anything like that? could you elaborate more on 2.5 info on it is somewhat foreign to me since I've never used it.

[Ubuntiac]

I have used the VSE for a few bits and pieces (along with Kdenlive and Pitivi). As you pointed out the interface is still very lacking (although personally I *love* Blenders interface elsewhere). The basics are there (split, grab, move, unlock audio from video etc), but the toolset is quite limited. Fine for putting together hobby complecity projects, but missing the operation speed of a dedicated editing application.

I should point out that this criticism is *only* of the VSE compared to full editing packages. blender as a 3d modelling, animation and game engine shines.

[homy06]

ah wow I see. It's a shame the one area that is lacking has the power to migrate a bunch of people to linux (since I've read that it plays nicer in linux than OSX or windows). I've been trying to get some video or screenshots of the working 2.5 gui. Unfortunately the vse is the one gui I can't seem to get some info on. Hope it turns out as well as the rest of it has. When I read some walkthoughs of editing in blender's sequencer then taking that to be edited with nodes. I was stunned. It was like an nle and compositor in one. I doubt I'll need to wait for lumiera if blender comes through on that.

[Sean4000]

ah wow I see. It's a shame the one area that is lacking has the power to migrate a bunch of people to linux (since I've read that it plays nicer in linux than OSX or windows). I've been trying to get some video or screenshots of the working 2.5 gui. Unfortunately the vse is the one gui I can't seem to get some info on. Hope it turns out as well as the rest of it has. When I read some walkthoughs of editing in blender's sequencer then taking that to be edited with nodes. I was stunned. It was like an nle and compositor in one. I doubt I'll need to wait for lumiera if blender comes through on that.

Blender 2.5 in action,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBIXfRwAy-Q

Enjoy the show!

[Ubuntiac]

Mmmmmmm..... Sweeeeeeet.

Hadn't seen that vid yet. Thanks for sharing! What's not obvious here is that this video shows animating a whole bunch of things that you can't in Blender 2.4x. Blender 2.5 is supposed to be able to animate virtually everything.

Hard to tell where the future of open source film production is going. If I were to guess though, I'd say capture on Lumiera. Sound master on Ardour. 3d and compositing on Blender. Editing with Blender switching to Lumiera when it's stable and usable.

On the basic amature editing projects it will be a race for Kdenlive and Pitivi to see who can get to *stability* first.

The future can't come fast enough. Pre-order those Blender DVD's (http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info.php?products_id=118) now to help it along, kids!

[waloleles]

hey, do you know when an alpha is going to be released?

[Ubuntiac]

Information about how Lumiera is developing beyond "yeah, its going well" seems to be very tough to come by. I'm sure the generic answer would be "learn to compile from svn". :$

[Sean4000]

Quote from the Lumiera website:

""""On Sat Jun 20 2009

Tom gave a presentation on the Open Video Conference in New York about Lumiera and our goals. Awesome conference."""""

http://openvideoconference.org/

Scroll down to "Live Now on June 20th 2009"

I'm watching it and waiting for Luimera to come up.

[Ubuntiac]

Has anyone managed to see the FOSS Video Editing talk at the link above. It only seems to be the talks in the main room, while this talk seems to have happened elsewhere. I'm seriously hoping I'm wrong as I *really* want to see this talk!

Sean4000 did it ever come up for you?

[homy06]

I tried watching it, but after a while it got quite boring (except for the blender guy, and the guy exposing disney wildlife documentaries). And couldn't believe the one woman coleman, actually dared to call herself an anthropologist.

Anyways back to your point yea, I didn't see it either. kept waiting for it.

[Sean4000]

I watched all the way until the African Safari Documentary portion. Themn I had to go celebrate my birthday. I was really mad it did not show up, I wanted to see it in action.

[homy06]

hey guys, a quick update. Openshot video editor has made some strides, the first release is almost here, check out the advances, http://www.openshotvideo.com/

Until lumiera goes anywhere this and blender 2.5 may be the nle for linux

[ceciliaFX]

hey guys, a quick update. Openshot video editor has made some strides, the first release is almost here, check out the advances, http://www.openshotvideo.com/

Until lumiera goes anywhere this and blender 2.5 may be the nle for linux
very nice!

looks very promising, thanks

[Ubuntiac]

I'd bet on Kdenlive (or Pitivi) before OpenShot. Both depend on MLT, MLT++ and FFMPEG. Kdenlive has a bunch of developers. OpenShot is a one man attempt. One of Kdenlive's developers is the developer of MLT and MLT++. Kdenlive has an established userbase.



I'd basically summarise it as:

Hopefuls:

Kdenlive (nice interface, some good features, crashy on some formats)
Pitivi (very few tools, crashy but developing fast)
Lumiera (huge potential, aiming pro, not much info out, won't be ready for a while)
Blender 2.5 (out towards end of the year, probably not the easiest to learn, powerful compositing + 3d options)


Currently working (but wonky in places):

Blender 2.49 (tricky to pick up if you don't know Blender already, fairly stable, powerful compositing / 3d options)
Cinelerra / Cinelerra CV (powerful, picky with input formats, a bit crashy)
Kino (very basic)
Kaltura (online flash based only, unintuitive but fairly simple interface, has problems with some codec / option combinations).


Unlikely Outside Chance:

Lives
Openshot (see above)
OpenMovieEditor (cool node system though)


Dead, Dead, Dead. (despite repeated assurances otherwise)

Jahshaka / OpenLibraries. If a better line of code was written instead of every "We're not dead yet!" post, we would have seen something useable released years ago.




Of course there are underlying libraries such as FFMPEG, Xine, Gstreamer and AVIdemux.
I'm assuming here that people are looking for something with an actual userfacing GUI.

[homy06]

I disagree on the openshot and kdenlive. I throw kdenlive right out the window immediately for not separating the video and audio tracks.

open movie editor does have a cool node system and it had potential while it was still in development, but its also fugly.

openshot i like bc its a smaller developing team that actually listens to you. I've made suggestions and they have been heard. The size of the development team doesn't matter as much as drive and listening to the users does. that's why i like openshot. Hopefully it'll come through.

Case in point, lumiera, isn't interacting too much with the potential users, and I have found it hard trying to communicate with them on the IRC. I wish them best, but I hope they open up to ideas so that it doesn't turn out like every other linux nle

[Ubuntiac]

I disagree on the openshot and kdenlive. I throw kdenlive right out the window immediately for not separating the video and audio tracks.

That's cool. Just realise that 2/3 of the core libraries of both are pretty much being specifically for Kdenlive and bugfixed in response to bugs filed against Kdenlive. I threw OpenShot out the window when it almost never lasted more than 5 seconds without crashing. That's the trouble with ranking Kdenlive, OpenShot, Pitivi and some of the others. They *all* have major missing / non-working chunks. What's important, and what works for each user is different, thus the huge variation in how everyone finds each one.

open movie editor does have a cool node system and it had potential while it was still in development, but its also fugly.
aye.

Hopefully it'll come through.
I'm doubtful, but agree with you here.

Case in point, lumiera, isn't interacting too much with the potential users, and I have found it hard trying to communicate with them on the IRC. I wish them best, but I hope they open up to ideas so that it doesn't turn out like every other linux nle

Couldn't agree more. I mean come on guys. At least stick up a 1 page description of what you're aiming for, how and by who with a forum so people can discuss, offer help, post mock ups etc. The 2 sentence description with IRC / mailing list only screams "No user input thanks." although the logo competition was a great start.

I'm just hoping that OpenVideoConference will eventually put up their talk video and something will escape the black box. What I *have* heard and seen is promising, but that's been very little. Thus my suspicion that Blender will lead the way, and if everything goes well, then be surpassed (for editing) by Lumiera after launch and a bug fix or two.

Personally I'm not attached to *who* comes out with the "killer Linux NLE" app, as long as *someone* does so we can all get behind it. I would like to see more collaboration between projects (Kdenlive and OpenSHot would be the obvious suggestion given their underlying libs).

