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Jonathan Thomas, the creator of the OpenShot, released over the weekend a new major version of his open-source and cross-platform video editor, OpenShot 2.5.
OpenShot 2.5 is here two and a half years after the OpenShot 2.4 release, and almost a year after the OpenShot 2.4.4 point release. It’s a major update that introduces experimental hardware acceleration (encoding and decoding) support, which should greatly improve the performance of the video editor.
If you’re installing OpenShot 2.5 on a powerful computer with a capable graphics card, you should notice up to 40% performance increase. However, please keep in mind that hardware encoding and decoding is still under development, so it may not work as expected all the time.
“This can result in a huge performance improvement on some systems, but also depends on the input and output formats, and many other factors. For example, if you are using only MP4/H.264 input files, and your graphics card is supported, it can help OpenShot decode the pixel data from the video, and on the flip side, encode the pixel data back into a video,” said Jonathan Thomas.
OpenShot 2.5 also adds improvements to the performance of the keyframe system when handling long vides or when editing multiple videos at the same time. The keyframe system now delivers real-time interpolated values and no longer caches the entire value set.
OpenShot 2.5 adds support for Blender 2.8 and later
Another interesting feature in the OpenShot 2.5 release is support for importing files in the *.blend format from Blender 2.8 and later versions. Additionally, the video editor can now import and export EDL and XML files that are compatible with proprietary video editing software like Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple’s Final Cut Pro.
Among other changes, we can mention much-improved thumbnail generation by using a local HTTP server for storing the thumbnails, the ability to recover previous saves, improved auto-backup, better SVG support, improved preview window, improved video exporting, and improved privacy by disabling metrics until users opt-in to share them.
Of course, numerous bugs from previous releases have been squashed as well, and you can check out the entire changelog on the release announcement page. OpenShot 2.5 is available for download as a 64-bit AppImage binary for all GNU/Linux distributions or a source tarball.
Last updated 4 years ago
