Olive: A free non-linear video editor | Hacker News Reader

Olive: A free non-linear video editor

github.com

17 pointsc487bd629 comments

for comparison, some discussion when it was announced(?) 5 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18838227

What does it make "professional"? I would expect zero crashes from that, as compared to any other "non-professional" open-source video editor I used so far.

Just FYI: ~3 months ago I went through reviewing a lot of the Linux available NLE video editors, and in the end I picked: Installing Windows on a spare drive and running Davinci Resolve. It is really next level, free, and everything else I looked at paled in comparison. Also there is a ton of educational content for Resolve on Youtube, which most of the others couldn't even come close to. I spent in total probably 5 hours trying to get it to work under Linux with no luck.

My runner-up was Lightworks, not open source but worked great on Linux. But it's $25/month if you want to export any high res content (I'm working in 4K from a cheap action cam).

I really wanted Olive to work, but it's pretty basic. I did a simple video with it as a trial and it worked ok. If I just needed to take a few clips and cut them together with transitions and fade in/out, that'd be a great choice.

But I want to publish things to Youtube and people have really taken it to the next level there. So I'm often doing multicam cuts and stabilizing and adding titles and things. Davinci is nice because it can do the simple stuff, but you won't outgrow it.

Resolve 16 has a new editing mode that focuses on quickly cutting together video and it looks pretty nice. I haven't used it yet though.

Resolve 16 beta is still a little unstable. I just re-installed 15 last night to edit a school video for my son. Also, I was having performance problems until I switched my footage to ProRes format, H.264 didn't really work. Also there are settings to use quarter res and smart caching and "SQ" playback that help performance on my 7 year old box (with modern video card).

And until it's ready, don't forget Blender makes a very powerful video editor.

Has anyone here used it for video editing? I had initially thought about using Blender because it's been around a long time and seems to be pretty popular and serious. But what I've heard about it was always in reference to 3D capabilities so it wasn't clear to me that it was the right choice if I was only doing video editing tasks.

I mean, I've seen Captain Disillusion's "Worlds Greatest Blenderer" presentation, and I love his work which seems to be largely done in Blender. But he does a ton of 3D stuff, and he's way, way better than I'll ever be. I'm pretty sure he works in the industry. If you haven't seen his stuff on Youtube, it's one of my and my kids favorite channels and he's been doing it for a decade.

I've been using KDenLive and it's quite competent for what it is.

I’m curious, why are these tools called “nonlinear“?

Linear is videotape or film, as in you don't have the ability to access any part of the content; you have to move through the content to find what you're looking for.

Non-linear is digital, so you can hit any part of it you want. "Random access" might be a better term, but that's the legacy.

This is because it allows editors to move clips around irrespective of time order (non-linear time), in contrast with linear editing [1] where you build an edit by assembling the master in sequential order (ie, by recording from one reel/tape to another).

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

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