Newsgroup: it.media.video.produzione
Titolo: Articolo che fa il punto sull'OpenSource VideoEditing

Segnalo con piacere questo articolo:
http://www.linux.com/feature/131342
Dove si analizza con completezza e precisione, lo status attuale e 
quello che presumibilmente arrivera' nei prossimi anni, con le gioie e, 
soprattutto, i dolori nel panorama dei software per il videoediting e 
compositing OpenSource.
Per chi vuole capire quali software provare su Linux, quale sia la 
situazione attuale, o quali siano i software piu' promettenti in 
prospettiva, decisamente e' un'ottima lettura, la consiglio caldamente.
Di seguito la copio/incollo tutto l'articolo:
" Open source video editing: what we have now and what we need
By Rui Lopes on April 10, 2008 (9:00:00 PM)
Watching the evolution of open source tools for video editing and 
manipulation over the last 10 years has been less than a thrilling 
experience. But are things about to change for the better in the near 
future? Can even the people most disenchanted with the current state of 
affairs feel tempted to regain a spark of hope?
The problem
The everyday user of GNU/Linux (or any of the other Unix-derived 
operating systems out there) can presently watch, listen to, and even 
produce rudimentary media content quite comfortably, but open source has 
not kept up with proprietary software vendors when it comes to the 
development of professional and semi-professional video editing tools.
I've always maintained that one of the great strengths of Linux is the 
ability to create distributions that are tailored for specific areas of 
professional activity. But, while there are some good distros around 
that appeal specifically to the video and audio crowd (like dyne:bolic 
and Ubuntu Studio), their number is small, and some of them have 
stagnated or even completely disappeared over the years.
One of the roots of this problem is that there is currently no 
professional level non-linear video editor for Linux. Adding to this, 
almost all of the video editors currently available have development 
rates that are alarmingly slow. Let's take a look at the best choices we 
have right now:
The editors, and what to expect of them
There are video editors that I could never compile, or whose latest 
release is more than five years old. Among them are: Vivia, ZS4, and 
Scilab Aurora. I won't look into them. Avidemux can perform basic 
editing operations, but that's not its main function.
Let's start with the most basic video editors. First on the list is 
Kino. Kino is a very simple tool, but is the most stable and robust of 
all the Linux-based video editors I have tested. It has never crashed on 
me. For the casual user, Kino may be the only place they need to look to 
satisfy their editing needs. It allows capture from a camcorder, basic 
editing, adding transitions and effects, and exporting to other formats. 
Unfortunately, it's too limited for experienced video editors. It lacks 
essential features such as multiple video and audio tracks, advanced 
titling, and compositing. These will probably not be added in the 
future, as Kino seems to have a clear idea of where it belongs, and is 
sticking to its niche. I currently use Kino to capture raw footage, and 
often for exporting video to various formats -- after I edit my video 
with another program.
Moving beyond Kino, we have editors that support multiple video and 
audio itracks, and seem to have some hope of gaining additional utility 
(although not much). First is Kdenlive, which seems to be a promising 
project. Or rather, it seemed. The truth is, it's being developed too 
slowly, and it's still in a stage where it crashes too frequently on too 
many systems. Then we have Pitivi, which is still too young to be 
correctly assessed, but which will certainly occupy the same niche as 
Kino and Kdenlive, making it almost non-relevant for video professionals.
I've used Open Movie Editor enough times to be able to say it's a solid 
application with a nice set of features. These two positive points are 
enough to make me keep an eye on its development. Then we have LiVES, 
which shares these positive traits as well, and seems to be updated very 
regularly as of late, even trying to make the life of developers easier 
with a plugin builder bundled. Both of them seem to be good bets for the 
more advanced hobbyist at the present, and perhaps for the video 
professional in the future (if they can add compositing and a broader 
range of plugins and effects to their feature list).
MainActor is the only commercial application on this list. It is no 
longer available. It was no Avid Xpress or Final Cut, but its mere 
existence was encouraging. There is currently a petition aimed at the 
company that developed MainActor asking them to release the code (or 
parts of it) to the public.
Jahshaka is one of the most hyped pieces of open source software I've 
encountered. The vision of the developers was (and is) an application 
designed from scratch to be an editing and compositing powerhouse. The 
hype promoted on their website was so effective that for many years I 
(and many others) eagerly awaited a stable release with all the 
industry-standard features that I'd been promised. At some point, 
Jahshaka even had corporate sponsors, including Nvidia. But that turned 
into a mess which would take too much space to present here. The good 
news is that, on January of this year, according to the developers, 
Jahshaka was "liberated from its evil benefactors," which means that 
they can now resume their original path. And I have to admit: I know I 
shouldn't, but I still have great expectations for Jahshaka.
