Pitivi – Free video editor with a beautiful and intuitive user interface

https://www.pitivi.org/

by pabs3 • 3 years ago

290 110 3 years ago

j452• 3 years ago

Looks nice.

A quick packaging for windows and Mac could let non technical folks wanting to edit video easily adopt something like this.

Maybe in the meantime a quick how-to install a virtual machine and edit within.

dgreensp• 3 years ago

Yes, I get the impression it only runs on Linux? And we're supposed to infer that by the fact that it's "distro-agnostic" and sometimes the word Free is capitalized in the middle of a sentence. Because if you're in the right place, you're already running a Free OS.

j452• 3 years ago

Free can run on many OS'

foxylad• 3 years ago

Does anyone have experience of both Pitivi and Openshot?

em-bee3• 3 years ago

i have used both for one project or another. but it has been a while. my main reason for trying different video editors was that some were not able to create videos from single jpg frames for a stop motion animation. but apart from that the editing of video streams worked well enough in both.

kmoser• 3 years ago

Unfortunately the videos on the showcase page don't play on Firefox or Chrome (Windows): https://www.pitivi.org/showcase/

siddbudd• 3 years ago

not on Mac either (tested in Firefox, Vivaldi and Safari)

gl-prod• 3 years ago

It's because bad HTTPs

renewiltord• 3 years ago

Unfortunately, when I last tried this a couple of years ago (I think), it crashed frequently. It could be my fault since I was using nouveau drivers.

ReactiveJelly• 3 years ago

I was gonna ask that. Every video editor I've tried, even back to Windows Movie Maker, crashed frequently.

I don't know why. ffmpeg is rock-solid. Modern CPUs are good enough that you can basically handle 1080p without touching accelerators.

Multi-threading is not impossible to get right in C++. So why do they all crash?

GiorgioG• 3 years ago

Try DaVinci Resolve

gamblor956• 3 years ago

That sounds like a RAM issue.

If you've got a faulty RAM chip, a memory-intensive use like video editing will reveal it. And it usually does so by crashing.

em-bee3• 3 years ago

i found pitivi quite stable when i used it a few years ago. i used it quite a while for various projects. i mostly had AMD and before that intel CPUs with onboard graphics and i always avoided nvidia though.

jszymborski• 3 years ago

Will have to give this a shot. I've been using kdenlive for some small things and it's been pretty great but this looks very cool

whywhywouldyou• 3 years ago

If the product has to TELL you up front that it has a "beautiful and intuitive user interface", it likely doesn't.

And the Tour page has a screenshot of the application titled "Stunning Elegance", where it does a great job of mostly looking the same as any desktop app developed in the last 10 years -- full of shades of grey, plain, no menus.

As a cherry on top, it is described as "Easy to learn. Exciting to master", which is getting so far out there into marketing land that my spidey senses tell me to stay far away.

em-bee3• 3 years ago

i have used it. it is easy to learn. certainly no worse than the alternatives.

i get your criticism. but i see that very often. most projects just don't know how to present their apps in a good way. it seems like we are trying to describe apps in ways that we think non-tech people would expect, but we are failing.

tyiz• 3 years ago

It Looks like a Camtasia ripoff imho.

erremerre2• 3 years ago

Camtasia has a great interface, so not surprised that it is trying to copy it.

However just by the look of the screenshot, I can see plenty of features in camtasia 6 that are not present in Pitivi.

hulitu2• 3 years ago

That was also my impresion. The first thought: where is the menu. Maybe this little "..." thrown on the (supposed) title bar.

No screenshots, gray on gray, no system requirements page, no easily to find instalation instructions. No mention of which GTk version it needs.

ReleaseCandidat3• 3 years ago

The part about "clean codebase" doesn't really help raising confidence either ;).

huhtenberg• 3 years ago

Yep, seeing them use "stunning elegance" to describe their own work was very off-putting.

Even if it were justified, it would've still come across as very cocky and cringe-y.

jfaulken• 3 years ago

The website works really hard to not tell you what platforms it runs on.

thanhannam• 3 years ago

It’s a shame GNOME doesn’t invest in it as much as KDE does in Kdenlive. Really liked its approach at first, but now still nowhere near truly usable.

visnudeva• 3 years ago

Have you tried KDEnlive? I believe it is the best open source video editor on Linux, it is now combined with AI to auto generate subtitles!

