Do all video editors in Linux suck?

[aeronutt]

I've been playing with Openshot, Avidemux, and Cinellera over the past few days. None of them do the basic things I need in a way I can use them.

Cinellera: complicated, hard for me to use, and on first attempt saved a video and it was in 2 or 3 colors, orange and red.
Avidemux: windows frequently have their borders 'off' my screen. A real PIA.
Openshot: When I rotated a video, it cropped it also. Can't figure out how to not make that happen.

[tgerbert]

...just for clarification's sake, it has been released, just not for Linux. I did try running it with Wine, no luck as of yet (I haven't put too much effort into making it work, but I expect it won't work too well if at all); I haven't bothered to try a VirtualBox yet, but I'm not too sure I see much point in that (at least for me, since I've still got a Windows partition I can boot to).

Oops...I posted to the wrong thread, disregard my above comments.

[stuartcnz]

No! Not all video editors in Linux Suck. You need to ask yourself two questions. First what level of video editing do I require, then secondly, what is my skill base for editing video.

If you don't have a background in video editing, you are best using a consumer grade software, such as Kino or Openshot editor. They won't do anything really flash, or even allow you that much flexibility, but they do what they do well, and are both quick and easy to learn.

If you want more scope and flexibility, then the current choices really boil down to either kdenlive or Cinelerra. My personal choice is the community version or Cinelerra, which is extremely flexible and will allow you to do some very advanced stuff, if you take the time to learn about it, but is not for beginners, as they will become frustrated with it, through lack of understanding.

Lightworks has been mentioned, though as has already been pointed out, is not yet available for Linux. Further, it looks like the open source version that will be released will be somewhat stripped down, and to get the full benefits, will require the use of numerous plugins, which will not be free.

So to summerize, at this stage I would recommend either Kino or Openshot for the home user. Kdenlive or Cinelerra for the more advanced user (Community version of Cinelerra being my choice). And star gazing into the future I think by far the best option for Linux will be Lumiera, though that will be quite some time away.

[amauk]

Maybe slightly off-topic, but I recently listened to a fantastic podcast about video editing on linux

http://gnuworldorder.info/audiophile...Order_7x05.ogg

[kodec]

In my opinion as an editor coming from using Avid, Premiere and Final Cut(rarely) and Vegas Pro for almost 10 years, yes they all suck (Linux progs that is). Cinelerra seems to be the most decent in terms of being able to keyframe all of the built-in effects (just no standard plugin architecture can be used). Kdenlive, OpenShot and other dedicated video editors still suck at standard features that all pro editing software has. I just got into a minor debate on the Lightworks forum about my reasoning for why the Linux and Mac OS port has been delayed. The moderator's reason of DOS code having to be ported made me laugh. Cinelerra for pro work or even Blender are the best bet. Blender and Nuke for compositing/vfx.

The perfect editing system would have.

Timeline based editor with timecode support.
Source/Project Monitor with scopes support.
Plugin system using frei0r and OpenFX API with fully "keyframeable" parameters.
Scale, Rotate, Translate and Crop, all "keyframeable".
Basic Composite math functions.
Basic color correction system (Color vectors for HMS, gamma, gain, curves).
Basic audio mixing functions.

Simple isn't it?

I'm really tempted to get my programming and math skills up and make my own. Too many projects developed by individuals that truly don't understand the art of editing. The professional ports care too much about making bread with open source software.

My Lightworks debate:
http://www.lightworksbeta.com/index....=30&Itemid=269

[bcarlowise]

I've been playing with Openshot, Avidemux, and Cinellera over the past few days. None of them do the basic things I need in a way I can use them.

Cinellera: complicated, hard for me to use, and on first attempt saved a video and it was in 2 or 3 colors, orange and red.
Avidemux: windows frequently have their borders 'off' my screen. A real PIA.
Openshot: When I rotated a video, it cropped it also. Can't figure out how to not make that happen.

I've been using Openshot as my video editor which I find to be very easy to use and quite stable...with ONE big caveat....it crashes when exporting a video if you move the mouse (using Ubuntu 11.04 or 11.10 and Gnome3 with an ATI video card). It runs perfectly fine (no crashing) if using Unity. I also noticed the issue when rotating a video....it does not rotate the entire video including the orientation but instead only rotates the video while maintaining the landscape orientation thereby resulting in a vertical clipping (cropping) of the video. My solution was to use mencoder to rotate any videos that required rotation. I recently discovered though that AviDemux rotates videos effectively so I can start using that for my video rotation as well.

[kjkrum]

Glad to see I'm not the only one sitting here swearing at the computer. Sorry to see it's been years and the problem remains unresolved.

Cinelerra: Interprets MP4 video recorded on a Sony Bloggie as empty sound files.

Kino: No audio playback in any format. Tried padsp wrapper without success.

OpenShot: Playback is choppy, can't keep video and audio synced. User interface is diabolically counter-intuitive.

LiVES: Takes several minutes just to open a small clip (< 1 MB). UI sucks massively.

I'm not even looking for the "perfect" editor. I just want one that works!

[RedRat]

Glad to see I'm not the only one sitting here swearing at the computer. Sorry to see it's been years and the problem remains unresolved.

Cinelerra: Interprets MP4 video recorded on a Sony Bloggie as empty sound files.

Kino: No audio playback in any format. Tried padsp wrapper without success.

OpenShot: Playback is choppy, can't keep video and audio synced. User interface is diabolically counter-intuitive.

LiVES: Takes several minutes just to open a small clip (< 1 MB). UI sucks massively.

I'm not even looking for the "perfect" editor. I just want one that works!

My guess is that much depends on which version of Ubuntu you are using. I tried these same editors in my older 8.04LTS 32bit and had only 2Gb of memory. I agree that they all sucked big time. I have now moved on the 12.04LTS 64bit with much more memory (6Gb). I plan to try these video editors out on my new system.

Part of the problem with this kind of software is that the technology is moving faster than the software developers (all volunteers) can update the software. A few years back, it was difficult, if not impossible, to get HDVideo into an Ubuntu machines, now I suppose it is much better--I don't whether there is support even for BluRay. To get volunteer developers, who are not working for a salary, to improve/update/create new video software, takes some magical goal for them. Perhaps to make a name for themselves or to solve an immediate problem they might be having, some even for the curiosity or intellectual challenge to create something new.

Keep in mind that video software developed for Windows and Mac are created by big companies for which this is a core business. They pay their developers, some rather handsomely, to make the software better. They also can afford to run test labs, e.g., Microsoft, to get an idea how users at different skill levels use existing software.