Lightworks Open Source Editing Evolves, for a Fee

When the slowly fading Lightworks editing platform was revived by EditShare in 2009, it seemed a noble but potentially futile act. Still beloved by legendary editors like Thelma Schoonmaker and several other Oscar-nominees, Lightworks’ serious original cred had lost too much ground to Avid, Final Cut Pro and Premiere. But since EditShare introduced an open-source version of the Lightworks software last May, some 140,000 users worldwide signed up, giving them access to a basic license and the primary Lightworks online community for free. EditShare’s latest update, announced yesterday at IBC, has added some small fees to the equation but also a number of valuable features that users need to complete and share professional work.

The newly expanded access, which will cost educational members $30 per year and pro users $60 per year, includes native support of popular codecs from ProRes and R3D to DPX, AVC-Intra and XDCAM. The fees, the company explains, were added simply to cover the cost of licensing these codecs from the various manufacturers who developed them. (Avid DNxHD is the only exception to the list, and will cost members an additional one-time fee of $55.)
 
Lightworks’ paid membership features extend beyond formats to include a native, real-time titling tool with GPU-based rendering acceleration and stereo 3D support. Pro and educational users will also now be able to work with EDL, AAF (including Avid and ProTools presets) and OMF and share projects through permission controls. As you might expect, EditShare has optimized Lightworks to better integrate with Flow and Ark, its asset management and archiving applications. The software also now works with I/O devices from Matrox and Blackmagic Design (those from AJA and DVS will come next year) and supports the Tangent TUBE protocol that enables Tangent’s Element control panels.

New — and Original — Control Surfaces

EditShare has created its own control surface, a $140 keyboard (above) with dedicated functions keys and popular shortcuts. A new version of the original Lightworks Console will also be available for those old-school adherents to an earlier way of editing. It will list for $2,800 and can be purchased, as can the keyboard, through a dedicated Lightworks Web store starting in late November. As far as I can tell, the store doesn’t exist yet, so stay tuned.

EditShare, as it name implies, is not afraid of sharing and has openly posted its roadmap for the Lightworks project from the start. If the company can deliver on its promises, you can first expect Mac OS X, Linux and Windows versions of Lightworks by the end of the year, and in early 2012, 64-bit and AJA device support, new effects, remote editing and an "advanced RED toolset." The Mac OSX and Linux development, in particular, has brought with it the ancillary task of working with third-party software plug-in and hardware manufacturers to iron out interoperability. That has slowed the development cycle somewhat, says EditShare’s European/Middle East/Africa managing director, James Richings, pushing the last-phase roll outs of the project into next year.

For more information: www.editshare.com