Time will tell.

[homy06]

I see, yea I didn't try openshot yet, just following it. If it crashes then yea it could be just a whimsical half idea, hopefully the first release won't crap out as much. Kdenlive i did try and I was very disappointed. And yea once openshot is officially released with a working copy I'd love to see collaboration since they're using the same libraries. maybe join up or something.

Yea lumiera needs to update more. If they continue down this way it'll just mess with the potential users and their image would be stained like jashaka. No one will care for what ever they do say, because they'll know its vaporware. Hopefully not though, and you could say it better about not caring who comes out first, but when and if ever.


edit:

I just found out jahshaka has been renamed cinefx and is again being pursued. check it out here

http://www.cinefx.org/2009/02/cinefx-jahshaka-reinvented/

[Sean4000]

Hey guys,

Joining the mailing list is the best way to get your concerns and ideas up the chain. All of the core developers regularly participate in discussions via the thread.

Sean

[Sean4000]

Hey guys,

I have received word from the mailing list that all the videos from the conference, including Lumiera's spot, will be posted for viewing in the coming weeks.

Sean

[Ubuntiac]

Awesome!

That's what I wanted to hear! :D

[Sean4000]

From the OVC site:

"""""Stay Tuned for Videos from the OVC
June 24th, 2009

We are in the process of processing the video from the conference, and we hope to get it online soon.

In all:
-We captured over 50 hours of session footage
-We shot over 12 hours of in-house interviews
-There are untold hours of crowdsourced footage from attendees using the Flip cameras

All of this footage will be available in both ogg and flv, with feeds you can use in Miro and other RSS readers. Stay tuned as we announce the availability of all this great content.

For now, though, you can:
-Add your own videos to the OVC conference archive (powered by Kaltura)
-Watch the streaming archive from the auditorium, courtesy of Livestream. We’ll be cleaning these up for on-demand viewing this week.""""""

I CAN"T WAIT FOR THE LUMIERA VIDEO!!!!!!!!

[Ubuntiac]

I CAN"T WAIT FOR THE LUMIERA VIDEO!!!!!!!!

Ahhh! Me too! (along with the Blender 2.5 bit! ;))

I wonder if we all emailed them and "asked" if the FOSS editing video "could" be the next one they put up... :) Pretty please?

[homy06]

it's july for 2.5 right? that's what I read on a couple of sources.

[Ubuntiac]

Really?!

Everything I've heard has been a demonstration alpha for Siggraph in October for a release "around the end of the year."

On the other hand, you can download a be compiled build of the current SVN from graphicall.org, and from what we're seeing they seem to be flying ahead (of schedule). :D

July would be awesome though. ;)

[homy06]

http://www.cgfocus.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2909

can't find the original post on blender, but here's a backup. It basically says the last phase will be worked on in july. So by that I assumed july/early august.

[Ubuntiac]

Ah ok, I see what's up here. Just asked on IRC. I got the date for Siggraph wrong. It's not Oct, it's Aug 3. They're aiming to have all the basics workable (but not finished) by then. Then it's finishing off missing bits and bugfix / stability work "until it's done."

[Sean4000]

We need to email them and see if OVC can put the Lumiera video up soon. I'm losing sleep over this and getting really impatient.

With Ardour 3.0 and Blender 2.5 on the horizon, Lumiera only gets more and more vital to lock the opensource trinity.

[Ubuntiac]

We need to email them and see if OVC can put the Lumiera video up soon. I'm losing sleep over this and getting really impatient.

Aye. Posted video or rioting in the streets, I say!


Anyway, here's the email contact from the OVC website:

General contact: Ben Moskowitz

conference@openvideoalliance.org

If you want to see updates on FOSS video editing, email Ben NOW! Even if it's just one sentence, it's the *number* of people emailing that matter, so get to it! Now! NOW! NOW!:D

[homy06]

i emailed them

[Ubuntiac]

I guess it should go without saying that I did, too. :)

[homy06]

I got a courtesy reply from ben from the conference. He basically said that they're working as fast as they can.

[homy06]

so in an effort hurt myself I decided to try all the editing softwares in linux again. conclusion, MLT still sucks. more support for PAL then NTSC. It doesn't provide true 24p (23.97) framerate or pulldown. I can see why Lumiera guys decided to code everything themselves. It's all garbage out there. I'm picking up blender starting this week. But for now I'm still stuck with Premiere cs3. What are you guys using?

[Ubuntiac]

Blender... and occasionally Pitivi when it stays open long enough to get a decent way through before crashing.

Hanging out for Lumiera / major improvements in Blender's VSE though...

[homy06]

I just picked up blender for dummies and a book on 3d animation of the body. I'm excited. now there will be cgi in my movies!!!

[Ubuntiac]

Nice!

Would love to see a link to any WIP stuff you have. I found Blender relatively easy to pick up, which seems to be unusual. I think that was probably because I a) followed tutorials rather than just trying to jump in and "figure it out" as I went, and b) I had experience with Maya and Max beforehand.

It's a great time to be learning Blender imo. Enjoy!

[homy06]

will do. i'm actually using it for a horror short movie. Originally the plan was to make a "open source" horror movie. Where I would document everything and have the effects available online. But I realized that I neither have the crew or the money to be adding that workload. thanks for the tip i'll start with tutorials.

[homy06]

any word on from Lumiera?

Open Video Conference still hasn't posted the video yet.

[Ubuntiac]

Every few days or so, between 2 and 4 videos seem to magically appear all at once. So far none of them have been The One, but there was only so many talks at the conference, so they've got to get there some time (hopefully before the Open Video Conference 2010!)

[homy06]

btw guys, i just realized they put mutliple presentations together so just bc the title of the clip says "Lightning", it doesn't mean it won't have multiple presentation and not necessarily about lightning. for instance, the lightning video has the blender presentation. although none of the vidoes show the screen. they just show the presenter so while everyone is watching the clip, you just watch the presenter watching...their own clip. :(



edit:

oh yea so the point it, the lumiera video might be disguised in another clip

[Ubuntiac]

Lightning talks are where a conference has one session with a bunch of very short ("fast as lightning") talks. If you look at the conference schedule (http://openvideoconference.org/schedule/), the "Lightning Talks" was the session at 1:45pm on Friday. So, all the videos are one session per video. Lightning Talks is just an unusual session that has a bunch of talks. The Blender section is also not *the* Blender video we're waiting for. All of that is in the FOSS Editing Showcase talk that was at 2:05pm on the Saturday.

Unfortunately, I count around 50 presentations at the conference and thus far about 15 video's up. Granted, not every presentation may go up, but at an average on 1 video every 2 days since the conference, assuming our video is about 1/2 way through, we'd still have about another 3 weeks before they got to it. :(

(1 month since the conference / 15 days = 2 days per vid. 1/2 way through 50 presenttions = 25. 25 vids at 2 days each = 50 days. 50 days - 30 days since the conference ended = 20 days left to go = about 3 weeks.)

[Sean4000]

I have requested a new GUI pic from the main guys at Lumiera.org.

Can't wait to see what she looks like now.

This is like a child that I'm watching grow up, it's very exciting.

[homy06]

ah thanks for the clarification ubuntiac.

can't wait to see the pic. I hope lumiera's coding is built like blender in the sense that it is stable, lightweight and powerful.

[homy06]

i found this python script. dunno if it'll help you guys.

It syncs up Ardour and Blender's VSE together so you can use Ardour to circumvent Blender's audio fail.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=114454

btw sean what upates will ardour 3 have in relation to audio editing for videos?
I've only read updates about the MIDI features being updated.

btw

anyone amazed on the limited info that's released about the vse for blender 2.5. I hope that doesn't mean they didn't do much to it.

