Pitivi – Free video editor with a beautiful and intuitive user interface
pitivi.org
pitivi.org
After a day of playing with the free version of Resolve in 2017 I gave BlackMagic some cash for a license & capture card for audio. The early versions lacked ALSA support.
Editing sessions can last 8 to 10 hours and I can't remember the last time it spite-crashed. Granted, this doesn't prevent me from mindlessly tapping Ctrl+S every few minutes.
Really hard to beat the free version. However, the studio version paid for itself quickly.
I see you've came to the same conclusion i did years ago. I look at it not as paying for software, but buying my time back at this point.
Linux "open source"/free professional software seems to lack the Je ne sais quoi needed to make it worthwhile. It works, but the software is in the "uncanny valley" so to speak compared to polished Mac/Windows paid professional software.
When you buy something, you are exchanging your money to obtain someone else's time. In this case, time that someone else spent to make sure a program works.
The F in FOSS stands for free, so nobody is under any obligation to spend their time so you don't spend yours.
Your conclusion generalizes to no-charge software, not to all FOSS. The "free" in FOSS stands for free software, meaning free as in freedom rather than free as in price.
If a program is free software [1] then a user of the program can read the source code, modify it, and distribute (including sell) unmodified and modified versions of the program/code. A user who lacks the program or the code isn't entitled to the freedoms but can get the software from someone else who has it.
Developers of free software can charge for it. One way of making money from free software is charging for access to the developer's server. Another way is charging for more expansive user support. (Alternatives to charging for the software itself include requesting donations and selling physical merchandise.)
You say developers of free-as-in-libre software can charge for them, but in practice any developer that tries to sell his free-as-in-libre software will be viciously laughed out of the room by everyone else.
The F in FOSS in practice stands both for free-as-in-libre and free-as-in-beer. And you don't get to talk about the quality of free beer.
Linux however demands me to do the computer, it doesn't enable me to do anything because I'm too busy doing computer bullshit. This isn't necessarily surprising, since the goal of Linux (more accurately FOSS) is to use FOSS and isn't concerned about what I need/want to do.
So no, most people (or at least myself) will not move from Windows to Linux. I use computers to do things, not preach the holy scriptures of FOSS.
Linux's interface is still archaic compared to windows 7 unfortunately.
I'm amused that I find myself preferring Windows 11 Explorer with its bloody worthless context menu and taskbar to anything FOSS has to offer.
GNOME? It's sincerely cancer. KDE? No software actually uses it. xfce/LXDE/et al.? Look, I'm not going to use a GUI that demands I go CLI some plain text files to change settings.
Getting video crashless seems hard, I had problems back in 2006. Have not tried again.
FOSS's primary problem is that the goal is the tool itself, rather than what is done with the tools: Commercial software exist to let the end user achieve something, which in turn generates profit for the commercial developers. FOSS exist to let the FOSS developers achieve their dreams, end users be damned.
A video editor crashing every hour is a problem for the end user, but if the FOSS developer doesn't care then that's that.
This is why Photoshop will continue to surpass GIMP, and why exceptional FOSS like Blender succeed where other FOSS do not.
This is why I really dislike the term "FOSS". It's both redundant and erroneously misleads people to thinking things like this. Free Software can absolutely be developed under contract, in which case yes, you are entitled to the developers time under the terms of the contract.
In a (healthy) company, you have PMs and executives who will tell the overly opinionated engineers to STFU and actually implement things that move the needle and solve problems users are facing.
This is also why most open source projects have terrible UI/UX and any designer who attempts to help and improve things finds themselves ignored, with no means to actually carry out any decision, and walk away soon after.
Except for those that discover the fork button. /s
In all seriousness I think that what you mean is that people rarely have the power to fork a project and drag all the users and development expertise over to their version. Especially if they are simply users of the system and not contributors. Users of commercial software can get companies to do stuff for them with their wallets.
This gives them the idea that their software is very powerful (and probably is) but this creates a cliff to the beginner and intermediate level users.
