Yeah but does it crash incessantly?

Or black frames or replace footage? Or has it got its own gotchas?

It is a game changer in that it further lowers the cost of entry into video editing. I know that my experience and talent can keep me in business, but the democratization of video making it harder to compete. That 90th birthday celebration will be edited by a doting great grandson instead of me. It won't be as cool and the music will be from itunes, but the family will be satisfied.

Fred

when i worked in film many, many years ago lightworks (along with heavyworks) WAS the defacto standard. i never used it, but watched season editors using it and heard their praise of its 'film' tools.

with things as they are, i might just revisit it ;-)

The free version won't handle the video formats I use regularly.

Taking a look I see it is open source and Free. Interface looks like it'll take a while to adapt to for my aged eyes.

Update:
Holly crap is it very unfriendly compared to Vegas.

Nuff said

I've heard people that have been in the industry for decades speak of it with great respect.

Anyways I just had my account activated, one cannot argue with the price however as has been hinted at for a lot of the common video formats you do have to pay for 3rd party support so ultimately it might not be all that cheap.

On the upside this could be a good model IF it all hangs together OK.


Bob.

From what I can determine Lightworks does not support AVCHD files unless they are transcoded. This is a deal breaker for me.

lightworks a game changer? i wish i could find a place to lay money on this cuz it ain't gonna happen.

I downloaded it for grins. Incredibly non-intuitive, clunky. For instance, you import a file into a bin. Can you drag the file from the bin to the timeline? - NO. You have to click on Insert. Then, if you have two clips on the timeline, can you overlap them to create a simple crossfade? Nope. Geez. Just basic stuff is a pain.

Dead on arrival.

Mike

AVCHD and many other codecs will be issued with the release version in 4 weeks, till then I have had great luck using it with cineform (no black frames). It is not intitutive but it doesn't crash, automatically backs up every key stroke and is optimized for many people working on the same project at once (multiple edits). It's hard to learn but if Scorese uses it I'll give it a fling. More drag and drop features in four weeks.
Just sayin.

Only had a very brief play with it but so far impressed.
I tried to import XDCAM MXF, I knew it shouldn't work as the codec is unsupported. Yet it read the wrapper correctly and gave me a "Codec unsupported" message in the import list. Vegas would have probably just crashed or done something unpredictable, certainly it wouldn't have said anything.
I tried to import 29.97fps video from my Chinavision camera, fair enough, didn't like that as the project was set to 25fps, another improvement over Vegas.
I imported 25fps video from the same camera, that worked just fine. So H.264 AVI files, no problem.
Audio mixer console looks the goods, uses the matrix switch paradigm to assign channels to buses etc. Old, simple, elegant and intuitive.
It has Racks and Bins, them I can relate to, why doesn't Vegas?
I like the "room" concept.

Not that impressed with the look of the interface but that is only dross, the basic guts looks excellent and the bells and whistles are easily added. Obviously not everyones cup of tea but for cutting a feature length production with multiple editors certainly a very serious contender and at the price, hard to beat.

Bob.

It can read the timecode and reel name in quicktime files. That's an improvement over Vegas.

<Time passes..> On the other hand, it looks like it can't read the timecode in Vegas' DV files.

"The real Game Changer" has been released today
http://www.lwks.com/

What is the secret to creating an account... I get unspecified errors and no activation e-mail.

Well if there's one thing I've become aware of it's that if someone uses the word "game changer" on the forums they most likely have no idea what they are talking about. And am I the only one who caught that the person who posted this set up an account just to post this? Nicely played "royfel", if I was going to make such a idiotic statement I'd want to be anonymous too.

Moving on.

- Ray
Underground Planet

I was one of the first 100 to sign up before the open source edition came out last year. I had seen (the real) Lightworks in the past running on dedicated, and pretty expensive hardware. I was excited on the day it was released. What a nightmare! As with so many NLE's, this "going native" trend is a major programming obstacle to them. My worst Vegas experiences were like heaven compared to any session where I tried to accomplish something in Lightworks. I stayed on the forums, learned which codecs wouldn't work, learned all sorts of workarounds for the simplest of tasks, and after a couple of weeks of torture came to the conclusion: even being free this is too expensive. If I were payed to use it, I would retire.
And I'll add I was running it on a system that exceeds all their requirements and Vegas ran smoothly on it. I would never jump through the hardware/software hoops I have with Vegas for this piece of (software) Just my humble opinion.

Edit: In all fairness, I was so disappointed with the constant crashing, I've never given it a second chance and given it was a public beta type of thing probably should have. I never made it past the update that I think occurred during the first month of release. If it's evolved in the way a project of this nature should, my feelings are probably no longer valid.

Just looking at the timeline is an ugly jumble. I'd also hate to try editing without thumbnails and waveforms. Ewwwwww.

WTF is up with the workflow?
Cumbersome as all get out!

i think, though mostly from memory of seeing film editors working with it, that lightwave is NOT really what we expect an nle to be but much more a tool for film editors.

i agree with all the negative comments about the interface, but then again, i'm not a film editor who would be very much at home with bins, rooms, etc.,

as for the workflow - i gather it's now got a few bells and whistles, but from what i remember audio was always mixed / sweetened separately, and as for fx, colour grading, etc., that too was AFTER the main edit, which is what lightworks, along with heavy works excelled at.

I'm OK with doing effects, audio, & everything AFTER the main edit because even though I may do most all those things in the NLE... I do them AFTER I lock picture/story.
(why would you ever want to waste time fixing footage or audio that will not be used?)

They should be offering it for FREE as the Lightworks workflow is just plain weird. I can't see anyone switching from any of the modern NLE's to go with the awkward flow of Lightworks. Especially if they had to pay for it. Lightworks can neither compare to the interaction of CS6 nor compete with the power and ease of use offered by Vegas. At it's current version, I'd rather go back to Media100 before Lightworks.

Even if you're shooting Film... don't you have to make it Digital to edit it on a computer?
At that point, why on Earth would you go with Lightworks? It's just too slow with it's workflow being so 'out of the norm'. 'Simple' things in other NLE's are Cumbersome & Awkward in Lightworks.

I can only see it as a Game Changer in the same sense that iFCP, iMovie Pro, FCPx (whatever it's called) was.

But naturally, wherever the industry goes... I'll follow.
After all, I did purchase a Mac years ago because FCP was all the rage. I now find myself using said Mac to run Windows and all the NLE's associated. - I sure do miss the FxFactory plugins though.

"Even if you're shooting Film... don't you have to make it Digital to edit it on a computer?"

Yes, but you also have to deal with footage / files from the CGI, VFX and compositing teams. You also have editors and sub editors all working on the one project at once. I suspect from my very brief look at it, that is where its power lies. the ability to share assets online from backend servers with muliple desks / rooms all working together.

I also suspect a full blown setup for a couple of desks is going to cost very serious money by the time you factor in the backend hardware you'd easily blow $50K and then there's the SLAs from the support house to keep everything humming along.

Bob.