Open Source Video

January 5, 2008 7:57 PM

Who provides the best Open Source video editing?

I have edited video in analog and digital (Final Cut Pro) and now I am searching for an open source editor that will do basic tasks.

The features I most want are basic linear editing plus the ability to do overlays.

The material I will tape will not be technically demanding. But it would be nice to have a good tool for some very basic stuff. (Looking to make some educational videos.) Thanks!

posted by McLir to media & arts (7 comments total)

Check out Jahshaka. Also, although it's officially been discontinued, and not open source, there are still versions of Avid Free DV floating around; try here.
posted by ssinct at 9:43 PM on January 5, 2008

Check out some of these programs.

Good luck!
posted by GrooveStix at 1:22 AM on January 6, 2008

Coming from a totally non-video-editing background I found VirtualDub to be absolutely fantastic for simple editing tasks. The $800 commercial package my company had bought, Camtasia Studio, did a couple of frilly special effects well, did video capture of your desktop, and had an amazingly high-compression codec for that but had a ridiculously crappy UI for doing editing and crashed constantly, losing hours of work frequently because one of the things that might make it crash was trying to save after repeated edits.

I had a seriously difficult time believing that it was released software, it was so bad. Finding such a drastically superior open-source tool (the screen capture stuff being all it's missing comparatively.) VirtualDub was awesome, with a responsive UI and keyboard shortcuts that let me fly through editing compared to Camtasia, never ever crashed a single time through hundreds of hours of doing training videos for web developers, and saved my frazzled nerves.
posted by XMLicious at 3:20 AM on January 6, 2008 [1 favorite]

I've played around with Kdenlive - it seems to actually work. However, in all honesty, I still boot into Windows to use Windows Movie Maker. Nothing I've found in the open source realm comes close to WMM for simplicity and ease of use.
posted by COD at 6:09 AM on January 6, 2008

I've never used it, but I've heard a lot about Cinelerra.
posted by fogster at 10:09 AM on January 6, 2008

I've used Cinelerra, & I like it more than Kdenlive or Kino right now. It was intimidating at first, admittedly. Oh, & I'll at least mention kino, which works with DV well; I got the impression that it was on the functional level of Virtualdub.

Cinelerra & Kino are on the Dynebolic live Linux CD, which lets you skip installing them.

I've heard Blender has a video editor now, but I can't speak for its suitability.
posted by Pronoiac at 4:27 PM on January 6, 2008

Cinelerra is the most mature option. Would certainly be my choice if I had to use one of those from what I've seen (and editing video is my job).

Jahshaka looked very promising, but seems to be dead or dying?

Avid Free DV is good if you can find it - not really open source, and a bit of a learning curve, probably not worth it.

Overall open-source video editing hasn't come of age.
posted by sycophant at 3:01 AM on January 8, 2008