OpenShot 4.0 – Open-source video editor(openshot.org) |
OpenShot 4.0 – Open-source video editor(openshot.org) |
I really wish all s/w had the platform and price in line 1.
TBF, it is on their home screen, https://www.openshot.org/download/
also, openshot is foss. can't you just give the source code to your clanker and let it mod itself in the app?
I wonder if they finally change the caption editing with the weird timing reference, probably not.
edit: this is what I'm talking about: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenShot/comments/1s27wre/the_way_c...
edit: can't really try as it crashes on my M1 Sequoia (maybe the install being named OpenShot-v4.0.0-x86_64.dmg was not a good sign ;))
I am pretty sure, this thing solves half of the problems the above solve, and it does it half-good.
Which makes me pretty sure yours was a useless comment.
No need for snarky "but ours is foss smugface" comments.
Not to say, your comment make me pretty sure you hadn't tried either of mentioned by me, and does not take video editing seriously.
For basic video editing it's quite user friendly and you can do some fairly prosumer level things with it (it's not going to match a studio grade NLE but for most people it doesn't need to).
What makes you pretty sure?
You know it very well, why do you pretend to ask ?
This is the big question for designers, how much of the future of software will be human-oriented UIs vs a human typing into a chat window (or as a temporary bridge, telling an agent to operate existing GUIs).
For now I believe agent-driven software is still pretty niche, something for highly technical users, but that will change as it mainstreams. Early adopters demand early adopter software features.
there is just no way a chat interface could replace a non-linear video editor gui
I strongly concur - I don't want to "tell" the app to level the audio between several clips only to have it level everything to 0 and then take five minutes to undo etc
Does OpenShot? For your specific use cases? I dunno, but it’s free, so give it half an hour or an hour and see? You’ll get more info than from many of us that probably don’t use this kind of software often.
And then you can report back your findings! :D
OpenShot is however significantly easier to use and does what you need for casual editing. If you want a step above that and still FLOSS then Kdenlive is a better choice.
What makes your original comment useless is that it reads like an American saying, 'I bet our GDP is bigger than Nauru's' - like what is the point? You know the answer already. An open source video editor is unlikely to be as good as DaVinci Resolve. DaVinci has multiplicity of the resources OpenShot/Kdenlive etc. do.
So again, what is your point?
Cheers from Canada
Most people want a video editor to splice and concatenate video files without any loss or transcoding. I believe this behavior (lossless) should be default on all of these editors.
You can do this with mpv. It's an open source cross platform media player.
For example, here's how I set up a tiny Lua script extension[0] to be able to visually cut videos in an intuitive way. It does it in seconds without re-rendering the video by shelling out to ffmpeg.
Years ago I did the same thing with a shell script CLI tool[1], but mpv's visual aspect makes it so much faster and easier to make clips out of a longer video.
[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/visually-create-video-clips-w...
[1]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/create-video-clips-with-ffmpe...
I guess an NLE could import clips in a locked mode by default that only supports lossless operations, and you’d have to specifically enable the rest. Could be interesting.
That one, I do believe should get more research and implementations. Currently I only know of LosslessCut's "Smart" mode, but I'd like to see other big players of the video editing space improving the state of the art in that direction for simple cuts.
Shotcut is my default video editor, if anyone's trying it on Linux please use their AppImage as it solved most of my headaches when I was using Flatpak version.
For your particular requirement, you can't get lossless quality all the time by any software.
I have hope for OpenShot, but it's still not there.
I've been working on OpenPost's Video Editor (Svelte-based video editor that runs on your (chromium) browser). If anyone's looking for something they can run on the browser, fully free and OSS as well, check it out https://app.openpost.social/video-editor
Currently really in early Beta but this seems like a great place to mention it.
Here is the repo if you want to give it a star
Just like "engineer" is a reserved term in many jurisdictions, "open" should be too. At least in our industry.
If a bakery wants to call itself "open", so be it. But if software calls itself "open", it had better be open.
