Video editing software comes in all shapes and sizes — from humble, consumer- oriented tools for basic clip trimming, titling and effects; to fully featured powerhouse offerings, often bearing stratospheric prices and substantial system requirements.
Finding the right tool for a given production environment can thus be an expensive, frustrating and time-consuming process, especially when seeking a competitive mix of price and performance.
We believe a truly great creative tool cannot be designed in secret, it must be designed in open dialog with creators.
This process may be easing, however, with the development of Novacut, an Open Source video editing suite that may change the face of online video forever; and you can have a say in the features that it offers.
“We believe a truly great creative tool cannot be designed in secret,” states the Novacut website. “It must be designed in open dialog with creators.”
This ongoing dialog is resulting in a modern, professional, collaborative editor that is designed from the ground up for HDSLR cameras and that uses both local computers and the cloud for storage and rendering, with support for 64-bit, 32-bit and ARM systems.
“We have a laser focus on helping those artists who right now are leveraging HDSLR cameras to tell wonderful stories, with amazing production quality, and are doing so on shoe string budgets,” the website adds. “Storytellers must take big risks to follow their dreams, so the last thing they need is uncertainty from their creative tools [so] we think it’s only fair that we continually earn your trust.”
Novacut says that trust includes its promise to maintain backward compatibility and a transparent community-inspired development cycle, resulting in an editor that will always be free and Open Source software.
According to editor and filmmaker Christie Strong, Novacut is not just a video editor, it’s a revolution representing the future of filmmaking — a collaborative, cloud-enabled platform, created by artists, for artists.
“The ambitiousness of the project, the passion of its team and their commitment to the filmmaking community inspires me,” Strong says. “They are thinking about the entire pre- to postproduction pipeline and designing tools that empower storytellers and support the creative process from the ground up.”
With HTML 5 and the movement to bring Open Source video to the web, solutions such as Novacut may prove to be indispensible steps along the way. Get involved and try to forge new features that may benefit adult producers and their unique requirements.
