Building The Ultimate Video Editing Suite

PlainBlack writes "Once upon a time, I was the Chief Engineer at a small TV station, but got out of that line of work about the time that people were talking about replacing video tapes with hard drives. Now I'm looking to build myself a professional grade editing suite using only open source tools so that I can dump as much money as possible into the hardware. My question to Slashdot is, what are the best open source tools for such a suite? I'll need both video and audio editing; a bank of wipes, fades, and other effects; a great paint program; and a titler (text overlays)."

Re:Kino, Cinelerra

[LesFerg]

Also I just found something called Cinepaint, in my Debian sources list, no clue what its like but the description file is impressive :)

Apparently It is the most popular open source tool in the motion picture industry [sourceforge.net]

Mod Parent Up!

[TheWanderingHermit]

This post has a LOT to say about problems with OSs. No community is perfect, and the OSS community certainly has its faults. This post points out a major problem with the OSS community, as does this topic. OSS revolves around programmers. There is nothing wrong with that, but it means that most of the strengths and weaknesses of programmers translate into the strengths and weaknesses of OSS. Unfortunately, one of those strengths is the urge to explore intellectually, but the reluctance to relfect on one's weaknesses outside of the intellectual arena.

For example (and there was an article on /. pointing to this earlier, if you want to look it up), a story listed the reasons programmers were not liked and trusted by users and how developers often treated users with disrespect because the users didn't have the computer knowledge the developers did. This is part of the OSS denial reflex. If you are looking for an OSS program that does something, and there is none out there, right away, everyone calls you a freeloader and demands to know why you would want to do that anyway. Instead of saying, "No, there is no OSS solution for that yet," the response is usually to claim that there is no need to solve the problem anyway.

Personally, I think the driving force behind "finished" OSS (by finished I mean programs easily used by anyone who can use a computer) is becoming (and already is, to some point) large corporations that are backing OSS development, like Sun and OpenOffice. Abiword is good, KWrite is good. But until OpenOffice was released there was no word processor with the polish, ease of use, and power of professional word processing software. A lot of that comes from the fact that most OSS projects are not paying developers and programmers to write the GUIs and other work that programmers often shun because it's a pain.

The problem is that, rather than write the interfaces and adding the polish, many in the OSS community would rather attack the person who says, "This is not ready for prime time," than to step back and examine the situation and dare to ask themselves, "Is there a valid reason this person is saying this?"

I use OSS whenever possible, and I look forward to the day when I can use only OSS. I have a list of all the OSS programs I've used in starting my company and we've (me and employees) already started discussions on how to pay back those projects (would donations work better, or volunteering man hours while programmers are on my clock). We expect a major jump in income in the next year, and when that happens, we will be contributing to projects we have used, either by money or time.

It's not about getting it without paying. It's about trusting OSS and not trusting companies who have everything to gain by selling software that has flaws and charging for a new version with those flaws fixed.

Oh, and one last rant -- I've bumped into a number of purists who feel all software should be OSS, and often these people are the same ones who leap into a rant of denial when someone says, "I can't use that program. It lacks features and needs an interface." At that point, they start blaming the user for stupidity, instead of accepting that not everyone is a programmer and there are many intelligent people who are experts in their fields, but don't have time to write their own programs. You can't have it both ways. If you want people using OSS, then you have to make OSS easily accessible and usable by all users.