If sound editing software could be considered expensive, then video editing is off the scale. You can spend anywhere between $500-1000 buying the industry standard suites for editing and special effects. The Jahkasha project is hoping to change all that. The suite is once again open source, but this is I would say a less well developed piece of software. Sometimes open source can be a good thing, other times it’s like throwing a sausage sandwich amongst a pack of wild dogs and saying divide the work equally and play nice.

The suite is divided into Animation, Effects, Editing, Paint and Text Character Generator. Animation seems to refer to what I’d call Motion Graphics, that is to say something which can generate animated titles for movies and TV. It seems to work pretty fast, but then it is supposed to be real-time. I imagine to be truly real-timewhen you are crunching HDV footage would require a pretty meaty computer. Effects seems to be some kind of DVE or transitions editor, where you make one video transit into another by flipping the video, changing its shape or some other kind of snazzy “kung fu” move like that. The paint part of the package is a bit like Photoshop version 1. There’s only really basic tools in there. The Text generator was nice, but lacked a few preset moves, which would have been really nice. The video editor seemed nice and precise but I couldn’t load any of the videos I had on hand to test it out fully, so I have no idea what formats it can handle. This is one of those things it would be nice to document well.

On the up side I did get the extremely strong impression that under the hood the software driving the graphics and video handling was very fast. Someone has worked really hard on this, and I get the feeling when it’s a bit further down its production cycle you are going to see some really excellent professional standard edits and shows coming out of this suite. Downsides? Okay it’s free so in complaining I feel a bit like the guest who after you buy him dinner says, “thanks anyway but the chicken was dry and the sauce was too salty”, but Jahshaka seems a bit homebuilt to me as yet. A big minus is there should be more feedback in the interface, i.e. a message saying “Jahshaka can’t load that file format“ rather than just sitting there and not doing anything.

That said it is a HUGELY ambitious project and I think the developers are doing a wonderful job with what they have. Once the project has developed a bit more it will actually start being useful for real work. I can see a niche with people making video podcasts or low budget movies.

Overall I think it’s amazing that anyone would even try to do this so I’m fully behind it in that sense.If you are going to get it expecting it to be Final Cut Studio or Adobe Premiere,think again. But wait six months because that could all change.

For more details and a download go to http://www.jahshaka.org/.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 5:25 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.