Lightworks Blog: Post 3

Lightworks Editor News
I've been distracted from my playing with the Lightworks editor over the past week, but Mike Jones has written up a provocative post: "Lightworks editing software is free and nobody cares."

Lightworks is Powerful and its Free but it’s also archaic and illogical; the wrong tool at the wrong time doing the job the wrong way.

and goes on to say:

There’s no doubting what Ligtworks can do - its a feature-rich system - but its also a system predicated on defying the natural user instincts of a standard computer GUI.

A reader of his blog, Richard Blakely, calls him to task:

I do find your comments about standards odd though. On one hand you're saying that it is the worst word in the world, and that it is wrong that someone should define 'standards' and then you criticise Lightworks for not conforming to standards such as drag and drop.

To which Mike responds:

The point of my post wasn't about my opinion of whether Lightworks is any good or not but rather that the strange culture of brand-loyal digital-native Post production will find it very hard to accept Lightworks whilst it insists on positioning itself outside of known and common parameters.

The problem is, while I see Mike's point - people find it hard to switch to different paradigms - that's not how he presents it in the original post; the original post spends quite a bit of time dismissing Lightworks as being backward and wrong; not just different. Which sort of undermines the brand loyalty argument.

And I actually agree with him in a lot of ways; launch Lightworks and it is disorienting; your first thought is "do I want to spend time dedicated to learning something this different?"

On the other hand, it is capable, and it is free. So while it might not be easy for those of us already using Final Cut or Avid or Premiere, but you would think that those starting out who can't afford to spend several hundred would have a completely different opinion.

But as Mike points out, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Yet it's probably too soon to dismiss Lightworks; it was only the most recent build that I could even get to work, so we need to give it a few more months before writing it off completely.
MikeJones.tv: Lightworks editing software is free and nobody cares

Lightworks Roadmap
And if you're wondering what's coming, they have posted a Lightworks roadmap for 2011: Roadmap