Intro

Shotcut is an open source, GPL'd video editing suite for the linux platform.

The development has been commisioned by Ushodaya Enterprises Limited - an Indian TV broadcaster. Their main goal is to provide a simplified editor for their news channels - as such, the focus of shotcut is the provision of news channel related video FX and data entry.

It has been developed using the MLT multimedia framework and the GUI is provided by the FLTK graphical toolkit.

This web page provides a little documentation and some historical screenshots taken at various points during the projects development.

Getting the Source

At the point of writing, there is no official release of the shotcut suite. Source code can be obtained from the MLT sourceforge CVS repository - be warned that installation isn't the easiest of tasks. A quick runthrough of the main points are as follows:

The fltk version to use is the current 1.1.x release, configured with pthreads enabled.

The MLT version is from the current CVS head - the MLT plug-ins introduce a number of additional dependencies, most of which are not critical to execution. For any kind of video support, you will need the ffmpeg/avformat module, and libdv is recommended. You will need pango and gdkpixbuf support for titling and image loading. Project serialisation and loading is provided by libxml2. Finally, you will need the SDL library for preview capabilities.

With the exception of ffmpeg/avformat, most recent distributions will provide the necessary runtime and development packages for these.

For a quick start, the recommended mlt configure is as follows:

./configure --avformat-cvs --disable-jackrack --disable-resample --disable-sox --disable-vorbis --luma-compress

Obviously, you may install the required packages to enable the disabled components there. Better integration with avformat can also be obtained by manually checking out and configuring the current ffmpeg CVS (configuring with --enable-shared is recommended if you plan to configure it with additional libraries like lame, xvid, vorbis and so on).

The next dependency is MLT++ - this is also included in the MLT CVS repository. There's no special configuration here. However, if you feel like experimenting with the swig based language bindings, feel free to configure and install the swig module contained in mlt++ after mlt++ has been installed.

And finally, shotcut itself can also be obtained from the MLT CVS repository. Again, there are no special considerations here.

Contact

Should you need support or further information about the project, please feel free to subscribe or post to the MLT mailing list.

Alternatively, you can find us in the #mlt IRC channel on the irc.gimp.org server.

Should you wish to contact the author directly, please feel free to write to charles.yates at pandora.be.