[Adam143]

I just heard about the project Lumiera.

its a revamp of cinelerra from the ground up to be more usable and better looking.

its still an infant but definitely something to keep your eye on as a Non linear video editor

i personally still have to use another OS just for video editing. its a bummer


i think we linux users need to show all other OSes who their daddy is.

i mean c'mon shake was originally for linux before apple bought them out.
=====================
Adam Jones

http://www.sapience.741.com]sapience

[Slave2]

"i personally still have to use another OS just for video editing. its a bummer"

Join the club!

No Linux replacement for Pinnacle!

I'd be happy if I could find just one that actually worked for me!

There is a new one called LiVES, I'm hoping to work!

http://lives.sourceforge.net/index.php?do=screenshots

to be released this week! :D

[homy06]

new one? Lives has been around for a while and it sucks, sucks bad. probably one of the worst.

"i think we linux users need to show all other OSes who their daddy is."

i like that.

[monraaf]

new one? Lives has been around for a while and it sucks, sucks bad. probably one of the worst.

Yeah, I remember when I tried it a long time ago, it seemed to want to create a jpeg image of every frame from the video clip I imported. Needless to say I dumped it straight away :D.

[Sean4000]

The programmers and mailing lists have been silent for a while now. I bet they are in seriously deep programming mode.

Lumiera is moving along much faster than I had anticipated, I must say.

[homy06]

let's hope its not bc of any other reason. got some bad news.

I asked a instructor at CGcookie (one who did the blender overview video) whether any work will be done on the video sequencer for blender 2.5. he said he wasn't aware of any work being done.

2.5 may not bring much to the nle front.

[Sean4000]

I expected such from blender. I can't really blame them because NLE is not blender's design. It will probably be cleaned up and ported to the new window design but not expanded in any significant way. This is all just paving the way for Lumiera. I can't wait for the next update.

[Ubuntiac]

I think there will be improvements, but ones that are incidental to the refactoring. For example a major part of the 2.5 rewrite is to allow greater UI flexibility (map any function to a shortcut, ability to build your own UI's, drag functions to new toolbars etc). The kind of cool thing is that the *features* of the current VSE in Blender are pretty decent. The problem has always been the interface (and I'm used to Blender for 3d already). With the refactoring of the underlying parts of Blenders interface in general, I'm still hoping that the VSE ends up more usable, even if they don't really add any new VSE specific features.

I certainly won't complain if we get something usable out of Lumiera soon although I'm not about to hold my breath. I still consider Lumiera the perfect, if long term solution in this race. That said... Go Lumiera! :D

[NLEatwork]

begin fairly unstructured rant
Sorry to burst your bubble guys, but Lumiera isn't going anywhere soon. Evidence:
http://lists.lumiera.org/pipermail/lumiera/2009-July/thread.html
http://lists.lumiera.org/pipermail/lumiera/2009-June/thread.html
http://lists.lumiera.org/pipermail/lumiera/2009-July/001305.html
http://lumiera.org/openvideo-flyer.pdf

Look at all the logo, tshirt, propaganda stuff taking up all the space. Then look at all the "possibly" "maybe" talk everywhere. It's not going to be ready for ages. The lone guy on OpenShot movie editor moves way more quickly and it's still taken him a while to get where he is.

I fail to see why everyone says Blender is too hard. It just needs a tiny bit of UI work (coming soon or made more easy to do in 2.5). I have been playing around with it and:
a) it has the most powerful features of all the linux editors
b) it is actually stable! NONE of the others have this at all and it's massively important considering you can't move more than a few mouse clicks into Cinelerra without it taking a dirtnap.
c) it is *already* hooked into a massively powerful python-scriptable 3D effects program with 800k downloads and tons of testers each release and mature developers. For the future, this can't be discounted, it's a massive gain to be integrated.

I submit that Blender is the path we should push. It just needs one or two competent UI guys, 2 google summer of code guys (one to do a stabilizing plugin, one make the audio work a bit better). Then it needs redhat, ubuntu and maybe Canon/insert video cam company here/ maintainers who will submit patches occasionally. That's well under $20k worth of developers to get a Final Cut express/prosumer entry-level program by the end of the year (any rich donors out there?).

Lumiera won't even be close to where Blender is now by the end of the year, and who knows what stability is going to be like. Additionally, there are features in Blender way beyond what people know about. I recently bought the book "Mastering Blender" and it has a fantastic chapter on matting green screen shots that was highly professional and customizable. It will take EONS for all this to be reimplemented elsewhere, and then the project that half-implements them will stagnate and someone will come up with the bright idea of "doing it again, from the ground up" and it will be 2015 before you know it.

The sad thing is the whole thing would be finished already if there weren't about 6 different projects going. Especially as the open shot guy seems to be so competent and is using python (blender uses python) he could have finished the Blender VSE to semi-pro level by now singlehandedly, let alone with help.

That's all I wanted to say, don't put your hopes in some Lumiera mockups at some conference. The fact that they can't even upload the slides themselves to their (ugly, sorry but it is) website for ages now is telling. There is no reason to believe they are any better than the existing projects, which will mean years of sub-par crashy applications missing all but the most simple features. I hope they prove me wrong, but the track record of ALL these projects asides from openshot and maybe kdenlive is appalling. We should start thinking of ways to get Redhat/Canonical/Google/Videocam companies etc. to support Blender. I am also willing to donate money to such a cause (I am interested in pledging money towards a number of features for Blender, and making an infrastructure for more such pledges).

To get companies to donate:
For Redhat and Canonical there is the desktop argument, they can't win the desktop without a real editor and cams are so cheap and common now they can't pretend it's a niche activity, it's needed.

For Google there is the idea they can offload all or most of the encoding to the users if they have their own editor (how much would that save them from the money they are bleeding from YouTube I wonder). This could at least get them to hand out a few more summer of code projects for Blender.

For Videocam companies there are many opportunities. Some, like Kodak, have been shipping simple editors (trim, titles, that's it) on the internal SSD in their budget cams. If the UI to blender VSE was to have two modes (simple/advanced) they could easily package an 18meg standalone version of it on the cams and add massive value at the cost of one developer (or part-time one). Hell, we could campaign to all the base-line companies who don't have pro editors of their own (Toshiba (Camelio), Creative (Vado), Apitek?, Kodak, etc.) to co-hire a developer between them or to follow a Google summer of code model.

Success would mean the end result would be a semi-pro editor attached to a pro 3D graphics program by the end of the year. We can do this if we band together and brainstorm and apply pressure (on companies, not developers. devs are our heros, let's get them some cash) and perhaps try to fund a few things of our own.

Is anyone else interested in helping this path? Do you have criticisms of it? What are they?


NLEatwork



P.S. Also nobody has mentioned the mono video editor Diva, remember that? It also failed after a very promising start. You need a proper dev community with the size to handle all the features of something that complex. A single guy just isn't going to be able to do it.
http://www.mdk.org.pl/2006/12/7/state-of-diva

[Labello]

begin fairly unstructured rant
Sorry to burst your bubble guys, but Lumiera isn't going anywhere soon. Evidence:
http://lists.lumiera.org/pipermail/lumiera/2009-July/thread.html
http://lists.lumiera.org/pipermail/lumiera/2009-June/thread.html
http://lists.lumiera.org/pipermail/lumiera/2009-July/001305.html
http://lumiera.org/openvideo-flyer.pdf

Look at all the logo, tshirt, propaganda stuff taking up all the space. Then look at all the "possibly" "maybe" talk everywhere. It's not going to be ready for ages. The lone guy on OpenShot movie editor moves way more quickly and it's still taken him a while to get where he is.

Well what I think is, that all you links show just one thing really obvious. that there IS active development going on and there ARE a lot of folks doing things. So why do u judge a project that hasnt even got any public release or ANYTHING working. we should keep on waiting.

i never ever have been using blender for video editing and i think i should give it a try since i really like to work with blender.

