Olive, a new non-linear video editor | Hacker News Reader

Olive, a new non-linear video editor

libregraphicsworld.org

195 pointsapp4soft77 comments

> Olive is geared towards users who rely on shortcuts: all editing tools and common operations have them, and you can configure your own shortcuts (UI for that could do with more work though).

I wish all programs that rely heavily in shortcuts also had a search bar for users still not proficient with the program. The way Code Editors have been doing in the last years. Searching with a few keywords is much better than having to look through tons of menus for new users.

> I wish all programs that rely heavily in shortcuts also had a search bar for users still not proficient with the program.

Maybe, this feature request[0] would be implemented very soon ;-)

UPD: Added few mockups into description of feature request![0]

P.S.: Issue with saving customized shortcuts in Olive just fixed![1]

[0] https://github.com/olive-editor/olive/issues/259

[1] https://github.com/olive-editor/olive/issues/250

Issue 250 took 13 hours to be fixed. That's pretty great turnaround!

> Issue 250 took 13 hours to be fixed. That's pretty great turnaround!

Haha, Issue 259 just fixed![0] ;)

And it took only 1 (one!) hour to be fixed!!! :P

@krispbyte, GET latest nightly build of Olive with "search shortcuts" feature while it hot![1]

[0] https://github.com/olive-editor/olive/commit/d46252b823fb40e...

[1] https://github.com/olive-editor/olive/releases/tag/continuou...

That's an amazing turnaround.

And here is screenshot[0] of Olive with "Search for action or shortcut" feature in action!

[0] https://i.imgur.com/2ALbMl9.png

That's useful, but not what the guy above had in mind :)

You are looking for Blender's or GIMP's search and run command thing. E.g. https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/interface/controls...

Well, could you write another one feature request to Olive issues tracker?

UPD: I just add such feature request[0], think it would be solved very soon, as such pop-up should be very similar to current "Keyboard" tab of "Preferences" dialog ;)

[0] https://github.com/olive-editor/olive/issues/265

You already did that :)

Finally, Issue 265 fixed & "Action Search" pop-up menu added into Olive![0]

@krispbyte, GET latest nightly build[1] while it hot! ;-)

[0] https://github.com/olive-editor/olive/commit/952c67972b9e19f...

[1] https://github.com/olive-editor/olive/releases/tag/continuou...

And you already wrote[0] fresh review on new features in Olive added this week ;)

[0] http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/winter-break-recap-...

It should be a feature of the OS/desktop environment! MacOS has this feature (in the Help menu), and I've seen proposals to add it to GNOME. I thought KDE was also going to add it via krunner, but I haven't seen it yet.

macOS users can install CheatSheet, which displays all the menu keyboard shortcuts associated with an app when you hold down the ⌘ key. It isn't a foolproof solution though because it only displays shortcuts that are associated with a specific menu item, but it's still a super handy tool, and it's free.

https://www.mediaatelier.com/CheatSheet/

> The way Code Editors have been doing in the last years.

Or like Emacs's M-x, which is much older than the editors you probably have in mind.

OpenShot [1] is another free (also GPLv3 as Olive) video editor for Windows/Linux/Max using the portable AppImage format [2] (AppImage lets you download a single binary and launch the software directly, no install process or super user privileges needed).

It uses ffmpeg behind the scenes.

It seems to have suffered from stability issues in the past (the wikipedia article mentions lots of negative reviews) but seem pretty stable now, so you might want to give it a ... shot.

It has been very useful for its quick install process, intuitive interface and reliability: haven't had a single crash in a very long time, with more than 200 videos on our channel [3] (albeit none required anything fancy editing-wise).

OpenShot's goal might not appear to be as grandiose as Olive's so I would love if there was a comparison of both out there.

Looks like we're off trying Olive to compare. Thanks and good luck to the Olive team.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenShot

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppImage

[3] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgsdHWWQBMHP1plylPrrgpA

There continue to be many stability issues in the 1.4.3 branch of OpenShot that Debian ships. Version 2.4.3 is not available from the Debian Stable repos but is much more stable. You might want to use the AppImage to get the most recent version if you’re using Debian.

This is a very important point that is probably the source of confusion, and people quickly ditching OpenShot because of installing it through apt.

