Video Editing Software
A little time spent with Google quickly shows that there’s a good number of video editors available for Linux, but where does one start? Wikipedia has a list of non-commercial, open source video editors for Linux and other operating systems, but it’s unfortunately presented with little context and no evaluation of the individual packages. In 2005, Dan Sawyer wrote an excellent article for the Linux Journal in which he compared a number of the video editors available for Linux. It’s a testament to the rapidly shifting sands of FLOSS that two of the five projects he examined are now defunct: while Cinelerra, Kino, and Blender are still going strong, Diva (formerly of diva-project.org) and Cuisine are apparently no longer developed. What else has changed?
After quite a lot of searching and evaluating, it appears that Cinelerra, Kino, and Blender are still at the top of the heap. I’m working on descriptions of each of these packages which I’ll post here in the coming days (it’s too much to post all at once).
Recently Jahshaka has entered as a promising new project, but as yet I haven’t put forth the effort to make it work. LiVES is another promising tool, but also currently lacks clean packaging, making installation non-trivial. I hope to be able to talk about these experimental/alpha systems as time allows.


Thursday, November 15th 2007 at 10:46 am
Jahshaka is all promise, but nothing more. Horrible workflow, virtually no documentation, slow and buggy as heck, deficient integration between its own modules — it’s the sort of application that gives FLOSS a bad name.