Due to the amount of requests I have been getting, I edited the main page for Positron. Every few days I will be posting on the page, so stay tuned. It’s been rough, but development is flying now. We’ll be awful close to a solid usable release at the end of the month.
So… what benifits does it offer in contrast to the overhaul of blender’s sequencer changes taking place in CVS?
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It will be faster. Even with version 2.41 the sequencer still cannot play back video from the disk at real time.
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Aimed for a different market. We will be focusing totally at the 2d edit/compositing realm, and not at the 3d animator market.
You’re going to find, that even with all the new changes to the sequencer, there will come a time when development will be hamperd by the fact that Blender is (and will always be) a 3d modeling/rendering app, not a video editor.
It’s like comparing Excel with Word, they can do alot of the same tasks, but they should never be merged into a single progam.
so you’re basically just taking blender again and disable the 3D window?
Okay, some things got miscomunicated. The first version of Positron was more of a attempt at seeing how well Blender could be converted into a NLE app. The result was bad. To much had to be changed internaly. On top of that it was viewed as a rip-off of Blender. This was never ment to be the case.
The current version of Positron is a complete rewrite of the program. So far, no code is shared by the two programs. We may still base the GUI off of it in the future, but for now they are totally seperate.
From the website’s feature list:
Node Based Composition
That’s node based compositing. Composition comes from compose. Compositing comes from composite.
Maybe people would take you more seriously if you didn’t use distasteful hype like this:
What do high-end brand-name products have in common that Positron doesn’t? A Big Price Tag. That’s right. Positron is breaking new ground in non-linear editing by releasing the first fully-functioned, feature-comparable NLE that is totally, 100% FREE! Get it now!
And why on earth are you calling it version “1.0.0”? For something that claims it’s supposed to be comparable to high-end commercial video editors, it’s nowhere near a 1.0 release.
I don’t take any issue with your efforts to make a video editing app. In fact, I think that’s great.
But I take every issue with your hype and marketing tactics. It’s like everything I hate about advertising and marketing (artificial hype, version number inflation, botched terminology, etc.) concentrated and wrapped up into a single website. It’s extremely difficult to take you seriously at all when you do that.
That’s node based compositing. Composition comes from compose. Compositing comes from composite.
And composite comes from compose… 
Seriously though, you’re right, composition sounds like some music composing program. And yeah, there’s too much marketing hype on the website: Sentences like “Positron boasts a dazzling array of features to help you accomplish any video editing task you can throw at it!” will alienate more people than how many it convinces.
Other than that, thanks for the program! It will come in handy I believe.
I agree totally with your views. I didn’t write the web page, and the hype did get a bit out of hand. I’ll fix that tonight.
Thanks for the input.
If you’d been following the other thread, you’d remember that this came from blender’s internal versioning setup when he was trying to port the code over to positron… gotta lighten up a lil’ here y’all… its like looking a gift horse in the mouth… (geez, where’d that saying come from? 
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Thanks for the awesome efforts, tbc++! You are appreciated!
It’s good to hear that I’m thought of as a horse. At least you didn’t compare me to a donkey! 
We may still base the GUI off of it in the future, but for now they are totally seperate.
I would keep the look and feel of the blender interface. It would help pitch it as a program complementary to blender’s functionality.
You’re right that 2.41 doesn’t do that, but the latest builds from the Orange branch do. And some builds already have FFMpeg integration. The “Cut” Tool is there too:
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Release_Notes/Sequencer
I have a lot of hope for Blender / Positron becoming a good video editor, but I don’t think any of the work that has been done in Positron has amounted to anything, since Blender’s own development is going so much faster than Positron’s.
In my mind, the Orange branch has already delivered almost all of the features that I’ve been waiting for Positron to get in order to some proper editing done. Right now, there’s zero reasons to use Positron instead of a CVS build of Orange… am I wrong?
I think it might be wise to get the support of the Blender Foundation to make a new branch on blender.org. Doing your fork on sourceforge is alienating you from a lot of Blender’s development momentum.
Nope, you’re right. But like I said before, blender is just not designed right. Hey, even discreet doesn’t try to combine smoke and Maya. They are two totally different projects. I think the work on the blender sequencer is good, but just sit down and look at a smoke/combustion/avid system sometime, and there is no comparing them to the sequencer.
Blender is a great app, but it cannot be all things to all people, and trying to warp it into somthing it is not, is not going to work.
Blender is a great app, but it cannot be all things to all people, and trying to warp it into somthing it is not, is not going to work.
The sequencer in Blender is only tied to the 3D part of it in useful ways (eg. sharing the same image datablock system, being able to link unrendered 3d scenes in the edit, etc). The rest of it is quite separate code, it’s not as if either of the modules are holding it back. It would be interesting to hear why you think it’s a problem.
There’s no comparing them to Positron either, because the only thing that’s available to actually see on the Positron site is an old version of Blender with a different splash screen. Anything else is hypothetical.
similar to lightwave i could see blender and positron working hand in hand.
in case the two projects can be mereged, still independedt applications, but have a smooth data exchange i could image that it would be very benificial.
i can’ t see almost nothing wrong with positron developpment.
the only thing i don’t like too much is the website annunce of a super-app but i don’t think it is so bad to justify all these attacks.
tbc++ is spending his own time working on somethng that he (and some others too) thinks could be usefull to people.
what’s wrong in usign blender as starting point?
isn’ t this one of the GOOD side of open source?
when positron was born the sequencer was not as good as it is now, after the orange project, but this was impossible to know before.
also i think that sentences like this:
so you’re basically just taking blender again and disable the 3D window?
are not very useful here.
if you think that positron is unusefull just don’ t use it, but, please, have some respect for tbc++ attemp to do something usefull.
the first version of positron was a first attemp to use blender as a starting point, let see what comes out.
thank you for your work.
edited: cekuhnen i totally agree
Good to hear some news from you, tbc! I’m not really sure why everyone’s giving you such a hard time. I think it’s great what you’re doing. Would it be possible to see a screen shot of what the current interface for Positron looks like?
Agree with bullx & dante. There’s no reason to be hostile toward this project. Its not in competition with blender, its (potentially) a great complementary app, and targetted toward a different market. tbc++'s been working (mostly) solo on the project, so its not coming along as quickly as the team effort of the orange branch… I, for one, am looking forward to seeing & testing the next release.
As I said before, I think it’s great that he’s putting effort into this and trying to make a good video editing app.
And I agree with him that it’s generally better if video editing apps and 3D animation apps are separate pieces of software. They’re unrelated enough that there really aren’t any significant benefits to them being merged in one app, and there are many benefits to keeping them separate (smaller code base, easier maintenance, etc.).
My criticism is purely relating to the website and the bad-taste-in-mouth effect it has on me (and many others as well, it seems). The website reeks of vaporware and empty promises. It’s just that sort of website. The more artificial hype and the more grandiose promises a website has (especially if the project doesn’t have much of anything to show yet), the more it seems void of any real substance.
Just “a bit”? 
Another thing you could do to lend yourself credibility would be to put your designs for the program up on the website, so people can see how it’s going to work and how the user will interact with it. They’ll be able to see where you’re going with the program, in other words. And they could even give feed back!
It will also let people see that you do have a plan, and that you’re not just coding blind or with vague visions.