Re: Announcement: Open Movie Editor

Hi,

salsaman:
> Do we really need Yet Another Movie Editor for Linux ? I'm working on
> adding the multitrack timeline to LiVES (http://lives.sf.net), and I'm
> looking for other people to help coding. This project has already been
> over 3 years in development. Would you be interested in merging the two
> projects ?

I'm aware of LiVES, however I always thought of it to be more like a
VJ compositing app.

I don't think merging the projects makes sense, because the scope of
the Open Movie Editor Project is fairly limited, it's more about
providing a simple and straightforward userinterface to the most basic
editing tasks. It is not aimed towards fancy effects and compositing,
but tries to provide a more traditional-style filmmaker with a
convinient tool to get the job done.

I've had a look at the feature list of LiVES though and indeed, it's
impressive. :)


Bob:
> Of course!  Competition is good!  In our Darwinian world, the software
> with the most Intelligent Design is most likely to survive. :-)
>
> From the feature sheets, it looks like LiVES is designed specifically
> for video at small to medium (SDTV) frame sizes.  It is not clear
> (yet) if Open Movie Editor is also targeted specifically for video or
> if there are plans to support the higher dynamic range content and
> resolutions necessary to make real movies.
>
> Is there any open source movie editor capable of supporting modern
> film digital intermediates with stand-alone frames in 10-bit log or
> 14+ bits linear at 2K resolution, and which supports edit definition
> lists (EDLs), and LUTs for display, as well as handles the conform
> responsibilities?  To me, these are the bare essentials to support
> editing a movie.

Well at the current state the Open Movie Editor is limited to small
frame sizes, and I think this a resonable approach for realtime
editing, because I don't think it's necessary to torture the machine
with these huge amounts of data constantly. However, I do agree that
working with large Frames is indeed desirable, and I think that it'd
make sense to downsample the takes for editing, and use the generated
EDLs to perform the equivalent operations on the "real" data as some
kind of background-rendering.

The timeline arrangement is stored as a fairly simple XML Dump, and
the only thing that needs to be implemented is a rendering backend
that does all the dirty work. I think I can try something as soon as I
see fit. Actually the gmerlin audio video library (gmerlin.sf.net)
that I use for some tasks provides a lot of tools for handling a lot
of obscure frame-formats and colorspaces and stuff, so I this is
definitly interesting.


Daniel:
> I'm afraid I'm going to miss that meeting, which is a shame as it sounds
> very interesting. We're working on a native 64-bit Linux desktop
> distribution for the creative industries ( http://64studio.com/ ) and
> the video editing side of things is far from resolved. So far we've been
> unable to find a free software video editor that we could package and
> distribute so that it works 'out of the box' without running into the
> software patents issue.

Software patents are a minefield, no matter what you do, there will
propable always be someone who could sue you for something. No matter
how hard you try, theoretically you cannot achieve perfection. The
"correct" solution to this problem would be to abandon software
patents, however at the moment a more pragmatic approach is obviously
to leave parts that are obvious targets for evil patent lawers out. I
believe that with a little hacking cinelerra could be packaged to fit
your needs.

> I agree with Salsaman that developers are spread too thinly over the
> various video projects. Nevertheless, we want to support video tool
> development with our packaging and integration work.

Well, If you have some suggestions about how the Open Movie Editor
Project could provide some value for your project, feel free to
contact me. :)

-Richard


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