[homy06]

i completely agree with you. I stopped thinking about lumiera that much when I saw that blender was much closer to achieving the goal of a professional nle. It's the audio/ bin file/ timecode/ and UI problems that seem to be holding it back. Unfortunately it's held them back for some time. I think we all were just expecting 2.5 to give it some love.

I'd love to help, but I have neither the money or the coding skills. Maybe if we made a petition to get a couple of developers to work on the VSE? I think that's a start.

[NLEatwork]

Homy06 - I agree, it's just not being taken seriously by the people who usually invest in Linux and it's an area that's been hurting for ages. Blender were lucky to buy-out an existing closed source program with community funds to get their beginning. It's a pity the same didn't happen when MainActor announced they were closing down their editor. I really do think we need some kind of petition and donation pledge site, I will look into the different platforms to use for it this week.

Labello - That you say I shouldn't be bashing a project with no product confirms my point. They have nothing, no beta, no alpha. Nothing. Read the comments, there is a little bit of work being done, but tons of it is just not happening, stickers and people not getting to meetings etc. When I see awesome projects like Diva which had a lot of impressive working code go down, and when I see tons of talk-fest projects like jahshaka I fail to see how Lumiera has managed to get people convinced. No the reason people are so hopefully is that they totally desperate for something. I argue Blender is that something and we need to forget about all these pipe dream projects and get behind it. Lumiera is going to need to hand off to Blender for tons of special effects anyway, so it seems ridiculous to not just built it on top of the VSE that's already there.

The way I see it is Gnome and KDE will have openshot and kdenlive as part of their "desktops" and probably "get there" (basic, stable editor) with the help of the MLT framework they share in about a year. But Blender can "get there" (prosumer, advanced stable editor, slightly more complex to learn) in 6 months. Lumiera, if it doesn't fizzle, is at least a year away from basic and at least two years away from advanced (and that's being generous). Are you prepared to wait to July 2011 for a stable (hopefully) slightly better looking clone of CinelerraCV? Some of us have been waiting years already and are fed up with the string of failed and half-finished editors.

[homy06]

couldn't have said it better. I say we get a petition and a donation going around. and setup a contest. winner of the best VSE UI (not just some graphic, but actually coding a UI) for blender gets the pot prize.

[Ubuntiac]

Hey NLEatwork,

The vast majority of what you posted was basically what I've already said in my previous posts. A couple of things worth pointing out though:

1. You talk about how fast the OpenShotVideo guy coded, and place it ahead of Kdenlive. You are aware that it's actually the Kdenlive guys doing most of the coding, and that OpenShot is largely a new GTK gui on their work? Check out who writes MLT (which OpenShot runs on) and then check out which video editor they're working on (Kdenlive). The reason he got a project up so fast was because the complex, under the hood coding was mainly done by the Kdenlive team. Nothing wrong with that. That's what makes open source great. You just want to give Jean Baptiste (Kdenlive) and Dan Dennedy (MLT / Kdenlive) a bit more of that credit.

2. You mentioned how important it is for any promising project to get a good community behind it to succeed and then ask why people are looking to Lumiera. Think about this. Lumiera comes with a whole pre-made community. It's early working name was Cinelerra3. The coders all worked on the Cinelerra community version.

3. I love Blender, too. This forum and Blenderartists.org, are the two main places I hang out online. I haven't just read about Blenders greenscreen *plugin*, I've used it. I trained as a 3d animator on Max, Maya and Blender and ended up using Blender because I like freedom. Blender is awesome. BUT - Ton and co. have expressed no desire to make a full blown video editor. None. Heck the game engine has loads of people who love it, use it and now with Twilight22 even are developing it commercially. The Blender Foundation still considers the game engine a "community project" rather than it's mission, as Blender exists with the aim of being the best 3d modeller, animator and renderer. The VSE is far lower down the interest ladder than the Game Engine.

I do agree that Blender is our best short term option. It's more stable than Kdenlive / Openshot. It's more professional than Pitivi. It's got more working code than *cough* Jahshaka. Even with Durian though, it has no plans to become a video editor beyond what exists now. Sorry. Lumiera and the Cinellera community on the other hand has on their very home page stated that their goal is:
"To create, as a community, a non linear video editing and compositing FOSS application for Linux/Unix/Posix Operating Systems, suitable for professional and quality oriented work, building on common open source video, sound and GUI toolkits and libraries, providing flexibility and a high degree of configurability and full control of all parameters, but at the same time a smooth workflow which scales well to larger and more complicated editing projects."


My advice would be, by all means enjoy Blender's vse now. By all means encourage the polish the UI needs. Don't let the shameless promotion over code that was Jahshaka cloud your view of the potential of a project openingly making regular commits, backed by a professional oriented community and with clearly stated, hype-free aims to bring us the professional editor we've been waiting for. Sure, it's likely to be a while. Sure, they haven't put out much info that non-coders can understand yet. Just be careful of digging up the seeds before they've grown and proclaiming that they must have been dead. That's the surest way to create Diva2.

[NLEatwork]

Ubuntiac - Your comment about the game engine proves my point. I already know the core Blender guys aren't interested in going outside their goals, but they are obviously flexible to improvements being made, even large ones, in areas outside their own focus. Also the game engine is an acknowledgement of the convergence of any 3D app with gaming, I think people are going to realise the same about the convergence with video. It's a very strong argument for Blender.

Also the greenscreening in Tony Mullen's book is about animated keyframed matting, it goes a little further than just the blender greenscreen plugin. I am not sure which you have used but I simply just don't see how a basic "drag plugin onto timeline" from a simpler editor is going to compete easily with that. It demonstrates the massive power of having the other infrastructure there. And his book also demonstrates there are quite a few companies which are using Blender for film stuff.

CinelerraCV having a community isn't an argument, it's an unstable app based on a more unstable one and it had to be abandoned in favour of the rewrite in Lumiera. I just see no evidence they will do anything special other than claiming "it's going to be awesome(tm)". And yes, I've been waiting for a good editor for over 5 years now and the half-finished stuff and Jahshaka type stuff makes one cynical.

With regard to the MLT relationship I am already aware of that as Johnathan Thomas' post a while back gave a huge shout out to them (and he seriously addresses why so many projects have failed). There are some interesting comments in this thread:
http://www.openshotvideo.com/2009/07/it-is-time-for-linux-video-editor.html#comments

Especially interesting is the dislike for python from Dan (python was also discussed in lumiera and they chose lua). This is probably one of the most factional things in the big projects, people emailing Linus asking why the kernel isn't in C++, people begging for LISP in Blender etc. With volunteers you can't ask them to just use something they dislike as they are doing it for their own reasons (often fun).

Anyway like I said I wish all projects well and I think the Openshot/Kdenlive combination will succeed as good editors. I just see the potential for Blender as going much further than that. They are going to be, and have been, improving their sound sync stuff as they get used for animations more and more (over still 3D). They continuously have film projects coming from their foundation now. As they get used in effects more they are starting to import camera movement tracking data etc. to insert digital characters into camera-shot footage (mentioned in the book again will find the link for you later). They can't avoid making the improvements I am talking about in the next two years anyway, I am just saying if the community rallies and gets some funding out of some companies and maybe can fund a few features on its own it would connect all the dots. That's the thing, connecting the dots. Blender has 1,2,3(basic editing) 7,8,9(3D); they just need to fill in the middle. Openshot and Kdenlive have 1,2,2.5 and thats it, if they go through 3 to 6 they still won't have the flexibilities that Blender has higher up.

Now this is the important bit, the *stated* reason why Diva sank and the *stated* reason why Jonathan thinks he can succeed is underlying libraries. All I am saying is that openshot and kdenlive are going to run into that same problem at some point. They will use a green screen plugin but then they won't have the motivation to make a whole GUI for deploying keyframable matting. The plugin will be "good enough" and that'll be that. It may be they want to be a traditional editor and hand off to other programs at that point, but I think the greenscreen and camera motion tracking in Blender show that they will be capped fairly low. At that point we get a good editor, but not a pro level one. If you take that line of argument you are left with all your pro-editor eggs in the Lumiera basket, and I won't repeat what I think about that. If your goal is a good editor, that is great. I am trying to find people who want a great editor to help me secure funds for the people I know are making one.

