Hello everybody, a Pitivi maintainer here. Some random thoughts, while I might have the attention..
I think when one considers a foss video editor, they might look into advanced features they need, if any, on how the app looks/integrates with everything, and not the last on how sustaining is the development. The needed features and look are personal and are what they are, so let me comment on sustainability of the "competing" video editors:
- Shotcut's dev said a few years ago in an interview that he gets enough money out of the ads on the website.
- Openshot's Jonathan, last I checked in the corona time on the website was also getting a few thousand USD per month, from donations.
- KdenLive last I checked a few years ago had a nice active team(!). I'm sure if you manage to submit a proper crash report they'll fix it. :)
- Olive's dev is very ambitious, good luck to him!
- Blender's integrated video editor looks solid!
- Pitivi's team shifted focus on GStreamer or away, but we always gathered ourselves to mentor each year 2-3 GSoC students. Most of the development for a good number of years has actually been done by GSoC students. A significant effort went into making their job easier, code reviews(!), merging, infra, maintenance. Two years in a row, groups of students from UNL Nebraska worked on awesome small features and enhancements. Behind the scenes, Igalia and other GStreamer contributors are doing heavy work on GStreamer. Thanks to all, you're awesome! :)
Now Pitivi.. like some of the others, has it's place. It's the only video editor based on GStreamer. GStreamer is here to stay, and so is Pitivi―at least until another video editor based on GStreamer and written in Rust (read "stable") pops up, you never know.
Pitivi is the only video editor built on GTK, we get quite some help from the community with the GitLab issue tracker and the website infra. We're not GNOME but yes we are close. We spent two individual GSoC internships to port Pitivi to GTK 4, but we're not there yet. Blame it on us. It'll get there at some point, but I don't think we'll do a third internship, so I think we'll most likely skip GSoC next year altogether.
"Beautiful" is not measurable, so if we say that "it's beautiful", it's not an absolute truth. You don't like it -> see "competition" above. Let me mention we did stay away from context menus. :)
"Marketing" will be needed when we want to do a(nother) fundraiser, but we're not there yet. The only marketing we might want to do is to developers and people who might be interested in joining and investing in the community. Maybe you have tips about that! Also regarding marketing, we don't have yet packages for Windows and Mac. I think all the others do.
"Stability" is lacking in video editors because none are written in Rust.
Cheers and have fun editing with your favorite video editor! I'll come back to check the replies next Monday.
> "Stability" is lacking in video editors because none are written in Rust.
And yet, somehow, all the pro editors manage to be fairly stable despite being written in C++ (or maybe obj-c in the case of final cut pro and iMovie)
Maybe you should do some introspection as to why that is, instead of blaming the language used.
PS: blender's NLE is possibly the most stable of the open-source ones and it's written in C. Maybe that's a hint? Maybe the answer is good leadership and high quality contributors?
Pitivi is great for most things most editors want to do and that too with the comfort of an application that looks native to the GNOME desktop environment.
Sad to see that Pitivi won't get into GSoC'24 but I completely understand the concerns as well.
Have always advocated for Pitivi's development in my peer groups, and will continue to do so :)
I'd heard a few years ago that it was pretty problematic software, and when I went around looking at alternatives it was one of the least recently updated (latest stable release 17 months ago, according to Wikipedia). So maybe "abandoned" isn't the right word, but that was the impression I left with.
The problem I had when searching was that there was a ton of choice under Linux (my short list was 10), but researching them from that point is not easy. They pretty much all show the same screenshot (media, clip monitor, timeline, timeline monitor). But how do you tell: Is it reliable? Does it have the effects I'll need? Is it serious or a toy?
Normally, I'd have heard of some things and at least know a reputation for something in the field. But video editing is so foreign to my domain, that I've maybe heard one thing about the Linux options over the last decade. Mostly you hear about Final Cut vs. Adobe Premier.
I think when one considers a foss video editor, they might look into advanced features they need, if any, on how the app looks/integrates with everything, and not the last on how sustaining is the development. The needed features and look are personal and are what they are, so let me comment on sustainability of the "competing" video editors:
- Shotcut's dev said a few years ago in an interview that he gets enough money out of the ads on the website. - Openshot's Jonathan, last I checked in the corona time on the website was also getting a few thousand USD per month, from donations. - KdenLive last I checked a few years ago had a nice active team(!). I'm sure if you manage to submit a proper crash report they'll fix it. :) - Olive's dev is very ambitious, good luck to him! - Blender's integrated video editor looks solid! - Pitivi's team shifted focus on GStreamer or away, but we always gathered ourselves to mentor each year 2-3 GSoC students. Most of the development for a good number of years has actually been done by GSoC students. A significant effort went into making their job easier, code reviews(!), merging, infra, maintenance. Two years in a row, groups of students from UNL Nebraska worked on awesome small features and enhancements. Behind the scenes, Igalia and other GStreamer contributors are doing heavy work on GStreamer. Thanks to all, you're awesome! :)
Now Pitivi.. like some of the others, has it's place. It's the only video editor based on GStreamer. GStreamer is here to stay, and so is Pitivi―at least until another video editor based on GStreamer and written in Rust (read "stable") pops up, you never know.
Pitivi is the only video editor built on GTK, we get quite some help from the community with the GitLab issue tracker and the website infra. We're not GNOME but yes we are close. We spent two individual GSoC internships to port Pitivi to GTK 4, but we're not there yet. Blame it on us. It'll get there at some point, but I don't think we'll do a third internship, so I think we'll most likely skip GSoC next year altogether.
"Beautiful" is not measurable, so if we say that "it's beautiful", it's not an absolute truth. You don't like it -> see "competition" above. Let me mention we did stay away from context menus. :)
"Marketing" will be needed when we want to do a(nother) fundraiser, but we're not there yet. The only marketing we might want to do is to developers and people who might be interested in joining and investing in the community. Maybe you have tips about that! Also regarding marketing, we don't have yet packages for Windows and Mac. I think all the others do.
"Stability" is lacking in video editors because none are written in Rust.
Cheers and have fun editing with your favorite video editor! I'll come back to check the replies next Monday.