Blog

I am proud to announce the newest release of OpenShot Video Editor, version 2.3! This is one of the biggest updates ever to OpenShot, and is filled with new features, performance improvements, and tons of bug fixes! 

Download OpenShot 2.3

 
Take a quick look at our release video below, which highlights some of our biggest new features.

Also, check out this awesome 2D animation created by my daughter with OpenShot 2.3 (my kids are the best testers and are experts at breaking OpenShot)!

Transform Tool

We have added a new transform tool, which allows real-time transformations in the video preview window. Right click on any clip, and choose “Transform” to enable the tool. Using your mouse, move and scale the clip as needed, all while enjoying a real-time preview. Animating the location and scale of clips has never been easier!

Zooming Improvements

Zooming in and out of the timeline, in order to increase precision of your edits, has been greatly improved. When zooming the timeline, it now centers on your mouse position, similar to image editing applications. The zoom scale is also now saved in each project file, which saves some time when jumping back into a project. When your mouse is over the timeline, hold CTRL+mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and out.

Razor Tool

Back by popular demand, the razor tool from OpenShot 1.4.3 has returned from the dead. Click on the Razor toolbar button to switch to razor mode. Now click on any clip or transition to quickly cut them (holding CTRL and SHIFT modify the razor to only keep the left or right side). Alternatively, you can cut a clip at the Playhead position by right clicking and choosing “Slice”, by using CTRL+K, or by grabbing the edge of the clip and dragging.

Improved Title Editors

Many improvements have been made to the Title Editor and Animated Title Editor. Both editors now display a grid of thumbnails, to make finding the right title easier. Save dialogs are no longer used, and instead title files are saved directly into your project folder. New “Edit Title” and “Duplicate Title” menus have been added, to assist in quickly making changes to titles.

New Preview Window

Previewing files now has its own dedicated video player, which allows for multiple video preview windows at the same time. Also, audio files render a waveform by default. The speed of previewing files is also improved, using the improvements mentioned below.

Huge Performance Improvements for Real-time Previews

Performance improvements are always a high priority, and we’ve made some really great improvements to the speed of real-time previews. We’ve also fixed some bugs related to freezes and hangs, caching improvements, frame detection, and better logic to determine the max size of our preview window, so we can optimize by not rendering images and frames larger than the preview window. The end result is the best real-time preview performance yet for OpenShot.

New Documentation

I have finally gotten around to publishing a User Guide for OpenShot 2.x. I am using the Sphinx documentation system (which is really great), and I think this will be very useful for new users, and any user who wants to get the most out of OpenShot. It is currently only available in English, but I will soon start the translation process for it.

Audio Improvements

Fixes for audio sample distribution, caching, off by 1 errors, and various frame boundary improvements (Thank you Nelson H). Also, improvements to audio device management, which is how OpenShot communicates with the audio system on each OS.

Improved Export Dialog

Export dialog has been improved to re-load the project, clear cache, and export without requiring any ties to the real-time preview system. This fixes many freezes and hangs when attempting to export, and is a much more stable approach. Also, on Linux, export progress is now displayed on the launcher icon (in Unity and other launchers).

New Windows Build Server

As you might have heard, my Windows development system (and build server) died (again)... stopping all Windows builds for a few weeks. Hard-drive and motherboard issues (and possibly other problems too). A HUGE thanks to John Fields and his band of merry Open Source Saturday folks. They donated a wonderfully nice computer (i7, 16GB RAM), and their only request was that it be called StarLord! Done! StarLord is up and running, and is working beautifully!

GitHub Bug Management

With the help of a few volunteers (Ankit, Justin, Jt, and others), we’ve been able to reduce our GitHub bug count from over 380+ bugs to less than 200. Many of those 200 should be resolved with version 2.3, so I still have some work to do in this area, but making great progress! I’ve also added some GitHub templates when filing new bugs, to help increase the quality of new bug reports, and guide users on generating and attaching log files.

Translations

OpenShot 2.3 is fully translated in 11 languages, and partially translated in more than 60 others. If you notice untranslated text in your native language, please feel free to submit your own translations on LaunchPad.

100% translated in the following languages:

• Spanish
• French
• Italian
• Portuguese
• Brazilian Portuguese
• Greek
• Ukrainian
• Catalan
• Malay
• Icelandic
• English (United Kingdom) 

Patreon & PayPal Donations

If you use OpenShot, support OpenShot, or just want to ensure its continued development, please consider a small donation, or help us spread the word. It is expensive and time consuming to build and distribute OpenShot, and any contribution would be hugely appreciated!