Additionally, asides from all this other stuff, Blender is already solidly cross-platform. I only use Linux for these things, so I am not sure of the status of openshot and kdenlive on other platforms, but that's another strong argument for Blender which the others don't appear to have.


NLEatwork


P.S. a video a guy made with Zi6 cheap HD cam and Blender:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_XwOQELT20 (make sure you turn HD on)
http://troy-sobotka.blogspot.com/2009/02/right-where-it-belongs.html

[homy06]

blender is definitely the way to go. The video you posted and all others that show blender's power are proof of belnder's main issue. sound. The sync issues need to be addressed. it simply makes anything but music videos not possible to do with blender. I wouldn't mind an ugly inefficient UI if I could have proper sound mixing. even just enough so I can sequence properly then improve the audio in ardour. ALso any playback issues in the preview window. I think a petition and maybe some letters to people like shuttleworth are needed.


edit:

left out my point, so my point is. Let's stop talking about it and let's do it. let's start a petition and figure out a way to setup a pot where we can collect donation and hold a contest to get the main issues resolved. I can put in 10 dollars.

edit: free petition sites

petitiononline.com
http://www.petitionspot.com/
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/

here's a couple of petition sites. dunno which is best and if it matters. we could just choose one.

[Aphorism]

Get off the Kool Aid. NLEatwork and everyone else supporting Blender has already pointed the serious individual in the right direction.

Look at what Nuke is.

Look at what Blender is.

Blender is _by far_ the most sophisticated and professional grade application we have in Free Software.

Before you ramble on and comment in here - get your footage and edit it in Blender. Roll it into the Nodal Compositor and effect it or grade it.

It isn't iMovie - and it was never designed to be iMovie / MovieMaker so if anyone is going to sit there and tell me that we need a friendly / accessible / blah blah application, please quietly sit down an pick up Maya and start cranking out work in five minutes. Didn't quite work out for you - let's try Smoke. Ok so that was complicated too... let's try Nuke... Get the picture?

Don't believe the rubbish that is peddled by the fledgling self-appointed usability folks in our community. Design is about two things - audience and goal. I don't want a hobby application. I don't want some piddly wizard driven pop up hell. I don't want colourful Tango icons everywhere. Then again, I am a _particular_ audience member. There are others like me.

Usability striving for everyone is usability for absolutely none.

IF the audience member desires a powerful application that produces quality top shelf motion picture work, Blender might be for you. If you want something to cut together home movies with your dog and cat, several page curls, and a few layers of solarization, it most certainly isn't the application.

To those that already get it:

* Learn it.
* Blog about it.
* Create tutorials and answer questions.
* TRY to create amazing work for a given audience.

Now some facts:

1) If you know what you are doing, Blender handles all of the North American non-whole frame rates and there isn't a sync issue. This means 24Pn, 30Pn, etc. are all manageable.
2) Blender proxies well for amazing performance on sub-standard systems.
3) Blender has the capacity to generate an infinite degree of effects. It isn't a 2D editor with 3D effects rolled in - it is the real deal.
4) Blender deals with deep colour depths well.
5) Broken just pushed color management to 2.5 lineage. That means that grading is dealt with including REC709. Test it.
6) 2.5 adds custom hotkeys - that should solve the bulk of the growing pains for those with other NLE experience.
7) Ton _does_ care about the Sequencer. Durian+1 will probably see some further refinements happen in that area.
8) Blender is fully customizable. If you don't like a layout, change it.

I challenge _any_ of the other Free Software NLE projects to even get 5% of the power of Blender. _Any_.

Enough for now. Anyone interested, feel completely free to contact me via email. I'm relatively easy to find. Apologies to the Lumiera thread for carrying on with the hijack.

Related Reading:
http://blog.rfquerin.org/2009/07/23/blender-video-editing-screencast-no-3/

The Math Node and some application thereof:
http://www.blendedplanet.com/?SFX_Tutorials:The_Ultimate_Keyer

Particle Effects and Systems:is
http://www.cgcookie.com/articles/creating-a-magic-wand-particles-effect

PS: Before you petition, make sure you know the program inside and out. Blender is already quite capable of many things. There has been work on CMX support via plugins as well. Further still, it isn't terribly well documented regarding the motion picture side of things. If you don't know who Schlaile is, you probably shouldn't be signing a petition just yet. The point of all of this is _understand_ the program. _Understand_ what is missing - if it is - and what is the path to resolving the issue. Work within the established and extremely successful coding group to see if / how / etc. something might be done. It tends to yield amazing results. I say this because I managed to get non-whole framerates brought to the attention of the proper developer and it was resolved in _less than a month_.

[Sean4000]

Blender is _by far_ the most sophisticated and professional grade application we have in Free Software.

Chances of me disagreeing with this quote: 0.00000000000000000000000000%

[homy06]

no one here is targeting the compositor or any other aspect of blender other than the video sequencer. In fact it's because of the compositor, 3d modeler, and what not that makes us want the development of blender's vse to be pushed. Farther than just some hotkeys and a customized scene setting. If 2.5 will be addressing the issues that blender has then great! but if not, then if those of us who aren't coders wish to start a community run competition and bring awareness through a petition, should be able to. and hopefully out of it comes a video sequencer that is professional enough for us film makers to drop our windows/mac partitions.

this thread isn't about getting a imovie video editor as our previous posts show, but has tried to find the shortest path to a professional grade nle.

blender 2.5 will be out soon, and hopefully it'll be good enough to edit projects with. if not then maybe we should take the next step and constructively critisize the exact problems the vse has and find solutions.

[Sean4000]

Fortunately I live in New Orleans and will be at SIGGRAPH in a few days!!! I will give a full report on my Blender 2.5 findings via email as to not clog the thread.

If there's any info on Lumiera I'll keep us posted here.

[Aphorism]

If 2.5 will be addressing the issues that blender has then great! but if not, then if those of us who aren't coders wish to start a community run competition and bring awareness through a petition, should be able to. and hopefully out of it comes a video sequencer that is professional enough for us film makers to drop our windows/mac partitions.

blender 2.5 will be out soon, and hopefully it'll be good enough to edit projects with. if not then maybe we should take the next step and constructively critisize the exact problems the vse has and find solutions.

Ok... so here is the open question to you homy - and please reply via email to me if you can as I can't check here all that often:

What is the issue here that you are having? Perhaps we can resolve it. As it is now, Blender is good enough to edit projects with. We need to sort out what your issue is and attempt to resolve it.

[homy06]

will do. i'm writing down the issues as I test it. I'll send it to you when I'm done.


edit:

sent it

[Sean4000]

Lumiera update from Christian Thaeter.

""""Going as fast as much people helping, that means currently a bit slow.
But well, the people only subscribed to the ML likely dont notice whats
going on behind the scenes.

We currently preparing for FrOSCon, any word-artists and texters would
be welcome to help us to make some information material/leaflets (we
planning to interest some developers there).

Otherwise, the trac is now used to organize a lot coding tasks. There is
a 'lumiera-work' mailinglist with a lot traffic which gets all the trac
things:
http://lists.lumiera.org/pipermail/lumiera-work/2009q3/thread.html
for non developers likely not much of interest, just to show that things
going on :)

Mridkash and me working on uwiki (mostly mridkash, thanks, I think we
make slow but substantial progress now). Still some web developer could
be of great help there (lua, asciidoc, css, javascript).

The next NoBug release is really on the horizon now, should be there in
a few days. While I would really like if someone helps me with
documentation formatting and review (Yes, I documented it by myself).

