OpenShot Basics

    The developer of OpenShot has made a commitment to stick with three basic criteria for his application they are: easy to use, stable, powerful. Well Jonathon has done just that, I would recommend this program to an average pc user, it has been stable since before 1.0, and with the compositing feature and high definition capability it is just as powerful as any proprietary video editor. In fact I'd argue that it gets more power from the hardware seeing as it as a native Linux application.
    Fun fact; if you go to Pixar's website to purchase software for digital animation you can choose between Linux, Mac-OSX and Windows, and chances are the server farms are all running Linux. Although the real cool thing is that one of the artists (Windows clients) can connect to the server (Linux), and have it take care of its' processing needs.

     Here is a quick demonstration of using OpenShot. In the video you will see adding files to the time-line, zooming in and out in the time-line, using layers, adding transitions creating a title and credits, and exporting. This was made with version 0.8.2, the current release is 1.2 and has made exporting simpler, and added an easy way to add 3d text.

Screencast of OpenShot 0.8.2 from Jonathan Thomas on Vimeo.

     As seen above this software is really simple, but the use of layers and compositing the potential to create something amazing is there. Look forward to more on OpenShot