Linux is a subpar choice for professional video editing
I don't wanna get into a heated discussion, so let me make something very clear: for a regular user, video editing on Linux is probably fine.
That is just not my use case.
I'm used to a degree of freedom, choice, and stability that, right now, Linux does not provide in that area.
I'm a film major who has worked as a professional video editor for many years and editing video on anything that is not nearly as good, reliable and precise as Adobe Premiere feels like torture.
But even being very flexible regarding features and requirements, after trying all the regular suggestions, as professional tools, and with all the respect I can muster, they are just unusable for me.
I need a reliable program in which I can throw any format without worrying about constant crashes, but Linux options are all either extremely limited, unstable or both! Before anyone asks: I tried multiple programs, in different versions and installation methods, on entirely different hardware and unaffiliated distributions.
Kdenlive resembles professional-grade software but constantly crashes at the simplest operations. DaVinci Resolve seems like a good bet but is a nightmare just to install and equally crashy when/if I'm able to do so (last time I had to manually edit the install script following the instructions of some random forum post. This did not cause a good impression. And audio didn't work), and I'm not willing to use something so finicky if Linux doesn't get primary support.
Besides, Blackmagic Design only provides a few pieces of the puzzle. Professional video editing requires a whole stack of integrated software. Both Windows and Mac OS have this, Linux has not.
There's also the issue of GPU acceleration.
I'm not saying FOSS developers owe me anything, nor that they have done a bad job with programs like OpenShot, Pitivi, Blender, whatever. I'm just saying that, regrettably, I'll probably have to install put Windows on dual-boot on my machine in the next few days.
Honestly, unless you're a programmer, sysadmin, network engineer, or someone who may use a computer, but doesn't really rely on specific software for your workflow (you just use email, write documents, use webapps, etc) you're going to have a bad time trying to use linux professionally. I say this as someone who uses linux professionally.
Professional software is very very difficult to develop, given that one wrong design choice can end up costing millions of dollars in lost productivity, and the funding just isn't there in the open source arena for anything but the most fundamental system level projects that large corporations rely on. No one really uses linux as a desktop outside STEM fields, unless they're just using the PCs as general workstations (even then, it's hard to beat the inertia of MS office, especially Outlook/Exchange), so no one is funding those projects. It's impressive that they work as well as they do given the fact that most of them are hobbies. I'd love for large enterprises to wake up one day and decide to collaboratively fund high quality open source projects that they'd all benefit from at a fraction of the cost of the licensing fees they pay to Microsoft, but I don't see that happening any time soon unfortunately.
There's definitely a vocal minority of the FOSS community that would shame you for "giving up", but those are people who are completely unable to empathize that people have different needs and work in different jobs than they do. I don't think there's anything wrong with jumping ship if it means you actually get to be good at your job, and there's not really a whole lot you can do about improving the situation besides investing your own time or donating to open source projects.
That's what I mean. Most people, including your parents, would be fine using linux as they don't rely on a specific piece of software to do their job. They need email, but they don't need outlook specifically, any email client will do.
People like graphic designers who absolutely, 100% must have a copy of Photoshop on their computers, or an engineer who must have a copy of AutoCAD on their computers aren't going to have a good time on Linux, even if they can get those programs running via compatibility layers or virtual machines.
While I agree with you generally, I think this is becoming an increasingly antequated viewpoint as more and more applications move into the cloud. For instance, POS systems used to require specialized terminals, but now you can subscribe to a SaaS application and use any device that can run a standards-compliant browser. There are already many examples of professional creative tools moving to the cloud, including Adobe's Lightroom and Corel's Gravit Designer, but there are an uncountable number of business tools that have already made the plunge.
I think the original argument should make use of the qualifier
specializedfor it to work.General office work can be done with LibreOffice, Microsoft Office online or Google Docs, but good enough specialized professional software is most frequently not easy to come by on Linux.
Emacs is superior to anything I was used to on Windows, and Emacs Fountain Mode (for screenwriting) coupled with Org Mode are by far the best tools for writing and planning I have ever used. i3wm is a joy. And the increase in performance is noticeable and welcomed.