Some time ago I made a 'SmallTasks' category on the trac:
http://issues.lumiera.org/report/11

Currently there are only few things there, this are really inexpensive
things where anyone can help us. When this becomes working as people
actually help there we can put more things there.

And finally next wednesday we'll make the monthly irc meeting, I send an
offical announcement for that in a extra mail next days.


Christian""""

[Labello]

yeah sounds good. unfortunately i am no developer. so i can't really offer any help i think. but i wish you luck in this project since i am also eager in using lumiera.

[Sean4000]

Ladies and gentlemen, i give you...the Lumiera teaser trailer. Made by yours truly. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAUiDf4aXLQ

[rylleman]

Ladies and gentlemen, i give you...the Lumiera teaser trailer. Made by yours truly. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAUiDf4aXLQ
Was that made with Lumiera?Very impressive! :rolleyes:
I mean seriously, it was just titles, and quite boring ones to that. I wasn't teased to anything. Show us what Lumiera can do and how it looks.

[Labello]

well i would love to see some screencasts showing some basic and rudimentary snippets of features... ANYTHING... and this video was maybe just the peak of the iceberg :D

[Dubstar_04]

Please see this:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=7794905#post7794905

Let me know what you think.

[homy06]

hi dubstar

yea I was were you are, that is until troy (aphorism) helped me out with using Blender's VSE, you can email either one of us, and we can offer you tips. If you're looking for a powerhouse editor than blender is it. If you want a Imovie, then you're best bet is something like kino or kdenlive.

The only set back on blender is lack of a system where clips can be incrementally moved based on a time standard, but that is being implemented. maybe in 2.5. other than that blender's vse is great. it's stable, powerful, and doesn't hog my resources. the proxy function is amazing. really give it a chance. it was a game changer.

[Sean4000]

The Lumiera team is in high gear preparing for FROSCON but they were nice enough to take a new screen cap for us:

http://git.lumiera.org/gitweb?p=lumiera-propaganda;a=blob_plain;f=lumiera_screenshot.png;h =f513509c32d62c5cb3a7492415de832488cb6950;hb=d9db8 0118deb7a4a37a083b08be072be8494eea6

[ichthyostega]

Hi all,
just wanted to drop a little note -- FrOSCon was a busy time and we talked to a lot of interested people, did a little interviw on radio tux, etc. etc.

Please, don't put off such activities like our logo contest, getting the logo on tshirts, or making posters and writing propaganda texts. Similar for the workflow, handling and feature discussions visible on our mailing list. We are quite aware that the actual work going on constantly at the code base isn't visible to non-coders; moreover our decision was rather not to start out from GUI features, but from the engine and internal handling, thus we have to live with the fact that our progress remains invisible for yet some time to come.

Cheers,
Hermann V.

[Ubuntiac]

I don't know what any of them mean, but there always seems to be loads of commits on the mailing list.

I do think Lumiera could use a regular weekly / monthly "press release" on what's happened in the code base, translated as much as possible back to English for Non-Coders. (even if it's kinda vague and fuzzy like "Sped up video importing code" or "Improved code for letting the timeline control some parts of the rendering que.")

My feeling is that Lumiera has a lot of potential, but regular online communication with potential users who aren't coders would go a long way.

Anyway, thanks for the update. Personally I can't wait to (finally) see the video from the OVC and hope that FrosCon videos will be up some time, too. :)

[ichthyostega]

I do think Lumiera could use a regular weekly / monthly "press release" on what's happened in the code base, translated as much as possible back to English for Non-Coders.

Hi Ubuntiac,
honestly, that didn't occur to me; but this sounds like a good proposal! Actually it is too early to be able to do such a "status report" on a regular (weekly/monthly) base, because much of the work we do is not directly related to user visible features. But I'll take the idea to just post a status mail.

We (Lumiera developers) are aware that the situation regarding website/documentation is somewhat stuck at the moment. There is a spin-off project "uWiki", which started as some considerations/scriptings to organise our documentation. The original idea/concept stems from Cehteh (one of the core devs), and some folks from the community are coding on it right now; we're expecting an initial release soon. It's a extremely lightweight Wiki, coded in Lua, using Asciidoc as markup/render engine and GIT as a storage backend. The Lumiera.org page is already based on Asciidoc+GIT, and we had an huge effort with lots of community people helping to convert existing documentation content into asciidoc.
would go a long way.

Personally I can't wait to (finally) see the video from the OVC and hope that FrosCon videos will be up some time, too. :)
I've seen a video featuring Tom Judge showing the lumiera presentation at Openvideoconference. I can't find the link right now, sorry. At FrOSCon, several people grappled the various video cameras and captured some nice footage; Raffaella intends to edit a little video-art short with Cinelerra out of this.... for now there is just a group pic of us in posing in front of the booth: http://lumiera.org/Froscon_LumieraTeam.jpg :-D

[Ubuntiac]

Thanks for the reply ichthyostega. It's appreciated.

I would just like to clear up a misconception though that users are only interested in hearing about "user visible" features. For me at least (and I suspect for others, too) I'm interested in hearing about *progress*. Even if it's not a user visible feature.

I feel much more hopeful (and thus inclined to contribute to) about projects like KDE where I'm always hearing coders talking about improvements they've made in this library, or that widget. Even when I don't understand exactly what they do (although a link to an explanation is always appreciated)., It lets me see that *something* is happening.

a) It shows that someone is moving the project forward and
b) It gives me hope that we'll prevent / avoid / fix problems I've had (or may have in future) with related issues (eg Blenders soundsync problems)


Anyway, I guess want I really wanted to say, in a nutshell, was that

I'm very grateful for all the work all the dev's of all the vid apps are doing (including Lumiera) and just please let us potential users know what's happening, as best you can, in as basic language as possible, what's improved in your project lately and how it may benefit us, even if it's not visible (yet).

Thanks again

[Keyper7]

I would just like to clear up a misconception though that users are only interested in hearing about "user visible" features. For me at least (and I suspect for others, too) I'm interested in hearing about *progress*. Even if it's not a user visible feature.

COMPLETELY agree.

For someone seeing the official site and mailing list, Lumiera is vaporware with official t-shirts. People want to hear something, anything related to the software itself, as much frequently as possible. The screenshot above is nice and the care with the GUI is much appreciated, but I know close to nothing about the state of the backend.

Does it still use ffmpeg? Will it support more formats than Cinelerra? How much of the original Cinelerra code was kept concerting the backend? Are libraries for transitions working? Are libraries for compositing working? Are libraries for decoding and encoding working? Are libraries for GPU support working?

This is very important to keep the community aware. There's been a lot of excitement when Lumiera was announced, but 90% of the people I ask nowadays about Lumiera go "isn't it abandoned?", "I saw their site and only see things about marketing, I think they don't have any code yet" and "seems they're working on a new GUI, but haven't heard anything other than that".

[ichthyostega]

For someone seeing the official site and mailing list, Lumiera is vaporware with official t-shirts. People want to hear something, anything related to the software itself, as much frequently as possible.
This is very important to keep the community aware. There's been a lot of excitement when Lumiera was announced, but 90% of the people I ask nowadays about Lumiera go "isn't it abandoned?", "I saw their site and only see things about marketing, I think they don't have any code yet" and "seems they're working on a new GUI, but haven't heard anything other than that".

<rant> :frown:
I must admit that this outward perception and attitude is really a bit sobering. If there is excitement, fine. But please consider that even those seemingly supplementary things, which are just demanded -- do cost time and effort. Writing the introductory pages on the website, building a navigation, getting the existing documentation included, maintain the newbies tutorial, helping with packaging, shell scripting etc. We (core devs) could indeed spend all our available time completely just with those tasks, instead of coding. If you think people want to hear something, anything than please sit down and write something, anything, so we can use our time for writing code
<rant/>

OK, more seriously... the one and only thing you (yes: you) can do to improve this situation is: join, help with little tasks, spread the word, get other people involved, review the architecture, criticise our code, help us find more coders willing to do a long-term commitment.

