Developing a video editor with a game engine? Why and how? In this video I’ll be talking about WHY I’m making a video editor and WHY I’ll be using Godot. ^^

Why?

I’m a Linux user and one of the biggest complains on Linux are about limited options for creative software such as video editors. There are a couple so here is a list and why they aren’t great to use:

• Davinci Resolve: Basically doesn’t have basic codec support for the most common codecs … even on the paid version;
• Blender: Just difficult to deal with for video editing, but fairly possible among Linux users;
• KdenLive: Lots of bugs and crashes.

There are a lot more, but these are the three main ones as Premiere pro doesn’t even try for a Linux version, doesn’t excuse Davinci for doing half a job though.

So yeah, my journey of making my own video editors starts. But then there is a new question, why Godot??

Why Godot

The reason why I use Godot is because I only want to re-invent part of the wheel again. xD The UI framework which Godot offers together with soo many other systems makes it the best choice. Here is a list of some of the features which made me decide on using Godot:

• UI system: UI stuff is something I always struggled with, and for every application which uses UI I often look towards Godot;
• Open Source: I wanted to make the video editor open source, but to make a really open source video editor, all tools I use should also be open source. I also use FFmpeg which is another open source application;
• 3D and 2D: It’s so helpful to have these kind of features build in, because GoZen is modular I can see soo many different modules people will make to improve their video editing workflow. GoZen can even be used to create videos from scratch because of the 2D and 3D capabilities which is a nice to have;
• Shaders: Do I need to say more? XD How cool would it be to have shaders which you can put on your videos to create more interesting and flexible effects;
• Time saving: Using a game engine in general gives opportunities for so many items which would take weeks/months to implement by yourself;
• Stable Platform: Godot is lightweight and because of the many contributors and possibility to fix things yourself, gives a very stable platform to build upon;
• Multi-platform: Godot supports compiling for different platforms, so no need for me to struggle too much with multi-platform support;
• Knowledge: I have worked with Godot a lot already and even worked on the source code every now and then so knowing the system already saves time and effort making the process of building a video editor a little bit less difficult.

Modular design

GoZen is designed with modularity in mind, meaning that people can customize the video editor in whatever way they want. People can change the layouts, add different modules, effects and transitions in an easy way.

Want to make a module yourself? It’s easy as GoZen uses Godot which is a fairly simple game engine to get into. I am also planning on making a place where you can easily find and download modules in the future.

Goals for GoZen

The main goal which I want to achieve is creating the best video editor on Linux. Which isn’t that easy, but we will already beat Davinci Resolve on Linux by just having codec support hahaha. I really hope this video editor can help many Linux users and even convince more people to switch to Linux.