I use Cinelerra as my main application for video editing and 
compositing. It is professional and capable in some areas, and barely at 
alpha stage in others. First released by an anonymous entity/person 
called Heroine Virtual, for years it remained a paradox: it was the most 
powerful FOSS video editor and compositor available, but was also 
notoriously unstable, had a hideous interface, and its development pace 
was glacial. A community version of Cinelerra appeared later, which was 
basically a patched and bug-fixed version of the original Cinelerra, 
done by other developers (with the consent of Heroine Virtual). I'm 
using the latest community version of Cinelerra, and I can say it's now 
stable enough for almost all production purposes.
Cinelerra's learning curve may be a little steep for beginners, but it's 
worth it (and the community provides good documentation). It has some 
features that you can only otherwise find in commercial applications, 
including video and audio multitracking, some decent bundled effects 
(among them LADSPA audio plugins), a good compositor, three-point 
editing, and motion tracking. Cinelerra also supports renderfarming 
natively, which puts it on a class of its own. With Cinelerra it's dead 
easy to set up a render farm with five or six nodes, and watch your 
render times take a significant decrease.
Complaints include: lack of more pleasant themes, lack of advanced 
titling, lack of more video effects (and poor documentation for the ones 
included by default), and better capture and render functionality.
Finally, we come to Blender. Outside of pure video editing applications, 
I would like to point it out as an example to follow. It is 
feature-rich, powerful, has lots of manpower working on it, and 
tutorials and videos about it abound on the Internet. And, surprisingly, 
it allows quite reliable video editing and compositing. However, as good 
an all-rounder Blender may be, we still need -- and I cannot stress this 
enough -- good standalone non-linear video editors.
A look ahead
To say this to a video professional would have seemed like a bad joke 
ten years ago, but Linux has turned into a good platform for multimedia 
creation and manipulation. What's lacking is the tools. We need more 
powerful, more feature-rich tools. Even Hollywood seems to be using 
Linux these days (and not just for rendering tasks), but the studios use 
their own in-house applications. I'm not the only video professional 
using FOSS who is disgruntled with the state of things.
Let's face it: most video professionals who use Linux in conjunction 
with FOSS tools as their main platform for video editing do it because of:
     * Cost
     * Ability to customize raw performance
     * Affection/Ethics
Note that neither richness of features nor the presence of industry 
standard features are on that list. There are also two important 
external factors that I want to point out and that should invite reflection:
     * the apathy of video software companies towards FOSS
     * the lack of developers for FOSS video editing and similar 
applications
I want to finish by mentioning compositing and special effects again. 
These are areas that have been sorely overlooked. I'm not asking for 
Adobe After Effects for Linux, rather something on a smaller and more 
practical scale with FXhome being the perfect example of the type of 
applications we need to fill the gap. Regarding compositing, Cinelerra 
is the only FOSS application that currently allows me to produce decent 
results (excluding Blender).
My main hopes for the near future are on Jahshaka and Cinelerra, thanks 
to the recent news I already mentioned. The key, I think, is speed of 
development, and decent scheduling of major releases. Do not be mistaken 
-- it will take years to develop high-end open source video software, 
and the video professional cannot wait years. However, this area finally 
seems to be heading in a better direction than it was even a few years 
ago, and that may allow for a bit of optimism on our part.
Rui Lopes is a Portuguese Web designer and filmmaker who has a wide 
range of interests in the technology field. "
-- 
BArrYZ

 compositing OpenSource
Cioè l'istigazione al suicidio... ;)
E' già tanto accettare i macintrashisti... Figurarsi i linuxari... :P 
-- 
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Luc (34, CO) - TV Sony Bravia 3LCD 50" - Ampli Kenwood V5580D
Camera Panasonic DS 38 - Windows XP Media Center Home Theater  
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 prospettiva, decisamente e' un'ottima lettura, la consiglio caldamente.
C'è un articolo analogo, risalente a qualche anno fa, e dice le stesse 
identiche cose, purtroppo da questo punto di vista le cose non stanno 
migliorando molto. L'articolo non cita la spaccatura avvenuta nello 
sviluppo di Cinelerra, cosa graditissima per me, dove i dev sparsi per 
il mondo hanno deciso di riscrivere da zero il codice creando un nuovo 
programma di editing (tutto questo perchè i dev ufficiali di Cinelerra 
sono troppo lenti e restii ad accettare patch et simila da parte della 
community).