The screenshot above is nice and the care with the GUI is much appreciated, but I know close to nothing about the state of the backend.

Does it still use ffmpeg? Will it support more formats than Cinelerra? How much of the original Cinelerra code was kept concerning the backend? Are libraries for transitions working? Are libraries for compositing working? Are libraries for decoding and encoding working? Are libraries for GPU support working?

The greatest problem with the existing cinelerra codebase is its structure, or better the lack of structure, interfaces, architecture, safe guards, unit tests etc. That's why we don't incorporate cinelerra code directly (but we analysed it very closely and try to learn from the problematic decisions found within the existing code).

The next thing I should point out is, that our initial step is rather huge. We don't want to re-invent incrementally what a video editor is, because we know it already, including the rather advanced stuff which shows up only when doing a professional/large scale video/film production. For example, problems related to handling multichannel, spatial sound systems or steresocopic imaging. Our answer to those problems is to keep things open and extensible throughout the whole application, and much more abstract as you might think they are at first sight. So, basically we don't just link in a library like ffmpeg and happily call into it. Rather, the solution is to have a media type descriptor and then treat this library as one installable module with a defined compatibility version, and then use specific adapters to access the functionality. So, basically Lumiera isn't "based" on any library.

As a starting and reference point, we rely on Burkhard Plaum's Gmerlin and especially on the GAVL library for handling of raw video and audio data. See http://gmerlin.sourceforge.net/ -- which of course doesn't exclude adding support for other popular codec/effect libraries later on...

This explanations might help you to understand, why I can't answer most of your questions directly; except the fact that we're far from the point where we can just put together a complete pipeline integration and make this or that library work in the context of the Lumiera app.

Especially on my behalf, a good deal of the work of the last months was related directly or indirectly with the fact that our GUI isn't hard wired, but loaded as a plug-in. In our design, it's crucial that core and session are able to work "headless" (for example script driven). To give an example: when you code an application just around a gui, you can simply let e.g. one clip "snap" to another clip, or to a grid as defined by a certain framerate. Later modifications, trims etc. will happen again through the GUI and thus will again cause such a "snap" to be retained. (Cinelerra uses this trick to avoid entirely to have to care for the link to the associated sound tracks.) But when to the contrary, you can't assume a GUI to be always there, you need to incorporate a similar functionality as a real link between objects in the session, i.e. as an information which is stored in the data model and maintained actively.

And indeed, all those complexities and problems are all just "vaporware", until the problem is understood, a solution is designed, coded up, refined, tested and integrated. And, btw, when people "think" ;-) we don't have any code, maybe people should just look into our repository, or maybe at the nice code stats at Ohloh: http://www.ohloh.net/p/lumiera/analyses/latest
(HTML and JavaScript are just an artefact in this stat, but C/C++ are for real)

Cheers,
Hermann V.

[Keyper7]

<rant> :frown:
I must admit that this outward perception and attitude is really a bit sobering. If there is excitement, fine. But please consider that even those seemingly supplementary things, which are just demanded -- do cost time and effort. Writing the introductory pages on the website, building a navigation, getting the existing documentation included, maintain the newbies tutorial, helping with packaging, shell scripting etc. We (core devs) could indeed spend all our available time completely just with those tasks, instead of coding. If you think people want to hear something, anything than please sit down and write something, anything, so we can use our time for writing code
<rant/>

OK, more seriously... the one and only thing you (yes: you) can do to improve this situation is: join, help with little tasks, spread the word, get other people involved, review the architecture, criticise our code, help us find more coders willing to do a long-term commitment.

Ok, first of all, sorry if you felt offended. I think you got the idea that I think you devs are not working enough. It's the exact opposite: I'm perfectly aware you are working and that's precisely why I emphasized "something, anything". I meant "I'm not asking for full reports because I know you are busy. But the minimum still helps."

The greatest problem with the existing cinelerra codebase is its structure, or better the lack of structure, interfaces, architecture, safe guards, unit tests etc. That's why we don't incorporate cinelerra code directly (but we analysed it very closely and try to learn from the problematic decisions found within the existing code).

The next thing I should point out is, that our initial step is rather huge. We don't want to re-invent incrementally what a video editor is, because we know it already, including the rather advanced stuff which shows up only when doing a professional/large scale video/film production. For example, problems related to handling multichannel, spatial sound systems or steresocopic imaging. Our answer to those problems is to keep things open and extensible throughout the whole application, and much more abstract as you might think they are at first sight. So, basically we don't just link in a library like ffmpeg and happily call into it. Rather, the solution is to have a media type descriptor and then treat this library as one installable module with a defined compatibility version, and then use specific adapters to access the functionality. So, basically Lumiera isn't "based" on any library.

As a starting and reference point, we rely on Burkhard Plaum's Gmerlin and especially on the GAVL library for handling of raw video and audio data. See http://gmerlin.sourceforge.net/ -- which of course doesn't exclude adding support for other popular codec/effect libraries later on...

This explanations might help you to understand, why I can't answer most of your questions directly; except the fact that we're far from the point where we can just put together a complete pipeline integration and make this or that library work in the context of the Lumiera app.

Especially on my behalf, a good deal of the work of the last months was related directly or indirectly with the fact that our GUI isn't hard wired, but loaded as a plug-in. In our design, it's crucial that core and session are able to work "headless" (for example script driven). To give an example: when you code an application just around a gui, you can simply let e.g. one clip "snap" to another clip, or to a grid as defined by a certain framerate. Later modifications, trims etc. will happen again through the GUI and thus will again cause such a "snap" to be retained. (Cinelerra uses this trick to avoid entirely to have to care for the link to the associated sound tracks.) But when to the contrary, you can't assume a GUI to be always there, you need to incorporate a similar functionality as a real link between objects in the session, i.e. as an information which is stored in the data model and maintained actively.

And indeed, all those complexities and problems are all just "vaporware", until the problem is understood, a solution is designed, coded up, refined, tested and integrated. And, btw, when people "think" ;-) we don't have any code, maybe people should just look into our repository, or maybe at the nice code stats at Ohloh: http://www.ohloh.net/p/lumiera/analyses/latest
(HTML and JavaScript are just an artefact in this stat, but C/C++ are for real)

Cheers,
Hermann V.

See, that's exactly the "something, anything" I'm talking about. You are currently following the idea "Our work is too low level right now, users would never be interested in knowing details", but this is wrong. Small sentences like "our focus is a gui-independent workflow, this creates architectural complexity", "our reference is GAVL", "we want media library independence" goes MILES in getting the community more excited.

The TiddlyWiki is good, but kinda looks like it's "from coders to coders".

[Ubuntiac]

I'd just like to agree with everything in the above post. This isn't a "work harder" request, so much as a "I'm sure you've been up to cool stuff, and I'd love to hear about it" request.

[waloleles]

i really think that red hat, canonical, novell...etc HAVE to pay programmers for this purpose, because once lumiera is finished, thew will have benefit.

A serious video editor is one of the thinks GNU needs.

[Ubuntiac]

Just a couple of interesting updates on Lumiera:

Theres an interview with a bunch of the team online at http://www.perspektive89.com/2009/lumiera_radio_interview_during_froscon_2009
English speakers: don't let the first 10 seconds of German scare you off. This interview *is* in English!

From the recent Dev Meeting:
The website needs to be reorganized and made accessible. andrewjames volunteers to work on it.

Quarterly development news will be published in the devel section of the website. The devs will post drafts to the mailing list and encourage the other devs to add their informations. Then someone shall aggregate this and make a news webpage. That creates a new task: help collecting the news and write them together.

The devs will communicate their achievements more often in small steps to the mailing list


This is a Very Good Move (tm)! Thanks for getting this going Icthyo...er... Icthia... well, you know who you are! ;) An RSS feed of the news page would be perfect and go as far as all the conferences combined in terms of encouraging help.

