What if someone was to make a Video oriented blender fork?

NOTE: The thread was previously titled “What if the video editor was an entirely different program?”

Okay with that out of the way,

What if someone was to recompile blender, set the video editing workspace as the default workspace, optimize the UI for video editing,etc

And the Blender Foundation had nothing to do with it

Because right now I feel blender is spreading itself too thin, while as the first few replies pointed out, taking the video editor out and making it open source is not an option

And blender is marketed as a 3D tool,
while people might not be ignorant but a lot of people who just want to edit a video nothing else will probably not really look at blender as an option

Because video editing is the 3rd to the last feature on the features list on the blender.org website

No, that’s a stupid idea, it’s not like the UI uses some standard framework like GTK+ or QT for it to be a separate program. You can’t just separate it without needing to run Blender, so why not just set the default workspace to “Video Editing” and be done with it.

Or… create a blender fork dedicated to video editing

Having the video editing take place inside of Blender allows it to easily have features specific for use with 3D.

It may actually be more work for the BF to develop it as a separate program because they would also have to create a new UI to package it in and then maintain a bridge application for data transfer.

I think that’s unnecessary as well. But I do think it would be an interesting project if someone wanted to fork out the Video sequence editor as a stand-alone. No reason to waste bf-dev time on it, though.

@Sterling the idea was that the BF to not waste time with the video editor

I had the exact same thing on my mind. Break it of, and see if there is a new group of interested persons, developers, and donors that would take it further. A video editor and a 3D-modeling app are so different that they should be different apps.

But having a suite of open source apps, that looks, and feels like a family, and play well togehther, that would be cool (but maybe not needed).
But I guess the video editor has it´s function within Blender as well, so maybe it can´t be separated?

but not for BI to put effort in to it.

but one more thing:
the commercial editors are extremely way ahead in development, and nowadays they are really cheap.
FCPX is 299 USD and Davinci Resolve is for free if you do not need 4k and some really fancy stuff out of it.

so is there really a need for a open source video editor?

but come on, think of the potential, I can’t think of a decent open source video editing program

Blender’s video editor is open source and is very good
You need to clarify your thoughts

The kind of people who would want to edit videos may not think of blender(Because blender is primarily a 3D modelling suite)
Not everyone is as ignorant as you think they are

And why would people choose it as their go-to choice for standalone video editing when Natron is well on its way to becoming the premier open source editing app?

Before you could even allow people to use the newly standalone Blender editor you would need to get it to where you can actually use it (that means creating a new UI, save/load functions, undo, ect…).

I’ve never heard of natron, is it new?

Being able to import scenes directly to the editor is great. That is one of many reasons why the vse is integrated directly into blender. I would never pull out the VSE, there’s no reason to.

Just because you don’t use a feature doesn’t mean it is useless.

Have you heard of google? go find out.

I don’t remember ever claiming that the Video editor was useless

Um… no. Compositor != Editor.

Did as soon as I replied to Ace

downloading it as we speak,
From what I can gather, it reminds me of nuke, more than say a video editor like adobe premiere.

Okay natron looks like an open source version of nuke,
it’s a compositor not a video editor

So I’m ruling out the possibility to take out the video editor out

But what if somebody created a blender fork dedicated to video editing?

Lightworks was supposed to go Open Source, but I don’t know if they ever did. OpenShot was supposed to go cross-platform but I don’t know if they ever did either.

Even though I use Blender, I’ve always found it too frustrating to use for video editing. Even configuring it the way Process Diary suggested, I found it frustrating. So, I mostly use Kdenlive instead.

Last I heard, Lightworks went commercial and now just provides a ‘free’ version with several strings and limitations attached.

A number of programs over the years start out as completely free, but that is just to obtain a userbase as the plan all along is to start charging for it.

Yeah, I was just looking over their site out of curiosity.

Lightworks Free is our zero-cost version of Lightworks available for everyone. Lightworks Free has all the power of Lightworks, allowing you to export only to MPEG-4 (Web, YouTube and Vimeo) at a maximum resolution of 720p.

Welp, guess I’m sticking with Kdenlive.

I think the main problem with blender’s video editor is not that it is integrated into a 3D application, but it is that it cannot output playable h264 video files or anything else really usable across desktop and mobile devices. If it could output this format I think more people would use and recommend it more. - And maybe even ask for a fork without the 3D side. So it would be a good strategy to first implement some consumer-friendly codecs.