A lot of examples can be found in “About Face: On interaction design” by Alan Cooper.
Ah yes, remember how long it took before image thumbnails appeared in the GTK file picker? Finally in 2022, but that was after countless forks and patches submitted that implemented them.
https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbna...
The render-job UI is pretty shambolic (as is the treacherously inaccurate timeline on the same page), for example. And BMD refuses to add simple functions like "match timeline properties to clip." Instead they have a prompt that offers to match only frame rate, in contrast to just about every other media-editing app I can think of. Fixing that should be easy; and if it isn't, the codebase must be hopelessly inept.
The integrations of Fusion and Fairlight are buggy and exhibit nonsensical and misleading UI behavior. Resolve has a node view... oh wait, now it has two node views, which are not integrated with each other or with the editor. Fixing that should be priority one, which could create a truly excellent hybrid product that some of us have asking for for years.
And now they've ported the thing to the iPad. Really? I realize that from the outside we don't know how engineering people are allocated, but nonetheless it seems absurd to spend resources on that while the desktop product suffers from serious defects that have languished for a long time.
I think if you're working with DNxHD files you don't have to worry about this.
The only big annoyance for me was the lack of a h265 codec. I had some FFMPEG shell scripts for the final exports, but it was a pain and I eventually paid for the full version, which I am very happy with considering it is a lifetime license. Some premium features like speech transcription, where you can select a video segment by simply selecting dialog from a text box, were a big time saver too.
With my last editing experience being Adobe Premiere in the early 2000s, Resolve was simply amazing.
Or just maintain a personal throwaway email that's not tied to your real life identity
So go ahead and John Doe it.
NixOS:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/781e2a9797ecf0f146e814...
Arch:
https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=davin...
When my youngest was 10, she worked with OpenShot and Kdenlive, and settled on Kdenlive on Windows - probably edited 20 videos of hours of Roblox footage down to 2-3 minute videos, syncing characters activity with music, voice over, etc... It was pretty cool - it worked well for her.
But the least stable, unusable piece of (compositing/video) shi^H^H^Hsoftware had been Discreet's (now Autodesk) Combustion, which I got for free with a Quadro graphics card.
If the first sentence in the press release is
> Discreet's Combustion is a robust 3D compositing package
you now what to expect ;)
https://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2001/Volume-24-Issue-1-...
Not victim-blaming here, but it's unfortunate that you didn't experience the other end of the spectrum, the highest-end compositor there was: Shake.
Anyone building one of these now needs to build it from the start with the knowledge these lower level parts may crash, or maybe Gstreamer itself could provide some crash protection.
I had the same bad experience than you with Pitivi, Openshot and KDEnlive. Then I discovered shotcut and I was finally able to work. And it's FLOSS.
1. Kdenlive
2. Avidemux
3. Openshot
4. Shotcut
5. Olive Video Editor
6. PiTiVi
7. CinelerraWhat besides Resolve supports this?
I wonder if and how much Gstreamer is responsible for situation.
I’m honestly more apt to ffmpeg. MPV and Celluloid work always reliable. Firefox probably had also a reason to prefer ffmpeg. I will try another editor in future, maybe it is not Gstreamer but Pitiv.
And the Tour page has a screenshot of the application titled "Stunning Elegance", where it does a great job of mostly looking the same as any desktop app developed in the last 10 years -- full of shades of grey, plain, no menus.
As a cherry on top, it is described as "Easy to learn. Exciting to master", which is getting so far out there into marketing land that my spidey senses tell me to stay far away.
i get your criticism. but i see that very often. most projects just don't know how to present their apps in a good way. it seems like we are trying to describe apps in ways that we think non-tech people would expect, but we are failing.
However just by the look of the screenshot, I can see plenty of features in camtasia 6 that are not present in Pitivi.
No screenshots, gray on gray, no system requirements page, no easily to find instalation instructions. No mention of which GTk version it needs.
Even if it were justified, it would've still come across as very cocky and cringe-y.
Blender is easy to use if you want to start with basic editing.