[Ubuntiac]

Just published: An excellent description of both the problem and the solution written eloquently as ever by Aaron Siego (previous KDE president, current lead on KDE's plasma desktop):
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2009/09/continuous-communication.html

I post this more for the suggestions than to beat a dead horse about the problem. The latest developments sound very promising!

[soko-ban]

Lumiera Coming Soon Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITBUOx7oPTs

[Sean4000]

Here's another Lumiera video. I hope this project is as big as it makes it out to be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAUiDf4aXLQ

[Ubuntiac]

<grumpy rant>

Ugh. It's videos like these (not done by anyone involved with Lumiera I might add) that make people feel like it's all hype and no substance.

If they'd show us what's great in the project *now* I'd be far more interested. Yes, I know there's no userland features yet, but even if they just explained what's great in the code base and why *eventually* it's going to matter to me as a user. EG being designed from the ground up for a professional level workflow, the best minds(?) from the experienced Cinelerra community so it's responsive to users needs, includes sections of code written in assembly language(!) for ultimate speed etc. etc. I'm just throwing things out here based on the (very little) I know. Any of these though would be better than "It's got an awesome logo! It's coming SOON! (really?) Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!"

Seriously. From the little info that's made it's way out of the black box, it looks like an excellent project. We just need a little more info to balance out the hype that random non-Lumiera-dev people are using to fill the void.

</grumpy rant>

Gah! Get off my lawn, you pesky kids! ;)

[conradcliff]

Where can we get some serious updates as far as the progress is going concerning this project?

Also..why is the website sooo crappy looking and never updated?

[Ubuntiac]

If you look at post #172 (http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=7967515&postcount=172) of this thread, you'll see the dev team have stated a commitment to do a monthly update on what's happened and put it on the website. That was 3 weeks ago, so I have my fingers crossed....

[OldSpiceAP]

I've been impressed with openshot myself lately. So far its features I've noted that seem to be well done are simple things like lots of lovely transitions, some nice effects, simple editing and cutting, chroma key (yay I knew I painted that wall in my house green for a reason!!), and many many more. It seems pretty stable, the interface is pretty, and better yet it is in fast active development. I've been using it to produce videos for weddings lately (I do DJing and thanks to OpenShot have finally moved the ENTIRE process to linux

[Ubuntiac]

Yeah, I tried it, too and had to admit it's starting to look rather nice. Haven't looked into keyframing of effects yet, which is often the really good test of a video editing app, but we shall see.

Things are starting to look up....

[conradcliff]

Wouldn't the world just be perfect if all the nle projects could be combined into one and we could have the most amazing video/audio editing project in the entire universe? I will dream of this tonight..

[waloleles]

I agree with you.

[ichthyostega]

Wouldn't the world just be perfect if all the nle projects could be combined into one and we could have the most amazing video/audio editing project in the entire universe?

...continuing in this slightly ironical way of thinking, I would be interested in the kind of workflow such a beast would support? Would it be iMovie kind of snapping together my cool holiday videos, or would it be editing a feature film for cinema?

But, letting that aside, the main problem lies in the people which are capable of doing multimedia development. They need to be both experienced in developing sofware, and at the same time have a thorough understanding of the target domain, preferrably by having done media work themselves. Basically this means, any one of those folks has quite a rich set of personal experiences, I mean, things learned by making mistakes. You see, its near to impossible to get all those together under a common umbrella.... ;-)

[ichthyostega]

Where can we get some serious updates as far as the progress is going concerning this project?

Also..why is the website sooo crappy looking and never updated?

The website is generated by ASCIIDOC with fairly default settings. Someone tweaked the CSS a bit for us. Personally, I worked as a web developer and certainly could make the website look much more polished. But I'm sure you'd agree with me that I should better refrain from doing so :-P

There is a spin-off project of lumiera, which is called uWiki. The basic idea stems from cehteh (one of the 3 lumiera core devs). The idea is to combine Asciidoc and a GIT backend + CSS to get a fairly flexible and distributed (just by virtue of GIT) Wiki. We agreed that we'll jump over to using this as soon as it gets ready. A good deal of our technical documentation is already in Asciidoc and we manage our sourcecode with GIT. A lot of people are lurking on our mailinglist, and many have volunteered to help with graphics and web design. Thus, I expect things regarding the website to work out fairly well....

If anyone wants to be up-to date regarding our progress on the "coding front": you're welcome on the lumiera mailing list. We made quite some progress, but most anything of this is "deep down" below the ground. I relalise quite well that it's difficult for a user to understand what we're doing, but I*don't know how to solve this gordian knot.

Regarding the "Coding Status" message... yes, the informations for the first one of them is there. It was posted to the mailinglist, see the thread starting here:
http://lists.lumiera.org/pipermail/lumiera/2009-September/001389.html

Cheers,
Hermann Vosseler
aka "Ichthyo"

[conradcliff]

...continuing in this slightly ironical way of thinking, I would be interested in the kind of workflow such a beast would support? Would it be iMovie kind of snapping together my cool holiday videos, or would it be editing a feature film for cinema?

Both! :D

But, letting that aside, the main problem lies in the people which are capable of doing multimedia development. They need to be both experienced in developing sofware, and at the same time have a thorough understanding of the target domain, preferrably by having done media work themselves. Basically this means, any one of those folks has quite a rich set of personal experiences, I mean, things learned by making mistakes. You see, its near to impossible to get all those together under a common umbrella.... ;-)

So true, I would love to know if they have anyone with a heavy media background helping them out with the work flow...they should have a forum where media guys can drop their two cents on how things should work..and flow. I imagine that will probably take place when some usable betas are available.

The website is generated by ASCIIDOC with fairly default settings. Someone tweaked the CSS a bit for us. Personally, I worked as a web developer and certainly could make the website look much more polished. But I'm sure you'd agree with me that I should better refrain from doing so :-P

There is a spin-off project of lumiera, which is called uWiki. The basic idea stems from cehteh (one of the 3 lumiera core devs). The idea is to combine Asciidoc and a GIT backend + CSS to get a fairly flexible and distributed (just by virtue of GIT) Wiki. We agreed that we'll jump over to using this as soon as it gets ready. A good deal of our technical documentation is already in Asciidoc and we manage our sourcecode with GIT. A lot of people are lurking on our mailinglist, and many have volunteered to help with graphics and web design. Thus, I expect things regarding the website to work out fairly well....

If anyone wants to be up-to date regarding our progress on the "coding front": you're welcome on the lumiera mailing list. We made quite some progress, but most anything of this is "deep down" below the ground. I relalise quite well that it's difficult for a user to understand what we're doing, but I*don't know how to solve this gordian knot.

Regarding the "Coding Status" message... yes, the informations for the first one of them is there. It was posted to the mailinglist, see the thread starting here:
http://lists.lumiera.org/pipermail/lumiera/2009-September/001389.html

Cheers,
Hermann Vosseler
aka "Ichthyo"


I do agree with you..keep up that coding!! :p From the shallow perspective of a hopeful user like me that hasn't gotten on the mailing list to "try" to understand what's happening in the backend of lumiera, the looks of the website and frequency of its updates is my only real gauge as to how well the project is coming along. Looks like there's some good hands working on it though! Can't wait till I can start using it and catching some bugs for you guys! :lolflag:

[ichthyostega]

...I would love to know if they have anyone with a heavy media background helping them out with the work flow...they should have a forum where media guys can drop their two cents on how things should work..and flow.
...
...on the mailing list to "try" to understand what's happening in the backend of lumiera...
at this point I'd like to add that our mailing list is this forum you asked about; i's deliberately for (prospective) users and developers. A lot of media professionals are there, and -- while it's usually silent -- at times we had quite deep discussions about workflow related topics, as well as on technical topics. :D