There are some very interesting comparisons to make in this realm, and, I’d say first off, that the proprietary tools are in the lead, for sure.
I’ll start with basic graphics – graphic manipulation tools. Of course, on the proprietary side is the ever present and predominant Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. And, honestly, they are very good tools, and considered industry standards.
On the open source side, the projects that stand out are GIMP (a Photoshop replacement) and Inkscape (a vector graphics program – like Illustrator). I’ve used GIMP for many years, and I don’t generally do a whole lot with graphics, but it always serves my needs. There has been a lot of back and forth about the GIMP user interface. It is very unlike that of Photoshop. So much so, in fact that someone came up with another project called Gimpshop, which re-does the UI to better match Photoshop.
Both GIMP and Inkscape are completely cross-platform, and available for Mac, Windows and Linux. I’ll leave it to the graphics professionals to say for sure, but they are both worth a look if you don’t want to plunk down hundreds of $ for Photoshop and Illustrator, and/or you like to work with open source tools.
The other realm of stuff that I know some about is video. In term of viewing, on the proprietary side are the players that come with the proprietary operating systems. Itunes/Quicktime comes native with MacOS, and Windows Media Player for Windows. One doesn’t have to pay for these, so it’s a bit hard for open source (or other products, even) to compete. Which is perhaps why the other major proprietary video player, Real Player, has had such a hard time catching on for all of these years. I notice now they seem to have added a ton of features (like video conversion from one format to another).
On the open source side, one program you must know about is VLC by VideoLAN. Totally cross-platform (so cross-platform, they have a version for BeOS!) It plays everything. I mean, everything.This means you don’t have to have several video players around to play different formats. I use it constantly – it’s my go-to video player. It has a bunch of other features as well.
In terms of video editing, again, the proprietary programs have somewhat of a leg up on the open source, although a recent entry into the field may well change that (see below). On the “low-end” (for people like me who make videos like this,) there is, like in the video playing arena, iMovie and Windows Movie Maker, made by Apple and Microsoft respectively, for their own platforms. (An aside, a lot has been said about the crapware iMovie has become – it used to be a really good video editor.) There are other proprietary products as well. I’ve used TrakAxPC, which has a free version and a paid version. There are a variety of other low-end video editing options. There are low-end versions of Adobe’s Premier (called Elements) and Apple’s Final Cut (called Final Cut Express.) On the high end (where I’d love to work more), there is Apple’s Final Cut (only available on Apple hardware) and Adobe Premier (cross-platform). There are also quite a number of high-end, Hollywood products, like Avid (a side note, I used Avid a little bit, way back when it was the first and only non-linear video editing platform).
On the open source end, there are some notable entries. Blender is a very popular cross-platform open source 3-D modeling, animation and editing tool. It’s actually pretty amazing what it can do. (There is a study that compares a bunch of 3D tools for professionals, you can see how Blender stacks up.) Another notable entry is Cinelerra, which only runs on Linux. (You can see videos edited with Cinelerra on Vimeo.) A recent entry into the fray, and the one that might make a huge difference, is Lightworks. This is one of the video editors that Hollywood uses that used to be proprietary. It will go open source later in the year, but you can grab it for free right now. Yes, a Hollywood-quality video editor for free, and soon to be open source. It’s Windows only for now, though.
In summary, proprietary software has the popularity edge, mostly. From this non-graphic professional’s perspective, it seems that one would not be left wanting if you went the open source route, however.
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