If anyones looking for fairly heavy duty industry standard video editing software then Lightworks has just gone public beta.

" Lightworks is an Academy and Emmy award winning professional-grade editor with over 20 years of history in the film and broadcast industry. Having cut hundreds of films such as Pulp Fiction, The Departed, Centurion and Shutter Island, it includes a full feature set of editorial tools, from advanced trimming and media management, through to stereoscopic support and realtime effects including multiple secondary colour correctors."

[url]http://www.lightworksbeta.com/[/url] - WARNING: Read user experiences in the thread first, before proceeding. [SamH]


Fully agree with Sam here, this is not a toy and may require a LOT of setup.

Check the forums and if your not sure then DON'T TRY IT.

Myea, i understand its beta but why is it messing up everything. I installed the program + the codecs it needed.

Now i get this. I also got that popup in taskbar that my "firefox.exe" is broken. So its corrupting my files or what? ...

1: Try the forum

2: Are you running 64 or 32 bit Vista?

This post seem's relevant but I'm not offering support for the program, use the forums for that.

"Microsoft offers a set of 32 bit executables in the WoW(Windows on Windows) directory of the system, for a Windows Vista 64 bit Operating System,

To setup DSN for 32-bit application you must use:
%WINDIR%\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe

and for 64-bit application you must use:
%WINDIR%\System32\odbcad32.exe

So, to run a 32 bit application, we would need to modify the env PATH variable and put SysWOW64 before system32.

Roughly the steps would be
1. Start %windir%\SysWoW64\cmd.exe
2. set PATH=%systemroot%\SysWOW64;%PATH%
3. Run the application.
4. After application has completed, reset PATH variable if required.


Hope this was helpful.
Or, if the application can't be run from a shell then you could modify the PATH variable directly from System Properties > Advanced Tab > Environmental Variable > System variable.
Edit the PATH variable accordingly and reboot the system for the changes to take effect.

And also check the related threads :

• Adminpak SP2 , Windows Server x64 SP2
  
• Need Help Registering DLLs
  
• http://forums.techarena.in/server-security/598973.htm
  

http://forums.techarena.in/operating-systems/1160164.htm

Well yeah ...

Lets just say that people who just want to try it out, DONT. This thing scared the shizzle out of me since every program turned out to be corrupted and well, i dont know. Had to run a bunch of recovery stuff to get things working again. I definately wont install this back on in the near future. Ill just wait when the beta is over.

And whats this thing VFM overwriting my damn d3d files? I saw it during the installation and windows recovery utility showed me that all those files were badly indexed and it fixed them etc.

Been in a bunch of betas and i gotta admit that i havnt seen anything this bad. Look at the bugs section in theyr forum. People are going crazy in there.

Hazaky is only one who has this file corruption issue (according to Lightworks forum and many other forums with threads about this beta), so I'd say it's unrelated - just a coincidence. Try removing your old WD disk which is full of bad sectors, perhaps?

By the way, if it simply doesn't opens (process appears and then disappears) - run ntcardvd.exe from it's directory first and create a project, but if it crashes with a message (e.g. "Lightworks.exe has stopped working") - you will need to update your .NET framework and/or (depending on which is NOT latest version) DirectX. For .NET, just use Windows Update.

Quote from E.Reiljans :

Hazaky is only one who has this file corruption issue (according to Lightworks forum and many other forums with threads about this beta), so I'd say it's unrelated - just a coincidence. Try removing your old WD disk which is full of bad sectors, perhaps?

By the way, if it simply doesn't opens (process appears and then disappears) - run ntcardvd.exe from it's directory first and create a project, but if it crashes with a message (e.g. "Lightworks.exe has stopped working") - you will need to update your .NET framework and/or (depending on which is NOT latest version) DirectX. For .NET, just use Windows Update.

I dont remember installing it on my old WD drive.

Tryed running ntcardvt.exe manually - no help at all, even with different compability options. DirectX and NET are both up to date. Come babysit my PC later.

Edit: And no, i am not the only one. Not everyone can make it work trough ntcardvt.exe and ive seen a dozen of reports in theyr forums already that say theyr OS is messed up. It seemed to be likethat because those codecs overwrote my d3d files. This doesnt make any sense. :/

Quote from hazaky :

Tryed running ntcardvt.exe manually - no help at all, even with different compability options. DirectX and NET are both up to date.

