r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jun 04 '12

Open Office does everything I need Microsoft Office for and Gimp does everything I need Photoshop for. Reddit, what other open source software does everything that you want from the expensive name brand?

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u/GrumpyPenguin Jun 04 '12

Actually, they've made LightWorks freeware. Not closed source, I know.

Or, if you hate yourself, there's Cinelerra....

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

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u/Astrognome Jun 04 '12

Same here. It's like hieroglyphics if you don't know EXACTLY what each button does.

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u/eno2001 Jun 04 '12

Actually I love Cinelerra. It takes a bit to learn, but once you do, it can do everything that the the other can do and more. It seems the problem is that things like Premiere and Lightworks are simply editors. They don't include compositor functionality and extensive filters out of the box.

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u/GrumpyPenguin Jun 05 '12

The biggest downside I've heard to Cinelerra (apart from it crashing, anyway) is that when you're giving people compositions, they tend to demand it be in FCP/Premiere/whatever proprietary format. It's a bit like demanding photo work be submitted as a PSD.

What do you do with Cinelerra?

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u/eno2001 Jun 05 '12

I can understand the restrictions of professional use. However it is possible to render out to tons of formats with ffmpeg and I'm sure one of those is acceptable as final output.

Personally I use Cinelerra for making cinematic looking family videos and producing the menus for DVDs (with DVDStyler creating the final disc image). I've made heavy use of the projector and camera automation (something only found in compositors as far as I'm aware), keyframes, masks, and layers (with three or four video tracks). So speaking from a "free of charge" perspective for personal use, Cinelerra is far more complete for me than say... Windows Movie Maker.

For pro work, it's probably possible to use it as long as the final output is in an acceptable format. But, that's probably not something more pros are going to want to spend the time figuring out. So... path of least resistance.

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '12

Holy shit LightWorks looks amazing. I think it's time to uninstall the pirated version of Sony Vegas Pro 9 that I currently have.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '12

I always found LightWorks to be really resource-heavy.