Lightworks Video Editor To Go Open Source 205
Art3x writes "EditShare will release its video editor as open source this summer. Lightworks handles high-definition media, DPX, and RED, shares projects with Final Cut Pro and Avid, and was recently used by Academy-award-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker on Shutter Island. Introduced in 1989 and bought by EditShare last year, it 'has come from over one million hours of software development,' says EditShare's James Richings. But he says releasing the source will 'generate concepts and capabilities never seen before. I expect that the Lightworks Open Source initiative will transform not only the technology, but also the opinions on what a professional editing tool can achieve.'" From the press release's description, it sounds like the "open source" phase will follow a period of free-as-in-beer downloading.
Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses. (Score:2, Interesting)
Clearly not oh trollish one.
The GPL maximizes the freedom of the end users, and software exists solely to be used. It also will ensure lightworks continues to benefit from this open-sourcing. Without the GPL linux would be as unused in the enterprise as FreeBSD.
Re:No doubt, will equal GIMP (Score:5, Interesting)
Finding fault with Blender is* easy, and for much the same reason people find fault with GIMP -- the UI is something you either love, or absolutely despise, with very little in between.
*Referring to Blender circa 2003, so this may need to be changed to "was". The UI was bad enough at the time to make me not look back.
Re:Good troll! (Score:0, Interesting)
Instead of just discussing the issue at hand, why do you GPL advocates always resort of ad hominem attacks and other logical fallacies?
Can't we please just get back to discussing how the BSD and MIT licenses promote freedom for all, while the GPL stifles it?
You need to stop calling people "trolls", you need to stop making exaggerations, and you need to try to partake in this discussion as if you were a mature, educated adult.
Re:Two things I noticed (Score:3, Interesting)
It's high-end video editing software. The system requirements are always 'more'. If you have to ask whether your computer can run it the answer is no. Considering that the summery talks about HD and Red video I wouldn't consider anything less than quad core with 4Gb RAM. If you are serious you would be looking more like 16Gb RAM, two or three 23"+ widescreens and a couple Tb of RAID drives for storage.
If any of this is surprising then you are not working at the level where software like this is necessary.
Re:No doubt, will equal GIMP (Score:4, Interesting)
Yet that doesn't excuse the fact that it is (or was, anyway -- as I said, it's been years since I've looked at Blender) valid criticism of it, either.
And yes, there IS something wrong with learning a clunky UI, IF there's a better solution available. In my case there was, and I would have been stupid to use the worse solution simply because it was open source. Then again, I try to use the best tool for the job, instead of being blinded by any ideology; if that best tool is open source, great. If not, that's fine with me too.
Re:Good troll! (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah, but in practice, most of the time, either A. the company keeps it open source anyway (e.g. Apple with most of the lower half of Mac OS X), B. the company builds a closed source version but regularly pushes fixes upstream, or C. the software is in a device where changing out parts of the software is well beyond the skills of a typical user (e.g. your microwave oven). Most of the exceptions to that statement never gained any real traction in the marketplace.
Sure, you can point out a few prominent exceptions, e.g. Microsoft using BSD's TCP/IP stack in Windows, but do you honestly expect anybody to believe that anyone would have been served by the original stack being under the GPL? Microsoft would never have made their kernel open source anyway, so they either would have rewritten it or worse, developed a competing network standard. Either of those would have resulted in further fragmentation of the market, more bugs that users have to suffer through, and in general a worse perception of computing by the public as a whole. The only way you could reasonably argue that anyone would have benefitted from this is if you honestly believe that Windows (already the dominant platform by this time) would have lost its dominance due to Linux having a better TCP/IP stack sooner. That's a pretty big stretch of the imagination, to say the least.
Re:I hope it's under the BSD or MIT licenses. (Score:4, Interesting)
Clearly not oh trollish one. The GPL maximizes the freedom of the end users, and software exists solely to be used. It also will ensure lightworks continues to benefit from this open-sourcing. Without the GPL linux would be as unused in the enterprise as FreeBSD.
I don't know how I will modded but GPL is "NOT" for end users. It does not affect end users one bit. End users do not compile or care to compile code.
If you are contributing to the codebase then you are no longer wearing the "end user" hat but a "contributing developer" hat.
BSD and MIT license grant more rights to third party developers. Full stop. GPL places some restrictions on release of binaries from code modifications which require publishing of code changes if a binary is released to the general public. Full Stop. Let's stop trying redefine terms like "freedom" and just spell out the differences.
GPL takes the approach of enforcement of rules if you want to play while BSD relies on good will and a desire to co-operate. One requires coercion and the other is completely voluntary.
Re:Depends... (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks. May you be touched by his noodly appendage.
Re:Analogy Pendant (Score:4, Interesting)
buying them can run you over $150 per batch.
Depends on your ingredients and batch size. I just picked up a 50lb sack of 2-row malt for $40US, and have another on backorder. Also picked up a couple vials of White Labs yeast at half off (no, they aren't expired). I just bought 3lbs of hops (1 x Galena, 1 x Willamette, 1 x Cascade) for $40US including shipping. Propane tank fillup was $15. I'll be brewing 10 gallon batches (sorry, 38 liters for you non-imperial types, or a little over 4 cases for those bad at unit conversion and division) at a cost of ~$40 for ingredients & consumables, or about $0.50 per pint. Compare that to $4/pint at the local pub.
