I started using Ubuntu Linux as my desktop near the end of 2004 and tried to help the PiTiVi project, because it was the most promising video editor project out there. Not a lot has happened since. Well yes, a lot has happened on the gstreamer front. PiTiVi is a nice video player now (sorry). But it can’t even be used for the most basic stuff of video editing. Sadly I am not a programmer by trade, or I would have made it happen.

It is a pleasure to see that my mockups I did about a year ago for PiTiVi were noticed and mentioned somewhere in planet gnome. I would also heartily recommend Eugenia’s excellent mockup (and similar to mine somewhat, in the sense that we both ripped the ideas out of Vegas Video’s excellent user interface)

my good old mockup for pitivi

John Palmieri also rants a little about the sad state of video editors in gnome. The only two who I consider have hope are KDEnlive and PiTiVi, but PiTiVi is ridiculously undermanned.

As Eugenia said, this is not a one-man job, neither a buddy-created application. It requires at least 10 engineers who know what the hell they are doing, and they are sitting next to each other. Which is why this can only be delivered in any user-friendly fashion by Red Hat/Novell/Ubuntu (or Google, if they want to be more helpful to Linux users). It will take 2 years to get there, $100,000×10×2=2 million USD. That’s the minimum you need to develop such an app (without counting any license fees, we would assume we just use these codecs the way we use them now on Linux: for free). In a more practical, real-life scenario, you need more engineers and at least $5 mil.

Bingo. Chapeau. You nailed it. The elephant in the room.

On a more positive note, thanks to Carlos for bringing composited eye-candy to the “mouse cursor locator” in GNOME 2.21.x: