Video editing app OpenShot hopes to make 2018 a blockbuster year for fans of open source media creation.
Project lead Jonathan Thomas writes in a blog post that he wants 2018: “…to be OpenShot’s best year ever, solving any remaining stability issues [and] introducing huge improvements to the UI, animation and editing workflows”.
He also hopes to introduce new video and audio effects, improve documentation, and create more video tutorials to help “bring OpenShot to as many people as possible.”
Open—andthencrash—Shot
Although encouraging to hear that “solving […] stability issues” is on the to-do list, do claims of Better Than Ever™ performance lead to disappointment in practice?
After all, each new release of OpenShot tends to come with some assurance of “vastly improved stability” or thereof, and yet crashes, farts, or slows down as soon as you start doing anything interesting with it.
Less OpenShot, and more OpenAndThenCrashShot!
But don’t mistake me; my love/hate relationship with the editor comes from a good place. I want to love this app. I love video editing, and I love open-source. Kdenlive, for example, is one of my favourite apps on any OS anywhere.
So it’s frustrating that the app is always promising stability, yet rarely delivering it.
OpenShot has potential to be a kind of Linux equivalent to Apple’s iMovie: capable, user-friendly, and well suited to basic video editing tasks.
OpenShot 2018 Ideas
I should point out that what follows is simple a list of “ideas” of things Jonathan would like to see in OpenShot, not a list of development commitments.
- Improved Stability
- Improved Transform and Preview
- Keyframe origin points for transform and rotation
- Faster Image Sequence Reader
- UI Improvements & timeline themes
- Interactive Keyframe Curves on the timeline
- More Effects
- 32-bit Windows builds
- More video tutorials
If OpenShot devs can deliver even a fraction of the things on this list of “favorite ideas” the editor it could easily find spoken in the same breath as The GIMP and LibreOffice when people recommended cross-platform “alternatives” to well-known proprietary apps.