The quest for sustainable free/libre non-linear video editors

Lounge
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Stop making me google for words I don’t know! :slight_smile:

Like you don’t know! :slight_smile:

digiKam is mostly worked on by Gilles (Marcel Wiesweg, Andi Clemens, and a few others all left before 2015).

darktable has several major contributors, so it’s fine.

RawTherapee is also OK with at least 4 very active contributors and several more people helping out.

Hugin is effed, being a one-man show by Thomas these past several years.

LuminanceHDR is lucky to now have Ingo in the gig, otherwise Franco would be all alone as well.

And other projects are mostly single-person stuff.

As far as I can tell, none of them rely on donations, and darktable, for one, refuses accepting donations.

Hell, Pablo accumulated ca. $3k at some point sent for his work on Hugin and he didn’t know what to do with it :slight_smile: Actually, his last commit in the project was removing donation link from menu.

Yeah, Jonathan disappeared for almost a year after the Kickstarter and initial development news re 2.0 and before releasing 2.0 beta.

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Mhm, that’s quite arguable, especially when we are talking about digital media production.

Neither Blender Foundation, nor Krita Foundation, nor Ardour are enterprises. They aren’t even LLCs.

LibRaw, Shotcut, and OpenShot are LLCs.

(Examples are just off the top of my head.)

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Excellent article @prokoudine !

I would like to refer to the last paragraph:

And the other conversation is whether funding development of any free/libre NLE is realistic at all. Consider this. The most any crowdfunding effort got in terms of the number of supporters is OpenShot and its 1,463 backers. However, at the minute of publishing this article, 6,148 people voted for the Adobe Premiere port to Linux (voted, not paid for, mind you).

The question why so many Linux users vote for porting Adobe Premiere to linux instead of getting involved in supporting a free alternative is an interesting one.

I belong to one of the countless “ordinary” users who at a certain point was forced to free himself from the constraints of proprietary enslavement.

When I switched to linux years ago, there was no substitute for video editing in the world of free software, not because I had very high expectations of having an equivalent product to Adobe Premiere, but because free software alternatives lacked fundamental functionality and stability.

I remember when I worked on a school project and convinced school principals to install Kdnlive and Openshot on their school computers, and had to permanently force students to save their montages on a regular basis while working, because the data loss was unavoidable after frequent crashes.

You can imagine how difficult it was to convince the school management about the advantages of free software and to draw attention to the difficulty that free software is confronted with, if the tasks could only be done by detours and with the greatest effort.

So, from the perspective of the school management, there is no option to ask about the alternative. They have neither the expertise or manpower nor the time to develop free alternatives. However, they have a budget to pay for annual licenses for software that is ready for the task.

Now the question is, what would be necessary that these funds somehow flow into the development of free software?

To be honest - and the article by Alex shows this very clearly - I don’t know what I could recommend to the school management if they were willing to invest in free video editing software.

In my opinion, next to a very broad ecosystem (which can be seen very well from the above graphic), there is still a big discrepancy between the views of developers and users on what should happen to the project when it has reached critical mass to become a possible competitor for established proprietary products and be perceived accordingly by the wider public.

On one side many developers are afraid of losing their “playground” and being forced to take on an additional responsibility, which requires appropriate effort, knowledge and time that they don’t have at their disposal.

On the other hand, we have many potential users who have similar difficulties, not too much knowledge, time and willingness to get involved in software projects, but are willing to invest money in software with which they can perform their tasks with expectations of how the software should work.

What free software needs are people like Ton Roosendaal for Blender, who have authority, competence and enthusiasm to connect these two sides.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be a person, it can also be an instance that is switched between the developers and the users.

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You got that to the point, Boris.

I am no programmer, I am a user. I understand that free software is still made by humans who invest time and energy. Therefore I decided a few years ago that I will define a “software budget”, even if I could get away without it.

My wife, daughter and me use Linux and free software on three laptops here, so we decided that we will contribute 300.- Euro per year +/- 100.-€ per person). On my side that’s two forums (each +/-25.-€), the GIMP and some small stuff. OpenShot was high on my daughter’s list, because she uses it a lot more than I do.

I do NOT wish to see any Adobe program ported to Linux, I am happy with the alternative solutions we have, and I rather wish that we support the ecosystem as it is.

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I think he meant “how relevant are those tools for other people’s businesses”

e.g. blender might get some investments (money or own dev resources) from some of the commercial users of it, because they need things for their work.

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this might be relevant to the discussion http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2018/12/14/open-source-confronts-its-midlife-crisis/

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last but not least … you are not limited to contributing money to opensource projects if you are not a developer.

  1. Do tutorials or help with the documentation. Many of the things provided by devs might be biased by internal knowledge and get too technical for many users. Help to get the user perspective into the documentation. Or translate it to your native language. Not all potential users might speak English.
  2. provide show cases.

So we could extend Ryan’s message about $1 per month to … invest lets say 4h per month to provide something from your expertise for the opensource community.