With the exception of video editing, my Linux experience is vastly superior to anything I had on Windows. My unwillingness to reinstall Windows is not out of philosophy or loyalty, I just think using Windows is a pain.
I’m clearly a nerd, though.
I think emacs works on windows nowadays, so you probably don't have to sacrifice that part of switching. Otherwise, I had some success a while ago running i3wm in an x server on top of WSL (vcxrv? Xming? one of those) for a few programs (zathura, a terminal and some remote X stuff). I just left it on it's own monitor and it was almost like having a regular linux box inside my windows machine - it could work well if you like i3's workflow but are using Windows otherwise.
Oh, I would never switch! I'm too lazy to change one bit of my Linux setup. It's 5+ years of effort. I achieved nerd-perfection. Dual boot it is!
Ah, in that case go for that! No need to replicate what you already have :)
If you're interested, I had a script to automate dual-booting a while back (unmouted shared disk, hibernate linux so I'm where I left off before, reboot to windows w/ efibootmgr) that made switching back and forth a little easier, I'm sure I still have it saved.
I can relate to the op‘s position. Linux seems like such a positive project but there is a frustrating level of denial going on when it comes to using it in a professional context that is not IT. You try and be part of that movement on the user side and tend to hit a wall that is usually downplayed and dismissed at either ungrateful or ignorant. So you want a place to vent.
IMO there is a certain deafness in the Linux community (at which point I will certainly be called out for there not being “a Linux community”, which might as well be the problem) towards the real-world end user experience. I get the argument that proper UX and driver compatibility are monumental tasks and that a non-profit community can never compete with commercial software in that space. But then again, why even bother?
It seems like 80% of the work is there (mostly the under-the-hood technical stuff) so it’s a bit frustrating. I won’t pretend like I know the solution but it would be great if there was some awareness to look for people who do and put them in a position of power. Using Linux in a context where usability actually matters sucks and it’s about time this is acknowledged without looking for excuses.
That's kind of the long and short of everything. Windows and MacOS are easy to use because they have literally spent billions over the years researching how people use computers.
We already have a good example of an industry paying money to make good tools with Blender. And in fact, I would venture to state that the only reason why they ended up integrating a video editor was because there really isn't a good FOSS alternative.
But at the same time, I think that most people tend to completely disregard how much innovation has come from the FOSS side when it comes to desktop computing. There are so many features that I have seen come to KDE or Gnome first that have been copied by Microsoft. Look at how Mozilla pioneered the concept of tabbed browsing, and look how long it took either Microsoft or Apple to add virtual desktops.
I think Mozilla is the best positive example out there. Firefox is super well thought out and you can feel the polish that goes into the UX. An hey, people actually use it!
I believe more FOSS projects should have more upfront profit models like
elementary OSis doing. That is my view a great hope.I don't like the
elementary OSitself, it's not my cup of tea, but I really think most people "works" better on a "consumer" mindset, so, if instead of giving your product and then asking for donations you just put an optional price to it (even if you can set it to "zero") you will get more revenue.You can also keep a "donate" button or create a Patreon if you want.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with that strategy, and it can be very beneficial for some projects!
Yes, but they are opposed, and their current model is making them a lot of money, so it will take them literally decades to change to open-source, if they ever do. The reason many users turn to the open-source community is that the open-source gives them hope that corporations are unable and unwittingly to provide.
Tildes' usually a reasonable place, but you might be surprised by the hostility something like what I wrote can get in certain places. That's probably why I adopt defensive language when addressing certain subjects. Sometimes it's automatic.
I don't expect any specific response. I would be pleasantly surprised by the suggestion of a promising tool I haven't tried before.
Maybe I just wanted to share this state of things for this thread to become a point of reference to counter all the excessively positive fanboy statements that "you can do everything on Linux", and also misguided suggestions towards consumer-oriented software even in professional use cases.
If a developer feels inspired by this need, all the better!
If the programs worked well enough I would be very open to learning a different workflow. Learning new programs is something I enjoy. I recently learned to use Gimp (coming from Photoshop) and Inkscape (coming from Illustrator).
