Lightworks going open source

Something to keep an eye on in the future. Lightworks video editor is transitioning to open source soon. This is an amazing production quality editor.
News item : http://lightworksbeta.com/
Lightworks production credits : http://lightworksbeta.com/index.php?o ... article&id=107&Itemid=260

Regards
Gnu

Edited to fix link.

@Gnu

As you said; for the future. As with our current systems probably video editing is slow enough, but with the incoming X1000 this will be a nice tool to have.

Gnu and Phantom,

I was thinking the same thing about both points you have made -- mature, open-source video editing solution but something for down the road a bit. I just downloaded the free Windows beta release of Lightworks, and it looks very promising. I'm a Final Cut Pro editor, and I immediately like that Lightworks can be configured to use the familiar FCP keyboard shortcuts.

Running something like this on an X1000 or some future AOS machine would be a cool thing.

@all

on the site, the next milestone is mid 2011 (open source code available).

@mbrantley

Quote:

How good is Lightworks? To date, every open-source video editor that I have tried (admittedly not recently) has had one or more of the following:
- A poorly designed GUI,
- Crash prone
- Couldn't load most of my video files

If Lightworks has been well put together, then it would be worth porting when the source code has been released.

Hans

@Hans

Check out the second link im my post (fixed it). I believe this speaks volumes on its capabilities.

Regards
Gnu

@Hans

All I had to read was that Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker has used it to put together pictures for Martin Scorsese. I'm convinced!

All I've done so far is install it on my Win7 setup just to take a look at it. My main machines are Mac OS X setups (but my fun ones are Amigas).

@Gnu

Quote:

Just had a look, and yes, that list speaks for itself. This looks like something worth keeping an eye on.

Hans

Ive just used lightworks, nice interface poor design. Video editing should'nt take long to figure out how too edit but lightworks I have yet to figure out how and I use adobe premier!!! None of the buttons are labeled, took me 10 min to figure out where the import file was ?

* Looks at lightworks screen with a blank look *

I've noticed there is hardly any documentation with the software or have i missed something?

@Gnu

What I wonder is why are they going open source?
Is the program a commercial failure?

@Elwood,

From what I've gleaned, this was a top-dog program sold as part of high-end, turnkey setups and even shared an Oscar award for innovation with Avid back in the mid-90s when NLE was new. Then it changed owners more than once and lost a large amount of market share and seemed headed for extinction.

Now EditShare has bought it and seems to be employing a strategy of cleaning it up a bit and documenting the source code before releasing it to open source. EditShare aims to make money selling plugins, hardware controllers, etc.

I've not been able to do anything with it because the just-released beta lacks codecs to deal with any of my video files. But what I'm reading on the EditShare forum indicates they will make it work with open source codecs in coming weeks.
They are also aiming to make it work with a wider range of hardware than whatever it currently supports.

But, like I said, so far I haven't been able to make it do anything.

@mbrantley

Maybe it goes open-source for let other devs to improve it further or add other functions as well.

Does it do h264? I've never done video editing before, but I do have a few home videos that came out rather dark and I'd like to turn up the gamma a bit so we can see them.

OK, another question. Running in Vista, how do I start Lightworks? In the start menu, all it gives me is an uninstall item. There's nothing there to run or use the program.

@Elwood
I don't know the motivations for an open source release.
Simply saying this looks interesting for future reference.
The parallels between this and how blender went open
source seem simular. Hopefully Lightworks benefits from
open source as much as Blender has.

Regards
Gnu

Edited for spelling

@magic

Quote:

That's a bit disappointing to hear, particularly considering the list movies that were edited using this product. Poor GUI design is one of my biggest complaints about open-source video editors. Perhaps the "poor design" is a transitional thing while they are reworking the code. I'm guessing that there are some things that they won't be able to open-source such as specialised codecs, which require the code to be modified.

If the underlying software in Lightworks is good, then fixing up the GUI shouldn't be too difficult.

Hans

@Hans

someone on the Avid community has a different opinion,
this from a comment in a forum:
"Everyone hepas praise on the intuitiveness of FCP, but Lightworks is truly
the most intuitive editing software I've ever used"
of course FCP is Final Cut Pro,
this is the link of the forum: http://community.avid.com/forums/t/82697.aspx?PageIndex=1

@Gnu

This looks like it would be an awesome edition to the Amiga Scene.... Awesome.

I use OpenShot

My daughters vid edited with OpenShot

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szFtXANACNI[/youtube]

@ outcast

nice video that I'm sure your daughter will cherish for years to come

btw, lightworks on the X1000 will be suite