OpenAI, OpenRouter, OpenArt, OpenGov, OpenWeb, OpenText, ... this is all malarkey.
The only instance where "open" isn't trying to pose as open source is when it's a verb or adjective coupled with a noun used in a well-understood colloquial manner, eg. "OpenDoor", "OpenTable".
OpenAI implies open source AI. Look at how hard this "open" company tries to regulate open weights.
OpenRouter implies open source routing. Their platform isn't open source at all, and a lot of the specifics people will grow to care about are entirely proprietary.
Don't even get me started on OpenGov, which is a complete travesty.
These are such bold-faced lies.
https://github.com/shotstack/shotstack-studio-sdk
More for embedding a video editor into your own application but may be of interest for those who like Openshot.
OpenShot 3.0 Released – Stability, Performance, and Usability - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33943790 - Dec 2022 (3 comments)
OpenShot Video Editor – Free, Open and Award-Winning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31324136 - May 2022 (2 comments)
OpenShot 2.6.0 Released – AI and Computer Vision and Audio Effects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28324536 - Aug 2021 (16 comments)
OpenShot 2.5.0: Video Editing and Hardware Acceleration - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336504 - Feb 2020 (4 comments)
OpenShot – Open-Source Video Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19725823 - April 2019 (88 comments)
OpenShot 2.4.1 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15689998 - Nov 2017 (10 comments)
OpenShot 2.0.6 (Public Beta) Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11071014 - Feb 2016 (27 comments)
OpenShot Video Editor Achieves $35k on Kickstarter, Final Goal in Reach - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5552289 - April 2013 (1 comment)
I tried many others, but mostly all others are not stable enough or have an even worse UI/UX... so I wonder... is this different?
- Good design requires user interviews, which are less common in open source - The sorts of people who are most attracted to open source work are programmers, not designers - Open source software can get popular even with bad design; closed source software with bad design fails and shuts down
If you're already used to the Blender shortcuts though, editing video is a breeze and everything just works as expected, which is really nice. But I wouldn't pick up Blender and its shortcuts just to edit video, then I'd probably go with something more fully meant for video editing.
That was my experience some years ago and I decided I will skip a decade to see it all working.
For old or no GPU, there are a few other options:
OpenShot is simple, Shotcut works everywhere, and https://www.cinelerra-gg.org/en can handle >4k footage for free.
Depends how much time you have to dig through manuals. =3
And I don't think it's a terrible thing for an open source developer to try to earn a few coins.
Mad that “free” software has to be paid by someone.
I don't know of any FOSS programs that can automatically handle it cleanly. =3
I decided to have a quick, cursory, "first-glance" look at OpenShot's software architecture...
It apparently (and again, someone correct me if I am wrong here) uses FFmpeg (https://www.ffmpeg.org/ https://git.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg), more specifically the FFmpeg libraries (libavutil, libavcodec, libavformat, libavdevice, libavfilter, libswscale, libswresample).
Nothing wrong with that, countless video and video-related programs, most notably VLC -- use FFmpeg as their base software layer.
LibAv (https://github.com/libav/libav), a fork of FFmpeg, can also apparently be "swapped in" as the base layer, replacing FFmpeg if so desired.
FFmpeg/LibAv are written in C, primarily adhering to the C99 standard.
From there, building on top of that, we have libopenshot (https://github.com/OpenShot/libopenshot) which is a C++ "middle level" library generating/abstracting a higher-level API for video editing specifically, and containing bindings to C++, but perhaps more notably, additionally to Python and Ruby...
Then on top of that, we finally have OpenShot (more specifically 'openshot-qt': https://github.com/OpenShot/openshot-qt) which is written entirely in Python 3.x, which uses PyQt (which bind to Qt libraries which give the software its platform independence!).
And of course, there are some other libraries and repos for other things here: https://github.com/OpenShot, for example, libopenshot-audio for audio, etc.
