Hacker News Reader

Comment by zaphar | Hacker News Reader

This looks superficially like Blenders Node based compositing engine. Some of their demo videos used blender as part of the pipeline. I wonder what a comparison with Blender would look like. Does it offer any value if you are already use Blender?

Either way more Open Source competition in this space is a good thing. For a long time Blender was the only Video Editing software out there with any quality.

View on HN

Blender's node system can do compositing and basic video editing. Another free software graph based/dataflow system that can be used as a basis for such video editing and fx is GIMPs new engine GEGL; this goat filled video presented at this years libre graphics meeting was edited and composited using software based on that stack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJJPgLGrSgc

Blender's compositor is good enough for lots of things, but it's a bit limited. Natron has a larger range of node types and also allows you to run OpenFx plugins, of which there are many (including both free ones and expensive professional ones).

Blender is one of many node-based compositors. They became a thing in the late 90's. Everyone is just copying what nreal, Discreet, and Avid did.

This is a compositing package, much different from blender.

If you believe that blender is a "quality video editor" please try at least kdenlive to understand what a decent video editor looks like. The video editing feature set in blender is a nice addon for hardcore Blender users but totally inaccessible for anybody else and missing a lot of must-have features. But it is nice, however, to see that they are working on it, maybe in a few years it will be great.

I have in fact tried kdenlive in the past and found it be (for my needs which are admittedly small) to be subpar compared to Blender. Addtionally, so as far as I know it's only available on Linux while both Blender and Natron appear to be available on multiple platforms which is an important feature to me.

I'm not a professional video editor of course and everyone looks at this stuff with different slightly desires. Blender had NLE before kdenlive even existed, if I recall correctly. My comment was in reference to that period of time. It's nice to see competitors like kdenlive and natron have appeared.

What must-have features are missing? Last I checked it did basic video editing really well and it's compositing engine is really quite nice. It's not Adobe Premiere but for most use cases I've found it to be the most complete and featureful editor out there that is both multiplatform and Open Source.

I'm with you on the Blender VSE vs Kdenlive question fwiw. First tried Kdenlive years ago and couldn't get sound to sync, so gave up. Tried again a few months ago, can't remember what the exact problem was but found it to be wanting compared to Blender.

I will admit that Blender has an unusual UI that will deter a lot of people.

was a few months ago when you tried kdenlive before or after their recent major overhaul? Basically, did you use the older version that was the traditional sequential-numbers versioning or the newer date-based versioning? (note that lots of progress has happened in even just the last few months)

Dunno to be honest. I've become a bit cynical because for the last decade or so people have claimed that there are good FOSS editors, then when you try and use them they fall apart at the first opportunity. Blender's the only NLE I've found that's not comically flaky. It's possible Kdenlive really has improved though.

Same here, for quite a long time there were a number of projects claiming to do video editing. (Anyone remember Jahshaka?) Blender was literally the only thing out there that delivered for years. This is one of the first projects I've seen that looked like it also delivered.

Like I said before it's good to see some actual competition in this space.

I used kdenlive 2 months ago. Worked very nice and was very useable (for someone without much video knowhow). There were some occasional crashes but thanks to autosaving this was not a big issue - but of course crashes should be fixed)

How many NLE software packages have you used?

I find it interesting that it seems that for a some people, Blender is their first experience with a node-based editor. They've been around for years. While I haven't used Nuke (or Shake), I was very good with Houdini for CG which is all based around nodes. It does include some basic compositing (or at least it did the last time I used it).

I tried maybe a dozen FOSS NLEs before finding Blender. Many, many years ago I used Premier.

The other big node-based thing is audio synthesis / effects, for example Pure Data. As far as I know these are the only areas where dataflow programming has really taken off.

LabView is node-based. It's extremely popular (and quite old).

http://www.ni.com/labview/

Matlab's Simulink is also node-based (probably because of LabView). It's also widely used.

http://www.mathworks.com/products/simulink/

Yeah, well, I'm not going to feed the cynicism by claiming that the FLO editors are on par with proprietary ones. I will say that Kdenlive is orders of magnitude more powerful and usable than whatever there was several years ago, and Openshot 2 looks to be a massive improvement (complete rewrite) over Openshot 1

Are you aware that kdenlive has been totally redone for qt5 / KDE5 and has had lots of continued work lately?

Overall Blender, Kdenlive, Natron, and perhaps the new Openshot 2 are the current best FLO options for video with some stuff like Pitivi something to keep a watch on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com