Adobe products crash a lot, and Windows and Mac OS have their own very special crashes. But Adobe Premiere, to be specific, crashes much less than all the video editors I ever tried on Linux. And Premiere's crashes usually happens after some time, they don't crash whenever I try doing a specific thing 100% of the time in all projects. With KDEnlive, for example, it crashes 100% of the times I try to import an audio file, making it virtually impossible to work.
Have you considered giving Corel's Pinnacle Studio 23 a try? It's not FOSS, and it's Windows only... but at least it, and the rest of Corel's Creative Suite (Painter, Paintshop Pro, Aftershot, etc), are a decent "professional-grade" alternative to Adobe that you aren't forced to pay monthly for.
I doubt I have nearly the same video editing experience or requirements as you, since I'm just a hobbyist who only occasionally needs to edit short videos... but so far for me, PS23 has felt like a decent enough replacement for Premiere. The flat cost is also much more appealing to me than Adobe CC, especially since I actually managed to pick up the entire Corel Suite, including PS23 Ultimate, for just $25 via a Humble Bundle deal last year. ;)
Thanks!
But, if I'm already going full Windows, I see no reason to use anything other than Adobe. Besides being the industry standard, I actually like their programs, and would only make an effort to use alternatives if it meant staying on Linux.
My roommate has a full Adobe subscription and does not use it much. So I'll just use his for the time being.
I love Adobe's software too. I grew up on it, and have been using it for well over 20 years, so it's by far the most familiar to me. But I recently got totally fucked by them when I canceled my yearly CC subscription. I needed to cancel it a few months early, and the assholes had the gal to charge me a $50 "early cancellation" fee, on top of me having to pay off the monthly fees I had remaining. So because of that, I am done with them as a company. Scumbags. I hope they enjoy the $50, because it's the last they will ever be getting from me.
Yes, they are assholes. But they are assholes who make good software that, in many situations, has no reasonable alternatives. I mean, not really.
I know there are some very specific things that you will need Adobe software for, but very few of them are creative in nature. There are better alternatives for practically every Creative Suite application, many of which are offered for less.
And really, when it comes to creative work it is the end result that matters, not the tools.
The only things I would recommend buying from Adobe are their fonts or their PDF tools. And even then if you have to use Adobe's advanced PDF functionality I would rather question why you think you need it. I still question why we need email and 3D capability in a document format that is supposed to represent a printed document.
I believe your knowledge of Adobe Products and how they are used by professionals in creative industries is incomplete.
Adobe is way more than PDFs, they make essential software of unparalleled quality for a number of video editing, graphic design, and VFX professionals.
Besides excellent, industry-standard (with good reason) individual programs, the integration between them is unmatched. Among other things, I can edit a composition on After Effects and it automatically updates Premiere without any extra render necessary. The same is true of Photoshop and Audition. That is HUGE. And Adobe Media Encoder is, without a doubt, the best and more comprehensive video encoding software on the market.
They are also super proprietary and annoying as hell, but they would probably be dominant in any model.
You are vastly overrating them. Adobe isn't the standard; they are a standard and that is a huge difference. There's a reason why I said that the most important thing is the end product. If you can't make a good product by yourself, It's certainly not because you didn't pay the Adobe gods. The things you think they are kingpins in actually have a huge amount of competition in the commercial segment alone. For photography, there is Affinity Photo, Capture One, and PaintShop Pro / AfterShot Pro. And for video there are far more competitors - Avid, DaVinci Resolve, and Final Cut are all competing in the same arena. And those are just the three of each that are on the top of my head.
Interoperability like that is really important in video, but it's not needed at scale, and that's why people are more than willing to replace Adobe's tools when outside massive projects. Lightroom is a particularly notable failure for Adobe; people are still buying it because they have that much momentum (mostly because it's bundled with Photoshop), but photographers have long complained about it's shortcomings. Lightroom is so bad that Adobe at one point decided they were going to rewrite it. But then they released it early, so the new Lightroom didn't have all the features and was generally incompatible with Lightroom classic. Today, years later, they don't have one good full-featured batch photo editor, they have two buggy and/or incomplete batch photo editors.
