I don’t want to make a habit of throwing a bunch of Kickstarter projects on the blog (unless they are cool) but Novacut is just too interesting, from a video editor’s perspective, to ignore. If all goes well the Novacut team is planning to release an open-source nonlinear editor. A few bullet points from the Novacut Kickstarter campaign say this:

  • Designed from the ground up for HDSLR cameras
  • Can use local computers and cloud for storage and rendering
  • Support for 64-bit, 32-bit, and ARM

While being designed for DSLR cameras isn’t necessarily a major selling point for me and certainly limits Novacut’s eventual reach, that may just be where the NLE starts. I’m sure it will eventually support many more kinds of footage. Check out this video discussion that digs a bit deeper into what the team wants to do with Novacut.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVrnKRQVsoE

The idea of an open-source tool is very cool — in theory. Unfortunately, I think there will always be the danger that without a large company’s resources behind it, such a tool might have a big initial launch and then fizzle away. But the big plus of going open source is avoiding the influence of engineers and stockholders. Novacut will have to first please the end users to be successful. And perhaps the time has come for open-source creative tools to take off. Blender, for example, is an open-source 3D tool that has had some success. Gimp is kind of an open-source Photoshop competitor that has been around for quite a while, too. And, of course, there’s Lightworks, which is now open source.

Can Novacut find its niche as a truly real-time collaborative editor? It needs to raise more funds first. I’m intrigued by the idea. Now I just have to figure out how much I can afford to pledge before the Kickstarter campaign ends.

If you want a bit more detail on Novacut, check out their Wiki. You can also follow Novacut on its blog, Twitter, Facebook and just about anywhere people follow others on the Internet.