We accept PayPal, Bitcoin, and Patreon donations, and we’ll list your name in the credits of OpenShot (which is pretty awesome)!

Additional Features

• Added new welcome tutorial message, which contains a checkbox for disabling anonymous error and metrics reporting. That can also be adjusted in the Preferences, but it has been often requested to allow new users to opt-out.
• All child windows now center on parent window
• Ability to easily display frame numbers on frames
• Improved accuracy when calculating frame numbers
• Improvements to frame accuracy, especially when zoomed in at max zoom
• Dramatically increased speed of selecting and unselecting large numbers of clips/transitions.
• Refactor loading properties for selected items, to improve speed.
• Refactoring and improving preview playback of files, and preview playback during resize/trim (which now maintains aspect ratio correctly).
• Improving long filename support in file tree/list views, and improving thumbnail/grid view on all listviews (effects, transitions, titles, animated titles, etc...)
• Updating translation files (with a few minor corrections to string formatting arguments). 
• Improving test_translations.py script, which helps me detect problems with missing formatting args.
• Fixed an issue preventing the track names from being translated on launch.
• Adding "width x height" to list of profiles on Export and Profiles screens, to make the output resolution more clear
• Improved logic for "Next Marker" and "Previous Marker" buttons to include the selected items (start and end positions), to allow quickly jumping to the beginning or end of a selected clip.
• Prompting user to find missing files when opening a project, and updating translation template.
• Prompt user to save before creating or opening new project file (if needed)
• Make effects container on a clip visible on hover (regardless of how small the clip is).
• Tweak tooltips of clip title so they don't cover up the menu button and effects.
• Making settings save to disk as they are changed in preferences.
• Setting focus to Project Files on launch, so the properties filter doesn't auto get tab focus (preventing certain keyboard shortcuts).
• Switching snapping logic to compare pixels (not time), so it's still useful at close and far zoom levels. Reducing snapping to 10 pixels. Fixing bug when updating new properties for a clip.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed regression with selection dropdown
• Fixed crash when pasting keyframes onto a clip/transition
• Fixing incorrect placement of a selection handle
• Fixed a bug when caching a mask size (a regression from some of our speed improvements)
• Fixed small bug with Next Marker and Previous Marker buttons (not handling position 0 correctly).
• Fixed bug in transform callback, where transformation was not being disabled when selecting a different clip.
• Adding a lock when updating the JSON of a Timeline (or remapping it), so nobody can  request frames while everything is changing. Seems much more stable during live preview.
• Fixing invalid cache after editing effect in a clip, and frame accuracy (converting timestamps into frame numbers). This makes frame by frame editing much better.
• Fixing broken gravity for GRAVITY_BOTTOM_LEFT
• Fixed bug with Build server version detection regex (when releasing new versions).
• Fixed a big bug when pasting deleted clips and transitions.
• Refactoring some tracking code on initial install, and saving settings after launch (since some settings are updated on launch)
• Always settings unique id when sending metrics, which is required or analytics ignores it
• Fixing a crash during initialization of the main window, and a crash during application exit, where threads were not being terminated correctly or safely.
• Fixed a crash when closing the Split Clip dialog.
• Fix align_x bug in newer Blender versions (Thanks mixedbredie)
• Updating Blender compatibility to 2.78, since the API has changed a bit. Also fixing the regex for detecting preview images from Blender, since the output from Blender is now a bit different.
• Refactoring load project flow to take advantage of the new locks in libopenshot (which allow for quicker updates to the live preview after a change is made).
• Fixed a regression detecting missing files that contain expressions (like blender animations).
• Improve speed on Transform method, since it gets called quite often during project load (due to clearing selected clips and transitions)
• Fixing regression with slicing clips (and razor tool).
• Fixing regression on reading large log files (causing slow launch)
• Fixing regression on passing keypresses to timeline. CTRL and SHIFT keys have special uses on the timeline.
• Improve cutting/splitting dialog to use Timeline() object, to support all possible media types (images, videos, etc...) and maintain correct aspect ratio.
• Removing unused files and unneeded translatable strings. Also, adding title names to translation template (forgot about those).
• Removing old effect meta data and old effect icons. New effects will have different translatable metadata.
• Removing uploads folder from mac build script
• Removing app.processEvents from transitions and effects models, due to crashes on OS X. Also, it doesn't make much of a difference anymore.
• Fixing weird bug preventing backup.osp from restoring correctly
• Fixing bug with duplicate title when running in an non-English language
• Improving logic to process files when importing (some were incorrectly marked as invalid)
• Fixing bug when opening legacy projects (1.4.3) that contain effects or markers