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One thing I noticed while working on that NLE post is that it’s extremely difficult to find short clips presenting the software. The Shotcut video I ended up using was probably the closest to what I had in mind: an actual user going through basic operations and showing the result, and not using 30-40 minutes of video time to do that.

Just sitting down and doing a quick feature-by-feature review for a new version would be a lot of help to promote a video editor of your choice. Nathan Lovato (Blender Power Sequencer) is good at that, but he’s all about presentation, he makes videos hand over fist for his Godot courses, it’s part of his DNA by now.

I’m actually thinking of doing a post that explains the basics of making a good video on a project, with good/ugly references and whatnot. Would it be of any actual help?

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of course!

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I’m trying to be a sexier Ton. It’s a hard bar to meet.
I may be failing…

@darix on the other hand. He’s your man. :wink:

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No! On the contrary! You have already surpassed him in this function :smile:

Despite the fact that Ton is very committed to support free software in lot of areas, he mainly takes care of Blender.

You have taken on the challenge to bring the whole free software photo community up to the top!
A gigantic task! With a fantastic result! And not only by creating this outstanding platform PIXLS.US but by actively supporting many projects and not least through your blogs.

I can remember a scene two years ago when I demonstrated working with GIMP to some pedagogical staff from different schools who had no money left to comply with Adobe’s new licensing policy and were forced to look for alternatives.

They have of course already tried GIMP but couldn’t work much with it because they could only find very sparse documentation at a very rudimentary level, and I was asked to do a short training course for them.

When I demonstrated what I learned about GIMP from your blogs, you should have seen their stunned faces.
After two days of intensive course, everyone was able to do with GIMP all the tasks they had done before with Photoshop.

When I asked them about it later, they all said that they are now using GIMP in school, but sometimes they still use an old version of Photoshop that they have on some of the computers because GIMP doesn’t have a CYMK support yet, which is sometimes needed for printing in the print shop.

So thanks to you, darix and many others, free photo software community has a nice future :wink:

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@beachbum thank you for sharing. I very much agree with your point of view and I will be using a ‘software budget’ to donate to a number of OSS projects / solutions. Thanks again!

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Yes please!

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Wow, someone’s having a good overview of the state of development of quite a few projects :wink:

I am not disputing your point, but I still feel like the following update is in order: Maik Qualmann should get recognition here: He is a very active contributor since a few years. I am not disputing that Gilles is the main contributor (e.g. all the portability (but not only) is his work), but Maik is almost catching up to him.

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Fair enough! Thanks for correcting me on that.

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Ok, to be honest, there are some really great FOSS programs, that should be installed on all creatives’ computers, such as Inkscape, Blender, Rawtherapee, and VLC, but on a pragmatic level, one should be open to whatever works for the workflow and is realistically obtainable.

I use Reaper, which is as close to a FOSS mentality as you can get with a paid proprietary software, and it is really affordable. Serif programs like Affinity Photo are great and affordable, and I have found it to be a great rock solid and high performing piece of software, as I have had too many stability issues with the latest Gimp versions that support 16 bit (a hard requirement for the kind of photo editing I do), and Affinity Photo rescues me in stitching certain panoramas that Hugin seems to want to botch.

I get the frustration with Adobe and Premiere, but it is a false dichotomy between using Premiere and having to go through the trouble of using a FOSS video editor that might be very unstable, or abandoned. For instance Blackmagic Davinci Resolve/ Fusion 15 has a free version that is very capable and powerful, and serves 95% of amateurs, and to upgrade to the full one is $300 with free/cheap upgrades. Considering the Adobe alternative is Premiere for just video editing, and having no strong compositing capabilities of the included Fusion in the Blackmagic software package, in only 15 months, 8 months if you need After Effects as well. Plus, you get the full version free with most Blackmagic video cameras.

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That being said, I do hope that a FOSS video editor someday emerges and can go toe to toe with the proprietary versions, like Rawtherapee can with Lightroom, and Blender can with Maya, but in the mean time, I recommend sticking with whatever is most functional, proprietary or FOSS. Given the immense complexity of creating a video editor, I think that the nonprofit model Blender uses might be necessary, with dedicated non-profit fundraising tactics to raise money to hire talented salaried developers.

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Could you elaborate on this on a separate thread? Or if a thread already exists, please link it. That would help us see what we can do to improve GIMP and Hugin.

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Hard to say with Gimp, as it is just so far behind in general performance and stability compared to Affinity Photo and Photoshop (didn’t buy or pirate Photoshop, just speaking from experience using it on school computers) and have used adjustment layers too extensively to give it up for ideological reasons. I can help out with Hugin and will post a thread on some of the issues I have encountered.

That said Rawtherapee is very powerful, and I always plug it from genuinely being impressed whenever I get the chance to. Especially with the new Shadows, Highlights tool in RT 5.5. Holy &*(#, that is on par with the Lightroom secret sauce shadows and Highlights tool, and the wavelets are superior over LR clarity, giving user control of each detail frequency level.

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The article specifically says:

“Of course, there’s the easy way too: just pay for either DaVinci Resolve or Lightworks for Linux and be done with free/libre NLEs on a free/libre platform.”

What false dichotomy?