Weird, here it helped (and it just didn't appear

Quote from hazaky :

Come babysit my PC later.

Sure will do, as soon as you'll come to Skype :P

Quote from hazaky :

Edit: And no, i am not the only one. Not everyone can make it work trough ntcardvt.exe and ive seen a dozen of reports in theyr forums already that say theyr OS is messed up. It seemed to be likethat because those codecs overwrote my d3d files. This doesnt make any sense. :/

Um.. mind linking to exact thread in this subforum?

Quote from E.Reiljans :

Um.. mind linking to exact thread in this subforum?

Ive seen no threads about this, but ive seen alot of posts saying that.

Wow, so much negative feedback on their forums.

Quote from -NightFly- :

Wow, so much negative feedback on their forums.

And there's a reason for it.

But lets face it ... its a beta. But i, personally - im gonna wait until the beta is over or when the major bugs are fixed.

Please check the first post for Samh's comments which I completely agree with.
THIS IS NOT A TOY AND MAY UPSET YOUR MACHINE.

IMPORTANT NOTE: There's now a patch online for win64 problems so check the downloads section.


Mind you, it's working fine for me (after a bit of tweaking, if Lightworks.exe doesn't work then use ntcardvt.exe) with Win 7 Prof on a 32 bit platform, if you remember that it's not a toy, don't run it on a production pc, and do a systems restore save prior to installing it you should be ok.
( Yes, I know 32 bit is a waste with editing software, it's going on a Win 7, 64 bit box with 8 gig of ram but that counts as a production machine ! Once I know it's not going to crash it then there it goes. )
And it seems to be a stunning piece of software when you get it running.

But remember, IT'S NOT A TOY & ITS STILL A BETA.

Oh well, in the other end i really would like to contribute in the beta and to see whats up with this piece of software. If there's a patch available then i might give a second try. What are your personal impressions, Racer X NZ?

Bump, I tried out Lightworks lately (they published version 12 a few days ago) and thought I'd leave some basic information here for those who are interested.

Lightworks is currently offered as a full version that you can buy (or "rent" for a month/year) and alternatively as a free version. The latter includes a surprisingly big amount of content (compare free vs. pro) and has no expiring amount of time to use it. There is no restriction when it comes to input formats. The installation caused no problems here and learning how to edit, use effects etc. seemed really easy for me (who has never used any professional editing software before).

However, the disadvantage of the free version comes into play when actually exporting a project to a video file. Using the free version you may only export your projects to H.264 mp4 files with a maximum resolution of 720p.

While I can live with the restricted resolution itself (considering I'm not paying any money for it), the quality really ruins it: You cannot affect it by setting a target bitrate or filesize. Instead, an unchangable bitrate will be used. I did a quick test with raw LFS footage (recorded using fraps) and the exported file was in a quality that is not acceptable for today's standards.

However, the good thing is that you can actually try out the software really carefully for free and then decide if it's worth spending money on it. For editing great movies the free version will do - for actually exporting them in form of quality video files it won't.
(Although it might be possible that you create lots of projects using the free version and then buy the full version for a month once you're ready to export all your work to proper video files)

EDIT: The restricted export settings in the free version are not what causes the loss of video quality for me (see 2 posts below). My problem is yet to be solved.

Tried it since v11, it's really fast and intuitive to edit clips once you get the basics and learn a few shortcuts. But there's not much on the image processing side.
Anyway, nice piece of software.

Alright, some more testing with clips from other sources than Fraps revealed that exporting is actually not what causes the quality loss in the free version. It does seem like something already goes wrong while importing the Fraps clips to Lightworks: When displaying imported files in fullscreen mode (F12) I believe there should be no visible quality loss as it's the raw file. However, in my case this is where the the clip gets awfully pixelated, before any compression has even happened.

If you guys happen to know a way to solve this (maybe some import settings?), let me know!

Update:
Having its roots in the film industry, Lightworks doesn't support the codec that Fraps uses - which is a bit confusing as you can import Fraps clips and don't get an error / green screen but a messed up version of the actual clip. So the only way to work around this seems to be transcoding the raw clips into a format that Lightworks supports.