Other specific tools have also fallen from grace. There are many alternative options for Illustrator, for instance. And even though there isn't a lot of competition in the 2D computer animation space, Flash is no longer the favorite; many studios are using tools like Toon Boom Harmony. But these are all outside my area of expertise.
I can't even begin to comment on what you said about Adobe Media Encoder. I'm not in that industry right now, so I can't tell you what professionals think about it. If you are talking about it being the best, that's honestly far too big of a topic, and we'd be straying too far away from the original. What I can tell you is that I highly doubt that is is the best video encoder. For H.264, x264 is generally considered to offer the best quality. I actually tried googling to find comparisons since none of them ever seem to bother with Adobe and the only one I could find was this extremely subjective comparison. And as far as comprehensiveness goes, FFMPEG beats every other alternative by miles.
Your answer may be technically correct but is not informed by practice.
This is enough to tell me you're coming from a technical/technological background. This is not about that target audience.
Odd cases do exist, but if you tell the average video editor to use the command line they'll laugh in your face. You can send videos to Media Encoder using one of its numerous widely accepted presets directly from Premiere and get on with your life.
I do professional photography in my current job and I was previously an apprentice with a freelance video producer. I know what I'm talking about. And I'm extremely insulted that you just skimmed through everything I said and dismissed everything, especially since I took the extra time to try to find out how accurate your completely unsubstantated statement about the quality of Adobe's Media Encoder was.
Sometimes I post more than one answer to the same comment, especially when they are long. I probably will do that here.
Even so, everyone has different priorities and time constraints and it is not always possible to give a timely and long answer to a long comment. This does not mean that I necessarily "skimmed" your comment. I don't know how you can establish that. I merely gave a general impression and directly addressed a small portion of it. I'm sorry if you feel that is insufficient.
If you don't have the time to address what I have to say, then don't reply and I will completely understand. When you only respond to a small part of a larger message it makes it appear that you don't care about anything else I had to say and are just trying to get the last word in, especially when it's a negative comment.
When you are responding to a conversation, it is normal to either agree, disagree, or offer a different perspective. But you completely ignored most of what I wrote and that seemingly earnest dismissiveness is more offensive to me than people who are actively trying to troll.
I understand. Sorry about that.
It's because they don't sell monthly subscriptions, they sell "annual subscriptions billed monthly".
Because nothing demonstrates the flexibility of a subscription service more than one year minimum contracts.
Sure, I understand it was a yearly sub payed monthly, and so them charging me the remaining fees for the months I had left, that I agreed to pay beforehand, is totally understandable... but them charging me an additional $50 extra on top of that is fucking ridiculous. It's greedy AF and makes me never want to give them another dime, despite being a customer of theirs for decades.
I canceled annually paid services before, and more than once they reimbursed me for the remaining months I would not use without any extra charge.
I suppose they're not obligated to do that, but it makes sense and is a nice way to treat customers. Adobe could do the same.
Yeah, they could, and if they had I likely would have gone back to CC again at some point too, so it makes sense from a customer retention perspective for them to do that. And I'm sure I could have contacted support, disputed the charge, and they might have given me a refund... but I figured if they want the $50 that badly they can have it. It will just be the last they ever get from me though.
It actually happened:
And filling bug for it was FAR from trivial.
I don't disagree with anything here. Nothing really compares to the integration between Premiere and AfterEffects. DaVinci Resolve is full-featured professional software, but I've never run it on Linux, and I recall having problems installing it even on Windows, where for some reason it couldn't detect my GPU and wouldn't run without hardware acceleration. I suppose if you pay, that's what their service contract covers, but still.
One thing I didn't see you mention though is Lightworks, which is another professional-grade NLE for linux. I can't imagine it'll beat the windows experience, but it's one more thing to try.
I did try Lightworks. I do not consider it professional-grade, but I understand others can have different opinions.
I mean, I suppose professionals CAN use, but I just never saw anyone doing. It was very unstable anyway.
And I dislike its timeline metaphor. It seems like every program want's to innovate when it comes to that and this is just tiresome.