Opinion: Let me start off by saying that I am NOT a Python guy! I'd rather program in Delphi/ObjectPascal, C, C++, x86 Assembler, Java, Lisp, Scheme, Racket, Clojure, Haskell, R, Odin, Zig, or, if someone put a gun to my head, JavaScript (without Typescript!) or Rust! (too large a compiler, too many imported dependencies in many libraries/crates -- the language itself I have nothing against!)
But, that being said (also, I'll say I've seen some truly great programs written in Rust, before the community tars and feathers me!), I have seen just how powerful a teaching tool for programming tool Python is!
This is not a simple Python "Hello World" program!
This program is powerful, quite powerful indeed!
It showcases what Python can do by coordinating and managing lower-level functionalities!
It's also an excellent program from the perspective of garnering GitHub community support (think about it, the barrier to "chip in" and offer help/assistance/bug fixes/functionality improvements is lower, way lower on a Python program than it is on say, a C++ program using all of the latest C++23 language features or on a LISP-derived language using many deep asymmetric recursive meta constructs...)
It's also a great example of a Python cross-platform program!
And I really like the way that the software is delivered in discrete layers, i.e., the C++ middle layer has its own dedicated GitHub repo (as opposed to being co-mingled with the Python higher level one), etc.
So, great job!
This is truly a Python exemplar program!
Some really good Software Engineering practices in this one!
The major design companies have this to supplant their theoretically now less attractive SaaS revenue, letting professionals automate most things through their creative suite products with LLMs doing a lot of reasoning about what to do and how to composite, but it all goes through cloud compute instances and they basically won’t add a local server to their products because they cant charge per credit. So that retains a bottleneck on uploading and file sizes and other things
If Openshot started competing in that regard it would be very forward looking. I wouldnt even say competitive yet because people dont really know about this use of AI and associate AI creativity with generative only, instead of just replicating the human processes for mass output faster
Not through mpv, but if all of the videos are the same resolution and codec you can use ffmpeg to concat them without needing to re-encode anything.
It could be worth making a little wrapper script for this, but the ffmpeg command itself isn't too crazy. You can Google for "ffmpeg concat multiple videos into a single video without re-encoding".
ffmpeg is super powerful, you can technically resize and alter videos into a consistent format and then encode a new video too.
or Github https://github.com/mean00/avidemux2/releases/tag/2.8.1
If you fly a platform that stores D-log M video and RAW images... there are very few FOSS options to share great looking content. =3
Funnily enough their not (fully) free and not open source competitor DaVinci Resolve doesn't have a cookie banner and doesn't set any cookies on your browser.
When AI was new, I definitely got fooled by "OpenAI" and thought it was an open source style AI company. Boy was I wrong there.
The straight abuse of language lately has become quite frustrating overall, but part of that gets political and I'll stray away from that to not get too off topic. When I see these words like "Open" used in the title so often, it just makes the word feel like it's tied to a new fad, and makes it harder for me to trust projects with those names.
I even remember having this problem personally when trying to improve designs of webpages at my workplace. We had many of our technical users still using the command line for their mail, and even for browsing some webpages. Their whole workflow was stuck in the command line and they've been doing it that way for 20+ years. Trying to change things to improve the experience for others was like pulling teeth. They would retort the classic "Why change it? It works the way it is, no need to change it". Which to a degree I can understand. Some websites out there really do change their UI's for completely silly reasons and sometimes even lose functionality because of it.
At least this is one positive thing coming from AI driven development. People can actually make some pretty decent UI's without having to know as much about good UI design. AI can try to utilize the "best practice" standards and make a UI that often looks much better than most devs could make. There are some downsides of course, such as the fact that almost every new website nowadays looks the same, since Claude seems to have one style it always goes with. But maybe that tradeoff is okay.
Imagine "smart cutting" a critically compromising part of a video (e.g. showing some personal info) only to later find out that the actual footage was still there, it just needed some timestamp shifting to unveil.