A quick packaging for windows and Mac could let non technical folks wanting to edit video easily adopt something like this.
Maybe in the meantime a quick how-to install a virtual machine and edit within.
I don't know why. ffmpeg is rock-solid. Modern CPUs are good enough that you can basically handle 1080p without touching accelerators.
Multi-threading is not impossible to get right in C++. So why do they all crash?
Image/photo editors never crash (or so rarely), same for most modern audio editors / DAWs and the later can use an awful lot of memory too.
But using Davinci Resolve in an old cpu (as in 2012 cpu) it is a complete pain.
If you've got a faulty RAM chip, a memory-intensive use like video editing will reveal it. And it usually does so by crashing.
I think when one considers a foss video editor, they might look into advanced features they need, if any, on how the app looks/integrates with everything, and not the last on how sustaining is the development. The needed features and look are personal and are what they are, so let me comment on sustainability of the "competing" video editors:
- Shotcut's dev said a few years ago in an interview that he gets enough money out of the ads on the website. - Openshot's Jonathan, last I checked in the corona time on the website was also getting a few thousand USD per month, from donations. - KdenLive last I checked a few years ago had a nice active team(!). I'm sure if you manage to submit a proper crash report they'll fix it. :) - Olive's dev is very ambitious, good luck to him! - Blender's integrated video editor looks solid! - Pitivi's team shifted focus on GStreamer or away, but we always gathered ourselves to mentor each year 2-3 GSoC students. Most of the development for a good number of years has actually been done by GSoC students. A significant effort went into making their job easier, code reviews(!), merging, infra, maintenance. Two years in a row, groups of students from UNL Nebraska worked on awesome small features and enhancements. Behind the scenes, Igalia and other GStreamer contributors are doing heavy work on GStreamer. Thanks to all, you're awesome! :)
Now Pitivi.. like some of the others, has it's place. It's the only video editor based on GStreamer. GStreamer is here to stay, and so is Pitivi―at least until another video editor based on GStreamer and written in Rust (read "stable") pops up, you never know.
Pitivi is the only video editor built on GTK, we get quite some help from the community with the GitLab issue tracker and the website infra. We're not GNOME but yes we are close. We spent two individual GSoC internships to port Pitivi to GTK 4, but we're not there yet. Blame it on us. It'll get there at some point, but I don't think we'll do a third internship, so I think we'll most likely skip GSoC next year altogether.
"Beautiful" is not measurable, so if we say that "it's beautiful", it's not an absolute truth. You don't like it -> see "competition" above. Let me mention we did stay away from context menus. :)
"Marketing" will be needed when we want to do a(nother) fundraiser, but we're not there yet. The only marketing we might want to do is to developers and people who might be interested in joining and investing in the community. Maybe you have tips about that! Also regarding marketing, we don't have yet packages for Windows and Mac. I think all the others do.
"Stability" is lacking in video editors because none are written in Rust.
Cheers and have fun editing with your favorite video editor! I'll come back to check the replies next Monday.
I’ve doubts about this statement.
PS: Pitivi is implemented in Python.
I assume this is very dry sarcasm, because <points to entire history of digital video editing and NLEs>.
And yet, somehow, all the pro editors manage to be fairly stable despite being written in C++ (or maybe obj-c in the case of final cut pro and iMovie)
Maybe you should do some introspection as to why that is, instead of blaming the language used.
PS: blender's NLE is possibly the most stable of the open-source ones and it's written in C. Maybe that's a hint? Maybe the answer is good leadership and high quality contributors?
Sad to see that Pitivi won't get into GSoC'24 but I completely understand the concerns as well.
Have always advocated for Pitivi's development in my peer groups, and will continue to do so :)
The only thing I don't like is the lack of preview monitor so I can work with raw clips before bringing them into the timeline but for quick cuts, it's a great tool.
Most other editors that these n00bs revel about are just ffmpeg with sugar-coated interface. No factual added functionality.
"Never" heard about it. Now seriuosly, if they would have said ffmpeg, ok. But gstreamer ?