29athrowaway• 3 years ago

It is a user interface that is usable and discoverable to a reasonable extent. But beautiful? come on.

mips_r4300i• 3 years ago

It's all relative to its contemporary FOSS applications, and it may well be beautiful compared to some of those :)

gorlilla• 3 years ago

Beauty has always been a subject of the eye of the beholder. Ie, it's very much subjective.

brettermeier• 3 years ago

It just looks like every other app made in the last 5 years or so...

Venn1• 3 years ago

I have been editing my podcast and guides with NLEs on Linux for the past decade. Kdenlive, OpenShot, Olive, Cinelerra, Blender and Pitivi all lack one key feature. Stability. You can lose a staggering amount of work between auto saves.

After a day of playing with the free version of Resolve in 2017 I gave BlackMagic some cash for a license & capture card for audio. The early versions lacked ALSA support.

Editing sessions can last 8 to 10 hours and I can't remember the last time it spite-crashed. Granted, this doesn't prevent me from mindlessly tapping Ctrl+S every few minutes.

__mharrison__• 3 years ago

Resolve is amazing. I also tracked pitivi and Cinelerra for years.

Really hard to beat the free version. However, the studio version paid for itself quickly.

Racing04612• 3 years ago

After a day of playing with the free version of Resolve in 2017 I gave BlackMagic some cash for a license & capture card for audio

I see you've came to the same conclusion i did years ago. I look at it not as paying for software, but buying my time back at this point.

Linux "open source"/free professional software seems to lack the Je ne sais quoi needed to make it worthwhile. It works, but the software is in the "uncanny valley" so to speak compared to polished Mac/Windows paid professional software.

Dalewyn5• 3 years ago

There is an old saying: "Time is money."

When you buy something, you are exchanging your money to obtain someone else's time. In this case, time that someone else spent to make sure a program works.

The F in FOSS stands for free, so nobody is under any obligation to spend their time so you don't spend yours.

belugacat• 3 years ago

A lot of open source projects suffer from “pet project” syndrome. Some maintainers have very strong opinions about how/what things should be done regardless of actual user demand or feedback, and there’s no one with the power to rebuff them because the product owners deciding what to implement and the engineers doing implementation work are one and same. Commit right makes might.

In a (healthy) company, you have PMs and executives who will tell the overly opinionated engineers to STFU and actually implement things that move the needle and solve problems users are facing.

This is also why most open source projects have terrible UI/UX and any designer who attempts to help and improve things finds themselves ignored, with no means to actually carry out any decision, and walk away soon after.

poulpy123• 3 years ago

the "je ne sais quoi" is called money

unixhero• 3 years ago

Can confirm. Used Kdenkive and Pitiwi, and they crashed on me. I lost a lot of work.

dharmab3• 3 years ago

The free version of Resolve is so good. I looked for a reason to pay them- nope, free version did literally everything a non-professional would need. And they even have free downloadable lessons on how to edit - not just use their editor, but edit in general- on the website.

Aerroon• 3 years ago

Last time I looked at it the free version didn't use your GPU for playback during editing. Has it changed since then?

animex• 3 years ago

...but it asks for all your identifying information so their sales team can email, phone, snail-mail solicit you to upgrade...until their shit gets hacked and then they are paying out a multi-million dollar privacy settlement/fine :/

vindarel• 3 years ago

I spent dozens of hours in kdenlive since last year with 1 well-identified crash. The situation might have drastically improved since 2017?

ReleaseCandidat3• 3 years ago

Yes, but users that you have lost because of crashes don't come back if they've found an usable alternative.

prox2• 3 years ago

Same here, kdenlive has been rock solid for me. It was crash prone and even sluggish a few major versions ago.

raudette• 3 years ago

I have used kdenlive for a dozen videos over the last 5 years - my use case, taking 15 minutes of footage down to 2-3 minutes, syncing video with voice over, building product demos, tutorials. It has been solid, on Windows and Linux.

When my youngest was 10, she worked with OpenShot and Kdenlive, and settled on Kdenlive on Windows - probably edited 20 videos of hours of Roblox footage down to 2-3 minute videos, syncing characters activity with music, voice over, etc... It was pretty cool - it worked well for her.