Apparently professionals do use it, and it's been used to edit a lot of very popular movies, including Pulp Fiction and Wolf of Wall Street:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightworks#Use_in_films_and_TV_series
And apparently it won a primetime emmy award in 2017 which I find odd:
https://www.editshare.com/news/pr-emmy-award
Personally I have no horse in this race. I'm not a videographer, and can't say what's good or bad about it. I just do know it's somewhat widely used in industry.
As for their "innovation" they started in 1989 and basically invented nonlinear video editing. They've been using that terminology for 31 years, so I think they get a pass. Lightworks had been on the market 15 years before Premiere, Resolve, or Final Cut existed. It's older than Amiga Video Toaster. The only NLE I can think of that's been around that long is Avid Media Composer.
The problem is that something like Premiere does a lot more, and has great integration with the Adobe pack, so it makes sense both to large studios and individual professionals. Lightworks probably make more sense for studios because they have more specialized professionals, so an individual tool that does just the editing makes more sense. Besides, with beefier machines, exporting to other programs to ingest is a breeze... if I just have a single PC or Mac, avoiding internal rendering at all costs makes more sense and that's what Adobe provides.
In sum: individuals usually have terribly shorter deadlines, less structure and rendering power.
Even so: the majority, including studios, still uses Adobe and Apple.
If I remember correctly, mrbig also requested help fairly recently with picking out low-budget computer hardware, so I'd guess he's probably not trying to run these programs on anything even slightly comparable to the hardware that major studios give their editors.
A lot of the complaints about crashing and instability could easily be related to trying to use hardware that's far weaker than the "typical" user of professional editing software.
I ended up picking up a computer that, while far from beefy - from a gamerz point of view - is more than capable of running these programs.
I’ve run Premiere on weaker machines anyway.
I understand.
I did not mean I dislike the timeline metaphor, I dislike in iteration on the current version.
But Lightworks probably works better on Windows and Mac. I did not have luck on Linux.
I tried OpenShot. Crashes as the eye can see. But the way I test these programs probably stretches them quite a bit. It's probably fine for home videos.
I'd argue that, if one's seriously pursuing something that requires heavy, professional-grade video editing, the only choice is between using proprietary software or not doing a good job at all.
Unless for a gifted programmer/editor with a very unique workflow.
You could also do it if you didn't have a deadline. With enough time, I suppose you could edit a feature-film on any platform.
I think the Madagascar movies are made entirely on Linux.
Well you're not alone. A few years ago Disney did a presentation at SIGGRAPH where they discussed the tools they use. They use a lot of custom rendering software written for Linux and they really really wanted to be able to switch to Gimp from Photoshop because the licenses (subscriptions, whatever) were so expensive. They tried it and decided it was better to just pay for Photoshop, it was that bad.
Source please.
I can understand why a big company like Disney would have problems integrating GIMP into their workflows; Adobe spends a lot of money to make sure their software stays as a de-facto standard. It's going to cost more to train people to use new tools than it does to simply pay for the tools they already know.
Possibly. But Adobe licenses are expensive. Maybe they did the math.
That's why I wanted the source; there's always more to the story.
I tried searching but there are too many results. @joplin, just a year would be helpful.
Oh man, I go frequently, so don't remember off the top of my head. Looking at my notes, I've attended in 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2019. I attended earlier conferences, too, but I suspect it was in one of those 4. I don't recall the focus of the talk, whether it was specifically about using Open Source or whether it was just generally about their rendering pipeline. Sorry I don't have more specifics, but that story really stuck in my mind.
Yes. On that subject, I think this other comment was spot on.
I found Resolve pretty crashy on Windows too, actually. But those issues aside, it seemed like really great software. I'd definitely like to try it out on Linux as well.
I did. Crashy and very hard to install.
There are a lot of people and studios who use Krita and Blender professionally.
There are some tools who are used professionally in Linux, there are others on Mac and others on Windows. I think each system has more focus on some kind of tools.
Linux is made by geeks so naturally it's where it shines.
Professional (and paid) software are made to make a profit and there is no profit in making video editing software for Linux. It's the same with games.