14 DAY TRIAL // Pitivi, a free and open source video editor for the Linux platform based on the GStreamer multimedia framework, is now looking for some additional funding that will help its developers pass the 1.0 mark.
There are very few free non-linear video editors for the Linux platform, and Pitivi is most certainly one of the best ones around. It's been in development for a long time, and the changes and features have been trickling in with each new version.
Now, the developers of Pitivi are working very hard to raise the money necessary to get their software past the 1.0 mark and provide a truly professional non-linear video editor for the Linux community.
The latest version of Pitivi was 0.92, released only a few months ago. The developers are saying that the infrastructure for a more powerful application is already in place, and they only need the funding to finish what has already been started.
“Now that we have all the infrastucture in place on the different fronts (quality assurance, proper separation and modularization of the codebases, and a massive cleanup of Pitivi's codebase with hundreds of issues solved in the 0.91 series and newer — see the various releases) and a healthy community of individuals and companies working with us, we believe now is the perfect time to think bigger,” reads the announcement from the Pitivi developers.
A very clear roadmap has been published, which details every step of the way and explains exactly how the money will be spent.
The funds will go into three major categories. The first one is Quality Assurance, which means that daily build packages will be provided in the repositories for all the major Linux distributions, which include Fedora, RHEL, Debian, and Ubuntu.
Secondly, a massive bug fixing effort will have to take place. Every new feature that is implemented will most likely generate problems. Having a 1.0 version means that you need to squash as many bugs as possible.
Thirdly, users and developers will need first-grade documentation for the application and dedicated people will have to work on this problem.
Pitivi developers also broke down to the dollar the implementation cost for every new feature, like dedicated UIs for multi cam editing, interfacing with a bpm detector, hardware-accelerated decoding and encoding, color correction, copy/paste, storyboard mode, and so on.
The funding campaign aims for $48,000 (€35,000) for the 1.0 version and $137,000 (€100,000) for the awesome version. There is no time limit, and even the smallest contribution can help.
Keep in mind that Pitivi is free and it will remain that way forever.