The Lightworks video editor is one of a number of professional-leaning media tools now available for Linux, and over the next year it’s going to get even better.
That’s according to EditShare, the company behind the free (but not open-source) app. They’ve shared details on their plans for 2019, including a tease of a brand new version.
First up, Lightworks 14.6. This is expected to enter public beta in the next few weeks. It will be final major release in the 14.x cycle.
It will feature:
- Support for 16-bit & 32-bit floating point GPU precision on Linux
- Improved still image handling
- HD overlay in vectorscope
- “Libraries” heading in Content Manager
- Improvements to Audio Network integration
- Improvements to varispeed in Flexible layout
- Timeline tab added beneath Viewer on Log and Edit tabs
- Option to generate .lvix seek files locally
- Scrollbars added to sequence timelines for video and audio tracks
- UHD Media added to the Media>Transcoding tab
- Ability to select segments on the sequence timeline
- Ability to continue an interrupted transcode task
- Added ‘selected segments’ to the sequence copy panel
- Right-click an Effect node to now choose ‘Replace with >’
- Right click the video routing panel to add a new node
A pretty chock list, isn’t it?
It’ll be interesting to see how many of the features ranked above are made available to ‘free’ users, and which are kept for Lightworks Pro license payers.
Lightworks 15.0
Looking further ahead in the year there’s Lightworks 15.0 to look forward to. The finalised set of features targeting the next major release remains up in the air, but Editshare’s Matt Sanford says we can look forward to:
- Support for device import (SD cards, usb sticks, etc)
- Support for OFX plugins
- Support for custom output formats
- Support for additional social media platforms
- Support for audio FX plugins
Let’s hope a bit of extra UI spit and polish is included too!
Have you tried Lightworks?
Not used Lightworks before? You’re not alone. Despite being a “pro” tool it’s rarely spotlighted in roundups of the best Linux software.
If you’re keen to try it — a Lightworks download costs an e-mail address, but is otherwise free to use — check out this decent introduction to the most recent major release. It gives a great overview of how Lightworks works, what its key features are, and teases some of its more advanced capabilities.