A new beta build of popular open source video editor OpenShot is available for testing.
It’s the first major release of the non-linear video editing tool in three years, and the first to arrive since the project successfully met its funding goal in the OpenShot Kickstarter campaign held in 2013.
The Linux video editing landscape has changed considerably since then.
We’ve seen the launch of professional-grade and pseudo-open source Lightworks video editor, huge improvements made to Qt-based Kdenlive, and even user-friendly Pitivi hasn’t been shy in pushing forward.
No one app suits everyone, and for this reason if no other it is great to see OpenShot back.
New Features in OpenShot 2.0
Many, many new features and improvements debut in this beta candidate – far too many to comprehensively list in great detail.
Since we aim to be helpful we’ve trawled through the change-log to pull out the following key new features in OpenShot 2.0:
- Timeline context menus (e.g., copy/paste, fade, animate, time effects)
- Split Clip tool (this lets you ‘cut’ a video file in to chunks to use in a project
- ‘Add to Timeline’ feature (a way to batch add videos or images to timeline)
- Timeline fixes
- Tags (lets you tag videos with custom name, filter them)
- Improved fonts (Mac, Windows)
- Faster start up time (thanks to new cache approach)
- Title editor fixes
- Keyframe editing
- Real-time preview support
- Support for adding animated .gifs
- Video snapping improvements
- Support for custom SVG titles (drop them into /.openshot_qt/title/)
- Performance improvements to libopenshot
- Mac & Windows installers
- New video export wizard
Most of these new features have been implemented as a result of the campaign. If you chucked in a couple of dollars give yourself a pat on the back!
You can see the latest version of the video editor being demoed in this new video from OpenShot’s lead developer Jonathan Thomas.
Download OpenShot 2.0 Beta
Source packages for OpenShot 2.0 Beta are ready for download right now.
Backers of the crowdfunding campaign will receive an email link to an ‘early access’ OpenShot 2.0 Beta installer over the next day or so (or, alternatively, they can check out this link on the KickStarter page).
Beta installers for Windows, Mac and Linux will also be made public in the very near future. We’ll update this post as soon as they’re available.
It’s not yet known if Ubuntu users will be able to use the official OpenShot PPA to upgrade to the beta, or whether a new PPA will be required.
However you get to try the beta you should expect to encounter bugs, crashes and rough edges.
Did you back the OpenShot crowdfunding campaign? Are you eager to try the new version? Let us know your thoughts in the comments space below — it’s what it’s there for, after all!