I'm one of many editors who just got their ass handed to them by Apple, and I'm looking at Lightworks as a potential future Final Cut replacement in my workflow. Avid's too expensive for me and I hate Premiere's interface, but Lightworks could be right down my alley.

Here's the thing: right now, I'm kind of queasy about climbing onto a new platform unless I can be sure that the development environment is thriving. I don't want to get dumped again the way Apple just dumped all their pro editors.

I just posted a question about Lightworks in the Creative COW forum, and here's the response I got:

"What do you think? Given a year or so of development, will Lightworks be a viable alternative to FCP?"

Andrew, I feel your pain on the whole FCP X boondoggle.

The beta release for the PC version has been out for a while, but there has been no action on this board. I don't know what to make of that.

If all you're looking to replace is FC and not the entire suite, it might be a good choice if it ever comes out for Mac, but with so little info it is really hard to say.

The one question I have is how much is open source, and how much will end up being some type of plugin you have to buy to get certain functionality. I'm a little suspicious since Lightworks is being run by a business, and not a foundation like Blender is. The story behind how Blender came to be an open source program is documented, and makes sense. I don't no what editshare's motivation is behind 'giving away' Lightworks. It would be nice to hear from them, or at least someone familiar with the situation.

As far as Lightworks is concerned, I'm interested in trying it out, and have been waiting. My biggest concerns is that it won't disrupt my system (I'll do a clone before install just in case) and wondering about support and updates. This would seem to be the most likely issue since there isn't a revenue stream associated with it and not a lot of motivation. And the release date is behind the promised date. The web site is also very static. These things combined make me think this is a low priority project for them.

Anyone here care to address any of these concerns? Lightworks looks really great and I want to believe, but this post does give me pause.

First of all, welcome!

If you're in any doubt as to the health of the Lightworks project, just browse through this incredibly active forum. Whatever the ultimate destiny of Lightworks, surely the fact that it's owners, Editshare, have a paid, full-time team of developers working on it (and forum moderators, etc) must tell you that they're serious about it. As for timescales - there's been a lot of activity behind the scenes, which is why on the surface things might seem slow, but rest assured things are moving in a very positive direction.

Why would Editshare give it away? I don't know any more than you do, except to note that since Editshare provides the means for editors to work together (amongst their ever more encompassing product range), the more editors there are, the more the need for a collaborative system.

Remember, though, that this is a beta product at this stage, and that the normal disclaimers apply. It's also the case that Codec support is thin at the moment, because good codecs normally require paying for, and this doesn't sit well with a free product. But this will improve in the near future.

So sit back and enjoy Lightworks, and be prepared for something that's different from anything you've seen before. It might be frustrating as you learn it, but if you do, you'll be rewarded with a top-end, incredibly fast editor, that didn't cost a cent/penny/dinar/euro/etc

agingeri wrote:
I don't want to discourage you from Lightworks, because it's a great editor. However you might like to check out the Videoguys website. They still have the Avid crossgrade for $995US. That will run on your Mac, which means less of a learning curve.

Hope that is of some interest to you.

I know this was well intended, but this is on the verge of being a bit too much of a commercial recommendation to be allowed on the forum, but I'm leaving it up because it was a genuine effort to be helpful.

BTW - Avid only has less of a learning curve than Lightworks if you already know how it. It's a good illustration of how every software (Lightworks and Avid included) have their own way of doing things.

Thanks for the responses!

Yeah, I know that something like Avid or Premiere would be a more full-featured platform as it stands now, but I hate their interfaces--and I've really gotten tired of being jerked around by closed-source developers. I really like what I've seen of Lightworks so far--it's not very usable in its current version, but I see a lot of promise for it--and I know that a lot of other (former) Final Cut users are eying Lightworks as a potential replacement by the time Final Cut 7 gets too old to be usable.

As a side note: as you said, it just happened that Apple, one of the major vendors of professional editing software, with a large share of the pro market, left its customers in the dust.

The bottom line: there is no guarantee in this world. Tomorrow EditShare might get bought by some company whose board decides Lightworks is a waste of time. BTW, the same can happen to Avid. Or remember what happened to FreeHand (the illustration program) when Adobe bought Macromedia. Or how the same Apple lost interest in Shake and killed it.

So I think you should choose what you think it's best for now and go on with your projects. Lightworks way of working is absolutely superb IMO, but you know better what works for you.

Dragos