This is exactly what happened to me: started using it from the distro and experienced crashes. Then downloaded the latest AppImage and never had a problem since.

Trying to help break the vicious circle here: Wikipedia mentions stability issues, Debian ships with a crash-happy old version that doesn't do it any favor, but latest AppImage seems stable.

Did you read the article? It mentions openshot, and compares the two a bit.

It only mentions it at the beginning (not even linking to it), I don't see where the comparison is, did I miss something?

I just confirmed my real-world experience that Openshot is good enough for many quick uses (more than what the Wikipedia article left me to think with the paragraph about stability issues when I first discovered it).

I wonder what you understood as a comparison. All I wrote there is that the two applications are for entirely different demographics.

I have just completed a first project with OpenShot. It worked perfectly fine initially, but as the movie became more complex, everything took much longer. Saving took several seconds, sometimes freezing everything for several minutes. Dragging multiple clips in the timeline would freeze the editor for several seconds. It crashed multiple times. Just to be clear, this was from having about 30 original clips, but cut multiple times (each probably at least 10 times), so over 300 individual clips in the timeline. The bottleneck seems to be related to parsing of the JSON, which is the format in which the data is encoded internally. The final file was about 1.1MB of JSON. I've also encountered strange artifacts when adding a new layer at the bottom of the screen - I couldn't drag clips onto it, they were placed onto another layer instead.

This is on a laptop with an i7 and 12 GB of RAM.

Compared to my experience of using Premiere Pro several years ago on Windows, with just 4GBs of RAM, OpenShot has a long way to go even for basic editing.

But, having said that (and considering that Premier had years of paid development), it's a good tool and it's great that some developers are trying to built video editing tools for Linux. Things are slowly improving.

> This is on a laptop with an i7 and 12 GB of RAM.

> Compared to my experience of using Premiere Pro several years ago on Windows, with just 4GBs of RAM, OpenShot has a long way to go even for basic editing.

Can you try Olive and compare it with all above?

As for me, I can fully use Olive under Linux (Debian 9.x) on my 10-year-old notebook with just 2GBs of RAM ;)

I've tried OpenShot, Kdenlive, and Shotcut (not to be confused with OpenShot), and I have to say Shotcut is my favorite.

Could you please review Shotcut a bit further?

I haven't tried it but have had success with OpenShot. I don't remember why I picked it over Shotcut, but it did what I needed and never crashed; just was slightly lacking in features, like reorganizing the timeline - I think I couldn't multi-select components.

I have recently settled on Shotcut as well. It's certainly not as powerful as the others, but it doesn't have the bugs they have either. So far all my renders have come out as expected as well, which is more than I can say for Kdenlive.

Olive also is cross-platform app (as use Qt5) for Linux/macOS/Windows/etc.

Olive distributed for Linux as AppImage too[0] ;-)

> OpenShot is another free (also GPLv3 as Olive) video editor for Windows/Linux/Max using the portable AppImage format

FTR, AppImage is portable package only for Linux, in same way as DMG is portable package for macOS, or EXE is portable package for Windows.

[0] https://github.com/olive-editor/olive/releases/tag/continuou...

Thanks for your hard work and the clarifications.

Indeed from a 10,000ft view the projects share some good stuff.

As @prokoudine pointed out in his other article [1] (linked at the top of this article), Jonathan Thomas from Openshot will be "100% full time working on OpenShot" in 2019, which is exciting with now both Olive and OpenShot working on making great video editing software.

What are your opinions comparing Olive to OpenShot, maybe more in broader terms (history/goals/manpower/roadmap/pro features coming up/...) instead of current feature comparison, since you guys appear to move very fast (but I also expect OpenShot to do some great stuff too in 2019). You must have surveyed the field before starting and have wonderful insights about the two (also @pedrokost comments regarding problems in OpenShot for bigger projects worries me, and Olive seem to beat Openshot there) and seen some shortcomings to decide to make your own.

Maybe @prokoudine will produce another interesting article about that?

[1] http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/the-quest-for-susta...

@app4soft is not the Olive developer (nor am I :))

Shotcut development is self-funded since 2018, so that makes three projects.

I don't see myself seriously comparing OpenShot to Olive. They are vastly different, in my opinion. The way I see it, Olive is being streamlined for prosumer/pro work. Hence all the editing tools, advanced keyframes UI, graph editor etc. — things I don't expect OpenShot to have.

