Linux becoming a professional multimedia platform

I'm actually surprised that Adobe never did this when Creative Cloud came out.

Agreed... it's quiet opinionated

Actual title: "Blackmagic Design Announces DaVinci Resolve 12.5 for Linux Now Available"

Ableton live was the last thing that made me keep a Windows install alongside Linux. I switched to bitwig and never looked back. Took a few weeks to become fully natural with it, but that probably has something to do with years of muscle memory from ableton live.

While I don't do it often, video editing is something that is still lacking in Linux.

I have tried a few options, but none of them feel quite right. There are always strange workflow patterns, or missing features that I think are crucial.

I didn't knew about this! I would need to research pro audio interface hardware manufacturers that support Linux

I upgraded to 2.0 specifically (and despite the new "12 months of updates" license) because they do Linux.

Reaper is good, but Bitwig is much easier to get into.

Also, if anyone doesn't know about Airwave [1] they should check it out for running their Windows VST instruments (or those from e.g. vst4free.com [2]).

What annoys me about music software, though, is the way the authors/companies have special offers which are time-bound. Free u-he VST instruments if bought within a two-week window? Eh? What about the people who already bought the software? Or did beta testing? Or... ?

[1] https://github.com/phantom-code/airwave/ [2] http://www.vst4free.com/free_vst.php?plugin=TAL-Elek7ro&id=6...

Lightworks. Pretty much the best video cutting software i ever used and its free

this is WAY more powerful than iMovie. It takes the training wheels off from video editing but is actually very easy to learn. A good resource if a udemy course for it. That was the training that, not just for this video editor but for video un general, stepped up my game!

DaVinci Resolve is mainly for colour grading and basic shuffling around of video and audio. It's also a very advanced (read difficult) piece of software and is very much not aimed at home movies.

I wouldn't recommend it as an iMovie alternative.

The free version is free as long as you have it. There's no registration or keys or anything. There is the chance that future versions won't be free though.

The main differences between the free and paid versions are mainly collaboration stuff like sharing things between systems and doing things remotely. There are a few other things like real time noise reduction and automatic 3D alignment but nothing a home user is likely to notice.

I think this is the way to go actually: start at the really high end. Who has Linux desktops? Google engineers and professional video color people. Maybe the Mazzaratti engineers will be allowed to play next.

I imagine it's much easier to maintain a working release for one distro and allow the package maintainers for other distros to package it how they need. Than it is to provide support for the endless amount of distros out there.

Proprietary software can't follow the "here's the source, let distributions package it or users build it for any platform they like" approach. They have to build it for target platforms, so they pick a few and target those.

Products with non-upstream kernel modules have a similar problem, but they additionally have to support a range of kernels, and it's easier to just say "we support RHEL and SLES" if they think that will suffice for their customers.

Both. Good support is expensive and rarely a "just". Adding a new supported platform means having to train your support techs in all the quirks that come out in using said platform, and those little things add up in a hurry. On the technical side, each distro has their own similar, but not quite the same, different set of patches against base software and build options which can potentially interact with your software, etc, all of which will need to have regression testing done against before release. Furthermore, software like RHEL itself is supported for a known duration of time, so developers can build their own release and support schedules and not have to worry about getting the rug pulled under them.

In the case of Steam they have SteamOS, which is Debian-based, and hardware products. But the client itself is agnostic and packaged in lots of distros.

Studio VFX has been done on Linux for the last decade or two, since SGI went belly up.

It seems like Linux is doing not too bad in the high end use of software. I mean, DaVinci is not a prosumer software. Lightworks seems to fall into that category and even thought I can remember the source I believe I read somewhere that Pixar used Linux for their render farms. Blender, even thought not as high end, is more at home in Linux than anywhere else...

DreamWorks Animation uses RHEL exclusively for production. That means all your favorite movies such as Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar, Shrek, How to Train Your Dragon were all made on Linux

Ninja edit to add high end software that runs on Linux that were used - Autodesk Maya, SideFX Houdini, Foundry {Mari,Nuke}, Pixologic ZBrush. This is in addition to the proprietary packages such as Premo (Animation) and Torch (Lighting)

In this case, Resolve has been on Linux since 2004 when it launched as a turnkey product using proprietary processing cards.

Before that, they used Linux workstations to replace SGI O2s for controlling their 2K color correction machines.