Olive

(Soon-to-be) the world's most powerful and versatile video editor

In 2018, the first alpha version of the Olive video editor was released, and it made immediate waves in the open source community as one of the most capable open source editors to ever exist. As an alpha release, it was far from perfect - there were plenty of bugs and stability issues - but it showed so much promise, and its performance was so strong, that some people still use it to edit videos to this day. Despite its alpha status, it has been downloaded over 8 million times as of 2021.

However for me, Olive's unique selling point was never intended to be simply "an open source video editor that works surprisingly well". As a producer of online video content for over ten years, I wanted Olive to do what all great tools should do: make my - as well as a lot of other peoples' - jobs easier. This meant Olive needed to support not only the key features of mainstream video editing software, but also some features of its own that had never been seen in any video editor before.

Achieving all of this functionality - particularly the features unique to Olive - has required a lot of prototyping and experimentation to get right, and since this has all been done in my spare time between paid jobs, this has led to an unfortunately very protracted development cycle. While I've remained as passionate and committed as I can be, pouring as much time as possible into Olive over the past few years, it's clear that Olive simply cannot survive with only one developer who can't even afford to work full-time on it. This is where you come in! With the proper resources, I could not only make Olive my full-time job, I could also hire other similarly passionate developers to work on Olive as a team.

Why Olive?

But what makes Olive so special anyway?

Olive began out of my frustration with the mainstream video editors, in particular how closed and restrictive they could be. From its inception, the goal of Olive has always been to give as much control as possible to the user, making it as useful as possible for video professionals like me who make complex timelines and compositions for a living.

Here are just some of the ways Olive beats the competition:

• Format support: Olive uses mature decoding libraries like FFmpeg and OpenImageIO to support a wider variety of formats and codecs than nearly any mainstream editing package. This can be a tremendous benefit to users since they don't have to waste hours converting their footage before they can even start editing it.
• Node compositing: Olive provides a node-based compositing system, which is the gold standard in the visual effects industry. Nodes provide users with an extremely high degree of control over how images are made, allowing them to make whatever effects sequences they desire. While nodes are common in visual effects applications, most mainstream video editors only provide an outdated "effects stack" which is far more rigid and inflexible. By integrating nodes right into the editor, users save time by keeping more of the work in one program rather than having to switch to a separate compositing program.
• GPU acceleration: Olive has been designed from the ground up to use GPU acceleration for its entire render pipeline. This gives it an edge in performance where other editors and compositors still struggle.
• Scripting: Olive will feature a scripting subsystem, allowing editors to automate jobs and exponentially speed up their workflow. If an editor, for example, needs to make cuts where the audio goes silent, they can write a script to do this rather than have to painstakingly make these cuts by themselves.
• Operating system support: Olive supports a wider variety of operating systems than any other mainstream video editor. This is extremely useful in the case of Linux, which is heavily used in high-end production houses such as Walt Disney Animation, who have previously commissioned companies just to help them get software working on Linux.
• AI: There's no denying that AI will play a tremendous role in the future of computing, and video production is no exception. Much like the aforementioned scripting, AI has the chance to make a ton of previously laborious tasks into completely automated ones. AI has already proven to be effective at accelerating jobs like rotoscoping (i.e. cutting objects out of a video frame-by-frame) and generating subtitles (i.e. transcribing speech to text). A video editing suite that integrates AI tightly could leapfrog the competition, and Olive plans to do exactly that.
• Color management: Olive is the only professional video editor to integrate OpenColorIO natively, originally developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks for use in their animated films such as Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It not only provides powerful color correction/grading capabilities, but alsos support working with and transforming color spaces to and from just about any professional camera or broadcast standard, both of which are extremely important to any film industry professionals.
• Modern codebase: Most mainstream video editors have been around for decades now and are still working through the cruft and technical debt of a 20+ year old codebase. By building something new, Olive can be lean and agile, adopting new standards (such as the aforementioned OpenColorIO) that would be much harder for existing software to adopt.

Why us?

As mentioned earlier, Olive's development has been almost entirely led by one developer: myself. While there have been numerous consultants, including some people from the Academy Software Foundation (a group of major film studios and technology companies such as Disney, Netflix, and DreamWorks pushing open source software in film), the entire project has survived on my commitment and passion for making great video production software.

In that time I've become incredibly knowledgeable about working with video and audio codecs, GPU pipelines, color management, visual effects algorithms, digital audio processing, and managing a large-scale software application. But one thing I'm not an expert in is business, which is why Olive needs partners to really get off the ground.

If you choose to work with me, you can rest assured you'll be working with someone who not only has the expertise to pull this off, but also pours everything he can into doing what needs to get done. With the right team, you can have every expectation that our knowledge will cover every facet of making a great video editing program.

Get involved

Olive's goals are ambitious, but with your help they can become a reality. Help us take over the world of video production and get in touch at [email protected]!