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Olive Video Editor
This article is about a type of Software used in making poops.
This article is a work in progress and so may not be ready for public viewing, and content can change at any time. You can help by contributing to it and discussing on its talk page. Olive is a free, open source video editor, released under the GPLv3 license, currently in alpha, but showing a lot of promise. It runs on Windows, macOS and even Linux. Used by not too many people in the community, only a small handful, Olive is a capable editor. Despite only being in alpha, Olive, even on low-end hardware (on Ubuntu, at least), runs very well with up to 480p footage. And if you have more high-end hardware, you could theoretically work with 1080p or higher-quality footage. It has a very similar interface to Adobe Premiere Pro and has a very similar set of features, but has some interface tweaks and features that make things a little snappier and easier to use. Mainly having to do with the versatility of its multi-select tool. If Adobe came out and said this was an old version of Premiere they scrapped, most people would probably believe them just from looking at screenshots.
Features[edit]
Olive has a surprisingly complete set of features for a piece of free, open source piece of software. It's not all the way there, but considering its current development status, it's quite remarkable. The team are so confident in the rate of development, that they say on their website (Paraphrasing here) "Disappointed that a feature you want isn't here? Check back in a month or two and chances are, we'll have it implemented".
Olive has:
- A surprising variety of default effects
- Speed control and Reverse. Of which, speed control makes for a decent alternative to pitch shifting, since Olive lacks a pitch shifter.
- Slip and slide timeline editing tools
- VST Plugin support (Untested by the writer, so how well that works is a mystery)
- Chroma/Luma keying support
- Nested sequences support and in turn, support for multiple sequences per project
- A basic, but very functional titler
- A very comprehensive animation/transformation tool.
- Can generate test bars, solid colours, sine waves and white noise from within the editor.
However[edit]
Olive is kinda buggy. Being alpha software, it isn't the most stable thing in the world. For example, keyframing for any effect only works if a clip is at 100% speed. If you want to keyframe a speed-changed clip, nest it first, then keyframe. Also, sometimes parts of the interface freeze, sometimes the program just crashes when pasting effects, sometimes it renders videos incorrectly, some effects like Gaussian blur make the editor run way slower for some reason, etc. But these bugs aren't as common as one might think, and for the most part, Olive does run with relative grace and finesse. Then there's the lack of masking, which could be a dealbreaker for some, as could the lack of more than one blend mode, very limited compositing features (Especially if you're a Vegas user) and the absolute lack of any worthwhile audio effects (That could be restored if you're willing to use Audacity).
Conclusion[edit]
If you're willing to sacrifice some functionality and tolerate the odd bug here and there, Olive can be a very good choice to make YTPs with, if you're patient and willing to get creative to circumvent some of its limitations. And combined with GIMP and Audacity, plus a program like Blender or Natron and there honestly isn't a whole lot that you can't do in Olive. It's almost on par with Final Cut Pro in terms of feature set. Again, it's still lacking in comparison and isn't optimal, since Final Cut is way more performant and stable, but Olive is still no slouch.