Unless you already own the equipment
Right. I gave up trying to cost-justify that stuff a long time ago. No one ever really owns enough equipment anyway. There's always something else you need. It's part of the fun, actually.
Then you have to count the time-consuming process of sanitizing the equipment
Ugh. The primary reason I don't brew more often.
actually brewing beer
That's the fun part! Well, one of the fun parts, anyway.
bottling it
Corny kegs, baby. Best brewing investment ever.
then drinking it before it expires
Sufficient alcohol content/hopping levels should keep infections away, if you've sanitized properly. Of course, if you're worried about consuming it before it passes peak flavor, invite friends over for a party. I promise you, they will show. However, I tend to find the old maxim true: The homebrew is ready when it's gone.
However, if you do decide to do it, it is a very rewarding experience.
Cheers to that. I take it you brew?
* Apologia pro vita sua: People homebrew for the same reasons that people use or develop FOSS. Some people are just out to save a buck. Others feel that the mass-produced and mass-marketed products are often lacking in quality, or perhaps they feel that the niche products are often pricey and have an artificially snobby following. Some do it because they realize they can produce something equal or superior (for their tastes and purposes, at least) to commercially available alternatives. Some do it just because they love doing it, they love the process of creation. Brewers usually share their creations freely with others and simply ask for a smile and tiny bit of gratitude in return. Many are content to buy basic equipment and a set of ingredients and combine them as instructed, like someone might download and use Ubuntu without ever peeking under the hood. Or, a brewer might create and refine their own recipes then share them with the world, like a developer might write applications or drivers to suit themselves before releasing it to others who might use it or improve it.
They often take pride in personally building or tweaking their hardware, whether it is a 2 x quad core server with 32 GB RAM repurposed into a badass desktop (the fans make it sound like a Cessna taking off, but who the hell cares), or a custom-welded brewstand with 3 x 170,000btu propane burners (sounds like a jet taking off - freakin' glorious).
Commercial brewers jealously guard their recipes and processes. Homebrewers love to share insights and techniques. As a matter of fact, once you get one talking you can barely shut them up (case and point). Homebrewers believe that knowledge is power, and should be shared freely. In fact, they not only personify the free as in beer / free as in speech metaphor, they improve on it, since they are generally happy to freely provide the recipe for the beer just poured you, making a hybrid case of free as in speech and beer.
NOT open source. They're just open sourcing the UI (Score:2, Interesting)
It's entirely clear from the press release that they have no intention whatsoever of opensourcing the "feature rich underlying technology" of the "NLE 's core engine".
This is the same sort of thing that Xara tried to pull... using the open source community to add additional power and functionality that all ultimately still depended on a proprietary close-source rendering engine. That went well!
Re:Companies Have Caught On To The Viral GPL Garba (Score:1, Interesting)
OSX- used by no one in the enterprise and pointless as a server OS
But has more than 5x the overall share of Linux, and makes up a disproportionately large percentage of the pro media market.
Chrome: a browser with no marketshare, even opera is more popular
I don't know where you're getting your numbers, but Opera isn't more popular than Chrome. A more sensible argument would have been pointing out the the rendering engine is GPL.
LLVM: nice idea, but no one is using it.
Apple is heading the development of LLVM/CLANG and is very much using it, the free BSDs are all working to move over to it (FreeBSD is about 80-90% there last I heard). Others will follow suite.
Though I could say the same about what it's aiming to replace; nobody really uses GCC either, the BSDs are all moving to PCC/LLVM, Apple is moving to LLVM, MSVC sees the most use on Windows systems, Sun Studio sees the most use on Sparc systems, ICC on Itanic, GCC is only really significant on Linux, and less than 1% of the market uses that.
I'd like to throw in that the most deployed Unix system (SFU/SUA) is BSD derived as well.
Apache is under the BSD-like Apache license, as are Derby, Catalina and Tomcat/Jakarta.
PHP is under the BSD-like PHP license.
PostgreSQL is under a BSD-like license.
SQLite is public domain, and thus closer to BSD than GPL.
Firefox is tri-licensed, but people like to forget about the other two licensing options.
GlassFish, the j2ee referrence implementation is under CDDL.
Mono, RoR, XWindows and Lua are MIT-licensed.
That's just off the top of my head.
Re:Much-needed pro-level competition for Avid (Score:1, Interesting)
Nope, I assure you it's 100% true. I work in the editorial department on Hollywood feature films, and it is rare (albeit not entirely unheard of) to find anything but Avid in use for editing on any feature film with even a modest budget. FCP has made some inroads in the low-budget indie world, and there are some TV series that use it, but Media Composer is still the gold standard throughout Hollywood. Walter Murch has in fact drawn the ire of many editors for his (very public) stance on Final Cut. As one editor I know put it, "Give me half a million dollars and a full time tech support team, and I'll use Final Cut too."
Personally, having worked with both, I think they both suck, but Final Cut sucks more. Final Cut would be okay to cut a half-hour series with, but it doesn't scale very well. I've worked on some low-budget features that have tried to save money by going with Final Cut, and every time that choice has been bitterly regretted by the end of the project. Avid has its own problems too. Mainly, they both feel like they're stuck in the 90s. What the post-production world needs is a modern editing system. One designed from the ground up to work with different formats of high-bitrate video and share projects and metadata across a network. Both Avid and Final Cut feel like those features are more or less bolted on. At least Avid has a demonstrated commitment to making editing systems. Apple seems to prefer making money hand over fist with the iPhone while leaving Final Cut to languish.