LightWorks Free Editor

[PerroneFord]

I'm pretty sure his beef is that 1) it's not only not fully-functional, it's seriously flawed, and 2) it's nowhere close to being on par with much of anything.

Yep, pretty much. Bugs from a beta I can live with. Bugs from a mature program (like Vegas and Avid) I can live with if they aren't show stoppers. Spending FOUR HOURS trying to import a DV file and a MOV that is on the "supported files" list is NOT ok. Particularly when I can open those same files on the SAME MACHINE in Vegas, Mpeg Streamclip, Prism, G-Spot, and every other video utility I've installed in the past 5 years.

Launching a beta that won't even fireup without a workaround is incredibly poor. As others on their forums have mentioned, it reflects very poorly on the company behind this product. Heck we used programs like VLC in beta for years. I used it in production environemts. Right next to my XDCam to Avid beta freeware that uses Avisynth in the background. No support for DNxHD is borderline laughable when the codec is free to download to the WORLD, and the code is GIVEN AWAY by Avid expressly to support products like this. Even my freeware supports DNxHD.

Editshare/Lightworks owes me nothing. And that's exactly what they'll get from me, and from the community based on this release.

 

[stip]

Ok

 

[Al MacLeod]

After looking at a FULL page of productions and media producers that used Lightworks to produce them I thought I was going to get a mature software
package capable of wonders for free!
A story as old as time my friends...just in time for Christmas.
A silver lining though...they didn't snatch any gold coins from my grasp!
I'm still searching for the moral lesson here....

 

[msorrels]

I don't think what they are giving away is the same product they had been selling. It is a rewrite/rework/resomething. And when they realized that the development wasn't working out they decided to do a open source hail mary. Of course they haven't even done that right (if they don't release the source code it's not very open). Plus from the license agreement they make you agree to in order to install I suspect they are going to have to use a custom open source license. Which isn't going to get them much interest from developers. I also can't imagine how they can open source it and also sell adds-ons that read DNxHD. It shouldn't take long for someone like me to create a add-on that reads Quicktime files. Which would kind of kill their add-on market (except for formats that require patent licenses).

It doesn't really matter though, if it had been viable I might have been interested, but as things stand I think it's pretty clear why they are giving it away.