> Thanks for your hard work and the clarifications.

Please, tell all thanks to @OliveTeam (Olive devs) via Twitter[0] and Patreon[1] ;)

I'm NOT developer of Olive; I'm just Olive user & tester.

[0] https://twitter.com/oliveteam

[1] https://www.patreon.com/olivevideoeditor

> The program doesn't crash all the time. In fact, I've only seen 4 or 5 crashes for overall ca. 8 hours of use.

That's pretty terrible and matches my experience with other open source video editors. Cinelerra was especially bad. Why is it so hard to write a video editor that doesn't crash?

I’ll guess that they crash a lot because they need to allocate a lot of memory and the size of the files they deal with often exceeds the machine’s free RAM. Blender seems to have the whole “stability” thing down at this point, though, probably because its primary use is as a 3D modeling and rendering application and so the video editor can take advantage of its good memory allocation system.

Please, read with magnifying glass:

> The program does _NOT_ crash all the time.

Also, I can run and normally use Olive on my 10-year-old notebook[0], where Blender VSE/OpenShot/Shotcut/Kdenlive could NOT work properly!

[0] https://twitter.com/app4soft/status/1080489940138512385

4-5 crashes over 8 hours is way too many crashes.

Test latest nightly build of Olive![0]

Four days ago it crashed for me on some tasks, BUT after yesterday update I try reproduce same steps — and Olive not crashed anymore!

It's development activity is really high; just check their commits[1] and bug-tracker[2] history.

[0] https://github.com/olive-editor/olive/releases/tag/continuou...

[1] https://github.com/olive-editor/olive/commits/master

[2] https://github.com/olive-editor/olive/issues

If your memory management system is that much worse than trivially memory-mapping the source files, you need to disable it.

Newer versions of kdenlive seem to do much better there.

> That's pretty terrible

For software that's barely been in development at all? That's pretty amazing.

Also, this article is almost a month old. The application is a lot more stable now. And more featureful.

Need write fresh Olive reviews daily, because in case of it's development it's yesterday review could be very outdated just in few hours :)

Weekly should do.

Software doesn't start out crashing lots and gradually get more stable as it is developed. At least it shouldn't and that is a sign of bad work.

I'm not saying it is easy to write software that never crashes (in C++), but it is easy to write software that doesn't crash 5 times per day.

> Software doesn't start out crashing lots and gradually get more stable as it is developed.

It does, all the time.

> At least it shouldn't and that is a sign of bad work.

Maybe. We'll see.

@probonopd wrote:[0]

> Olive is a professional open-source video editor in the making. And they are publishing continuous builds in #AppImage format for #Linux which makes it trivially easy to follow @oliveteam[1] development. Pro tip: Use AppImageUpdate for binary delta updates[2]

[0] https://twitter.com/probonopd/status/1079154249253179392

[1] https://twitter.com/oliveteam

[2] https://github.com/olive-editor/olive/releases/tag/continuou...

@app4soft, humbly asking for an "executive summary" tweet (maybe pinned on @OliveTeam?) introducing the project to people who have never heard of it to make it easy to retweet with some essential "selling" points (cross platform, open source, free, financially backed on Patreon, very active, ...)

Of course! I will tweet few "executive summary" during this week via @app4soft and will ask @OliveTeam pin some of them ;)

I still use Blender for everything, including non-linear Video editing.

And apparently the Video Sequence Editor is being worked on again, after a couple of years of neglect.

Same.. it's quite great.

Yep, VSE finally got a maintainer after many years of having none. Personally, I'm really looking forward to Richard's contribution.

is there a good tutorial on how to get started with video editing in blender?

i managed to use blender to edit some render sequences others made that i added to my video using pitivi, which is frankly the only video editor that i could get to work reliably (compared to kdenlive, openshot and cinelerra).

i'd love to use blender for everything to cut down on learning multiple tools and deal with transition issues but i couldn't figure out how to edit the whole video in it.

Something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zcj4onvP06w (suggests using an add-on for Blender) or the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RViX4Tn_tGs&list=PLH3QvbpQe8... series maybe?

thanks, i'll check those out...

I don't see any practical reason not to use Davinci Resolve, which is free (as in beer) and miles ahead of the open source editors. I used to be quite fond of Kdenlive but having used Resolve for a couple of months there's no way I'm going back.

