Or Blender? Or Cinelerra? Or ShotCut? Or OpenShot? Or Olive? Or Pitivi? The open source video editing landscape is frustrating. So many competent projects competing with each other, none of which have clear superiority. And nothing that comes close to the proprietary offerings. Feels like we might be closer if developers werenât split eight-ways.
Itâs not so simple to join everyone, and maybe not even as productive as we might think. Some of those projects are based on different technologies and have different approaches to video editing. Take photo editing as an example. There arenât many foss software for that, and gimp is the bigger one, but it didnât make gimp reach the level of proprietary software in the same field, even without fragmentation. Perhaps, if there were more foss photo editing software, there would be more global development in thia area
There is fragmentation in FOSS image editing. Thereâs GIMP, Krita, Pinta, RawTherapee, DarkTable, Digikam and a few others. But itâs good fragmentation. FOSS image editing is in fact in a much better place than FOSS video editing right now.
GIMP is focused on being a good general purpose image editor. Krita is focused on being a good digital art program. Pinta is focused on being a more basic, beginner-friendly image editor. RawTherapee/DarkTable/Digikam are focused on professional photography, with the latter in particular focused on library management. And they all do at least a decent job at accomplishing what they set out to do. If you as a photographer find that GIMP just isnât doing it, you can try DarkTable and will likely find what you were looking for. If youâre an artist and GIMP isnât good enough, you can simply use Krita.
Whereâs this variety with video editing when everything is just trying to be a general purpose video editor? Iâll acknowledge that the âsimplified video editorâ use case is covered by OpenShot and Pitivi. Iâll also acknowledge that there are dedicated editors for animation (OpenToonz, Krita) and VFX (Natron). What about everything else? Instead of having different video editors for different use cases, you have at least six editors trying and failing at trying to do everything.
Say you arenât satisfied with Kdenlive, what should you use instead? Maybe Blender has the feature you want, but then maybe itâs missing another feature you depended on in Kdenlive. Maybe Cinelerra has both features, but is missing a third one you also need. By the time youâve tried all of the available options, youâve wasted a lot of time and have found no editor suitable for your usecase. Do you just constantly switch back and forth between two or three editors which combined have all the features you want? Well, you can try. Switching between image editors is easy. There are many standard lossless formats you can export to and you can even directly import GIMP or Photoshop project files in other editors like Krita and Digikam. How do you open your Kdenlive project in Blender or vice versa? Should you encode every time you want to switch? Lossless video can easily take hundreds of gigabytes, lossy video means a loss in quality, both mean several hours spent waiting for encode to finish. Obviously not viable. So really you have to pick one editor and hope it does everything you want, because switching mid-project is impossible.
Thatâs an interesting perspective. The definition of fragmentation can be blurry, because I wouldnât consider software like gimp, krita and darktable to be a case of fragmentation, because they serve explicitly different use cases, but I would consider darktable and rawtherapee to be, since they fall into the same one.
The point I was trying to make was that, if there was only one foss video editor, perhaps the developers from cinelerra, pitivi, kdenlive, etc wouldnât all contribute to it, and the result wouldnât be the sum of efforts applied to each software.
By the way, perhaps video editing is more complex than other software to develop, and the lack of a big organization behind it makes things more difficult)