Free software video editing tools

This page is to hammer out the ideas, problems, solutions for free software video editors

Many users are seduced into using proprietary software for video editing because they are unable to achieve the effects they want using the current state of the art in free software video editing and production software. More and more everyday computer users are becoming amateur videographers, and we need to make sure that their operating systems come complete with free software to meet their needs.

Ways to help. There are a number of quality, free software video editing programs, such as Cinelerra, AVIDemux, Kdenlive, LiVES, Lumiera, as well as PiTiVi, the Open Movie Editor and Blender's Video Sequence Editor (VSE). Along the way, the easiest way to help is to use these editors and to encourage others to do the same. You can help these projects directly by submitting bug reports, adding features, improving usability, and creating tutorials, guides, and documentation.

Please join us, and improve this page, by adding your ideas and suggestions for improving the state of free software video editing tools.

It would be helpful to produce an in-depth list of software currently available in this space, as has been done on the priority project page for Donor and Contact Management systems.

Sources of Video for Free Software Video Editing projects

If you need some some stock footage with which to experiment, please feel free to visit the Internet Archive's Digital Tipping Point Video Collection (the IA DTP VC for short). The IA DTP VC contains interviews of many of the most prominent contributors to the Free Software movement. The purpose of the IA DTP VC is to support the production of a feature-length documentary about Free Software, called the Digital Tipping Point; and to provide casual viewers with video with which to learn a bit about the Free Software movement; and to provide video editors with remixable video files that they can use to create entertaining video shorts about Free Software. All of the footage on the IA DTP VC is released under licenses which encourage the re-use of the video. The license for each video is plainly stated on each page.

Existing Projects

Blender

Although primarily a 3d modeling/animating/rendering system, Blender also contains a powerful video editor (the "sequence editor") that is also scriptable via python. It contains most of the standard transitional effects and etc expected of video editors and many more features, including compositing nodes which may be used to enhance video / do greenscreening / many other things.

Though very powerful, Blender has a few caveats as a video editor:

• It is very difficult to pick up unless you are already familiar with Blender's user interface concepts. Although these user interface concepts are consistent throughout the application, they generally do not resemble user interface ideas found in other applications. This may lead to a high learning curve.
• It does not presently support rendering directly to OGG Theora, so you must use a tool such as ffmpeg2theora to complete such a process. This could likely be added without much difficulty, and importing videos with theora is already supported.

More information:

• Start of blender's wiki documentation on the sequencer/video editor
• Video editing with Blender tutorial screencast part one
• Video editing with Blender tutorial screencast part two

Others

http://OpenShotVideo.com >>"I have a simple mission: To create an open-source, non-linear video editor for Linux. Many have tried and fallen before me, but for some reason I feel compelled to try myself. I am documenting my journey in this blog for all to read. It will be a dangerous journey, and I might not make it back alive. Hold on tight, and enjoy the ride! By the way, I'm calling this project OpenShot Video Editor!"

http://OpenMovieEditor.org >>Open Movie Editor is a free and open source video editing program, designed for basic movie making capabilities. It aims to be powerful enough for the amateur movie artist, yet easy to use.

http://DIVFIXPP.sf.net >>DivFix++ is yours AVI video repair and preview software. It designed for repair and preview files which are on download from ed2k(emule), torrent, gnutella, ftp. web or any other source on the internet. It can repair AVI and DivX files (for now.)

http://MLTFramework.org >>MLT is an open source multimedia framework, designed and developed for television broadcasting. It provides a toolkit for broadcasters, video editors, media players, transcoders, web streamers and many more types of applications. The functionality of the system is provided via an assortment of ready to use tools, XML authoring components, and an extensible plug-in based API.

http://Cinefx.org >>Cinefx is a suite of open source, cross platform media playback, encoding, visual effects and editing digital content creation tools.

http://PiTiVi.org >>PiTiVi is an open source video editor, written in Python and based on GStreamer and GTK+.

http://Kdenlive.org >>Kdenlive is an intuitive and powerful multi-track video editor, including most recent video technologies. Our software is completely free, in all sences of the expression, as defined by the GNU foundation. Using Kdenlive is investing in a community driven project, which aims to establish relationships between people in order to built the best video tools.

http://Cinelerra.org >>Cinelerra is the most advanced non-linear video editor and compositor for Linux. It is developed by Adam Williams (formerly known as Jack Crossfire) at Heroine Virtual Ltd..

http://JAHSHAKA.org >>POWERING THE NEXT HOLLYWOOD

http://LVEMPEG.sf.net >>Linux Video Editor (lve)

http://LiVES.sf.net >>LiVES is a Video Editing System

http://KinoDV.org >>Video Editor (dead project, as stated on http://kinodv.org/ as 05.08.2013)