You could say... a working monetization strategy does wonders for products, even free ones. Too bad so many Linux OSS developers are fundamentally against that.

Why do you say that OSS developers are against that?

Personally, I am all in favor of any monetization scheme that doesn't infringe on the four freedoms described by the FSF: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

The downvotes say it for me.

The people who read Reddit and Hacker News don't even begin to represent the Open Source community.

What evidence do you have to support that claim?

Frankly, I think that the burden of proof is on anyone who claims that online discussion boards are a snapshot of the FOSS community.

That said, anecdotally, very few of the FOSS developers I've worked with are active Redditors or HNers or whatever.

There are probably no practical reasons, but I avoid proprietary software whenever possible, which nowadays is always, except for a couple of phone apps.

+1. I haven't seen a single free video editor that is actually professional grade like Davinci Resolve is. Openshot and Olive/Kdenlive may be great at replacing iMovie and Windows Movie Maker, but there's a level of featurefulness that is a requirement for serious productions that none of those FOSS solutions seem to have.

I can't wait for the day in which I can be fully satisfied with an open-source video editor, but until then I'll keep using the solutions that actually do the things I need them to.

> Olive/Kdenlive may be great at replacing iMovie and Windows Movie Maker

Olive / Kdenlive and iMovie / Windows Movie Maker are vastly different types of video editors.

It's like comparing a full-featured DAW against Audacity.

I've used a few open source video editors and the only one that was stable enough was Kdenlive. Since then I switched to the DaVinci Resolve and am super happy with it, even bought the paid version USB dongle. Funny that Resolve is also not stable on computers that aren't beefy, had to upgrade the PC for it to handle 4k smoothly. It's refreshing that you can de-noise audio, fine-tune video stabilization, color correct and add nice effects and transitions all in one app. I've got a ton of crispy artisan 4k home video now :-)

I would love to try Resolve but got stuck on installation. They've never packaged it for any distro I can find, and their self-made installer seems to only work on RedHat. Am I missing something? How did you get it installed?

Sadly can't help since I'm using Windows at home, didn't have any installation issues. Only gotcha so far is that one has to download a separate binary for the paid version of the app, there's no "activation" in the free version.

I'm fairly certain the download offered on Blackmagic's website is just a JAR file that you can run in your preferred JVM.

It's also in the AUR, if you use Arch.

I also use kdenlive quite extensively and while I get a crash here and there, KDE asks me to restart the app and it then loads the file with the last edits. I don't think I've ever lost edits.

I've done about 25 hours of 4k so far and it's actually not that bad (i7 4770k/16gb ram/ssd).

I don't do much with either, but I've been trying to edit a 3+hr video for a long time and Kdenlive does seem to autosave in ways (or frequency) that OpenShot lacked when I tried it. OS crashed more and I would have to start over more.

It always pains me when people write about software without mentioning what platform it runs on. Even after clicking on the project page link in the article, you have to go to the downloads to find this information. As it turns out it's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, so this is a little less objectionable than other instances of this problem where I read about something only to find it's only available on a single platform.

Fair enough. Updated the beginning of the article.

It was buried at the end of the article, but this is the creator’s Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/olivevideoeditor

I’d love to see Patreon grow as a viable way to fund open source projects.

I admit I still use the abandoned Premiere 2 from Adobe. It's a free download and it works, perfect for home projects (even if it's technically piracy)

> Proxies. Olive doesn't do that yet.

In the age of UHD resolutions and up this should probably be on the list of immediate priorities. I could not work without the proxy feature of Premiere.

Likewise. I immediately cringed at the idea of usability for 4K or even 1080p video without proxies.

On smaller projects (think 5 minutes of final video), Olive works pretty sensibly.

The article, however, goes on to say "Matt says he's in the middle of designing proxy support at the moment" __right after that__.

Can someone explain what a proxy is in this context and what it is used for and why it would be necessary? Can video editing software truly not be written to natively process video data itself?

From my understanding, proxying is the ability to work with lower-resolution video -- so it's faster to edit -- but still be frame-accurate to the original, so the output matches what you've been editing.

I've previously used Pitivi, found it too unstable for continued use. I think next time I need to do some video editing, I'll probably try out Blender.

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