There’s been a fair amount of activity in the open source video
editing space lately, and unfortunately not nearly enough on medi8 (in fact we haven’t even updated
our web site so there is nothing to see there, aside from the
source).

Instead of going through the other projects I thought I’d finally
post my reasons for writing medi8 as an Eclipse plugin. I think at
first blush this seems like a strange idea — certainly I’ve gotten
negative reactions from a few people I’ve talked to about it.
However, really, it makes a lot of sense, as I will try to show; and
not
everybody disagrees (I seem to be following Doug Schaefer around a
little lately. And likewise I sometimes feel that Per has been
everyplace interesting about 3 years ahead of me…).

Note that in particular we’re writing Eclipse IDE plugins, and not
an RCP application. For RCP the choice is mostly about technology:
what is the simplest way to get an application up and running? What
framework provides the platform support and ease of development that
you need? Etc. But, that’s not what we’re talking about here.

The basic observation is that editing a movie has a lot in common
with developing a program. It can be a large project, taking many
months and involving many people (back when I was seriously working on
my free software movie, on Vicki’s advice I planned to take 6 months
off work in order to edit). A “real” movie can involve a large number
of parts, some of which could be custom software (e.g., a custom
titling plugin to make cool credits); data management is a serious
issue; etc.

Once you draw this parallel the reasons for developing Eclipse
plugins become more clear. Using Eclipse as a framework gives us
many things for free.

We don’t have to worry about project structuring or management,
Eclipse has this. Likewise for file management, and Eclipse even
provides features that, were we to write a video editor from scratch,
we would not include — e.g., the option of integrated source control
(I saw a feature request for CVS support in Kino, and felt
vindicated). Eclipse also has infrastructure for help, for
manipulation of editors and views, for task management (to-do lists,
markers, and errors), and builders.

Really all we need to concentrate on is the mechanics of movie
editing, how our model works, and things like that. We don’t spend
any time writing the same application infrastructure that has been
written so many times before.

Of course this isn’t without drawbacks. Eclipse’s GUI tends
toward the cluttered and it could benefit greatly from a UI
designer (I’m not very concerned about this, though; cleanups are
inevitable). There’s also the possibility that Eclipse will somehow
be incompatible with what we want to deliver; but the evidence is that
this is merely a theoretical worry.

The overall vision for this tool is pretty straightforward: a
full-featured sound and video editor built as a set of Eclipse
plugins. Part of the big goal is using Eclipse as a framework to
unify all the parts of film editing; so for instance I picture being
able to build effects plugins of various kinds as Eclipse projects
themselves, and have the final film project depend on the effects
written for it.