ReleaseCandidat3• 3 years ago

Yes, the samé for me, just that I've used the Pro(?) version of Lightworks before BM released Resolve.

But the least stable, unusable piece of (compositing/video) shi^H^H^Hsoftware had been Discreet's (now Autodesk) Combustion, which I got for free with a Quadro graphics card.

If the first sentence in the press release is

Discreet's Combustion is a robust 3D compositing package

you now what to expect ;)

https://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2001/Volume-24-Issue-1-...

ShadowBanThis012• 3 years ago

Seriously, you're still complaining about a 22-year-old piece of software?

Not victim-blaming here, but it's unfortunate that you didn't experience the other end of the spectrum, the highest-end compositor there was: Shake.

stuaxo• 3 years ago

I understand why (the complexity in the codecs) but it's certainly frustrating.

Anyone building one of these now needs to build it from the start with the knowledge these lower level parts may crash, or maybe Gstreamer itself could provide some crash protection.

thefz• 3 years ago

Resolve is so good I paid for the full version even if all I do is edit GoPro videos.

LanternLight83• 3 years ago

Can anyone speak to linux support, free or otherwise?

flaburgan• 3 years ago

Did you try Shotcut? https://www.shotcut.org/

I had the same bad experience than you with Pitivi, Openshot and KDEnlive. Then I discovered shotcut and I was finally able to work. And it's FLOSS.

chupapimunyenyo2• 3 years ago

I tested many open source video editors and shotcut was the best compared to the rest. It has a lot of (basic) features that are missing in other editors

suby• 3 years ago

I don't edit videos too often, but Shotcut is what I use. I'll be trying out Pitivi because I'm not quite happy with it, it crashes quite a bit.

ho_schi2• 3 years ago

Regarding Pitivi I have to confirm that. I tried it multiple times on a novice-level (just cutting and accelerating). Unreliable and crashing, both on AMD and Intel. The quality of encoded result is also bad, even with H265 and highest quality. And the preview window is always “popping” out and doesn’t went back into the main UI. Is it me or are others more successful with it?

I wonder if and how much Gstreamer is responsible for situation.

I’m honestly more apt to ffmpeg. MPV and Celluloid work always reliable. Firefox probably had also a reason to prefer ffmpeg. I will try another editor in future, maybe it is not Gstreamer but Pitiv.

imtringued2• 3 years ago

The default settings in pitivi are infuriatingly bad. I had the same problem with the preview window.

0x0203• 3 years ago

Does Resolve work on non-nvidia GPUs? Last few times I've tried to run Resolve, it claimed to not support my AMD Radeon video cards.

bean-weevil• 3 years ago

KDEnlive used to be awful about this, but it's a lot better now. I haven't had crashes in ages.

inslee1• 3 years ago

I just used Pitivi recently to cut something and quite liked its straightforwardness.

The only thing I don't like is the lack of preview monitor so I can work with raw clips before bringing them into the timeline but for quick cuts, it's a great tool.

mmwelt• 3 years ago

Does anyone know how it compares with Shotcut[1]? It's free, open source, and works on Windows, Mac and Linux. I've been a happy user for a while.

[1] https://shotcut.org/

hulitu2• 3 years ago

Built atop the giant shoulders of the industry-standard GStreamer multimedia framework,

"Never" heard about it. Now seriuosly, if they would have said ffmpeg, ok. But gstreamer ?

antics9• 3 years ago

I do not find Pitivi stable, or beautiful.

Blender is easy to use if you want to start with basic editing.

https://youtu.be/U4WlgU1I2Jg?si=etEsTOeCnAeKV-wL

aleb• 3 years ago

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.

ho_schi2• 3 years ago

"Stability" is lacking in video editors because none are written in Rust.

I’ve doubts about this statement.

PS: Pitivi is implemented in Python.

CharlesW• 3 years ago

I’ve doubts about this statement.

I assume this is very dry sarcasm, because <points to entire history of digital video editing and NLEs>.

guraf• 3 years ago

"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?

aryan20• 3 years ago

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 :)

timonoko• 3 years ago

It has keyframe curves just like Cinelerra!

Most other editors that these n00bs revel about are just ffmpeg with sugar-coated interface. No factual added functionality.

Pitivi – Free video editor with a beautiful and intuitive user interface

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