Pitivi is a truly unique video editor.

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Free and Open Source

Pitivi respects your freedom and keeps getting better with each new release. It will never require licensing fees or use DRM to prevent you from using it whenever, wherever and however you like. Developed collaboratively by people from all around the world, its sole purpose is to be a fantastic video editor to empower people to express themselves through video. Like GStreamer and GES, Pitivi is distributed under LGPL.

Anything in

As long as it is well supported by the GStreamer Multimedia Framework, Pitivi will accept any format you throw at it.

Some video editing applications only allow you to use footage that has the exact same framerate inside a project. Well, our timeline is like the honey badger: it doesn't care.

Hundreds of animated effects, transitions and filters

Not only do you have access to over 70 industry-standard transitions and more than a hundred video and audio effects, you can add true dynamism to your films by animating all the effects' properties over time with keyframes.

Flexible and efficient

Packed with time-saving features such as realtime trimming previews, ripple and roll editing, grouping and snapping, realtime assets management and searching, playhead-centric zooming and editing, non-modal cutting, detachable interface components, smooth scrolling, automatic zoom adjustment, Pitivi allows you to cut with ease. Like a ninja with a vibroblade.

Beautiful audio waveforms

Visuals are only a tiny part of the story. A movie without balanced and well-timed sound is amateur at best. Pitivi provides you with a clear and accurate representation of loudness, so you can balance things out or easily detect patterns for beat matching, clap synchronization or simply cutting to the music.

Speaks many languages

Thanks to the tireless work of the GNOME translation and localization teams, Pitivi is available in many languages. Your language is not listed there? Make it happen.

Easy to learn. Exciting to master

You have better things to do than dealing with cumbersome user interfaces or reading through books just to get started. Resulting from years of experience and analysis, our user interface is intuitive and self-documenting: it provides you with all the contextual hints you need to grasp the essentials without needing to dive into the user manual all the time. But if you want to do something more complicated or want to better understand the tenets of our design, our fully-searchable, topic-oriented and multilingual user manual is right there, at your fingertips.

It grows on you and grows with you

In addition to providing you with the best video editing software possible, nothing is more important to us than encouraging you to adapt and improve Pitivi and GES. After all, you should truly own your software. The reason we can keep improving with each release is because you get involved.

Natural desktop environment integration

Pitivi integrates best with the GNOME desktop — or any Linux desktop environment, really. We don't just look pretty alongside other GTK applications though: we help redefine the desktop experience by working closely with toolkit and theme designers to suit our needs and push the whole ecosystem forward.

Automatic project backups that actually work

Once created, your project is always safe. With Pitivi, you can even cut the power or crash the entire computer and Pitivi will offer you to restore from the last automatic checkpoint. Best of all: Pitivi won't try to second-guess you. We've seen enough examples out there of applications that can't be trusted to handle backups correctly.

Background processing

Pitivi generates thumbnails, waveforms and clip proxies in the background, without disrupting your workflow.

No need to reinvent the wheel

With the GStreamer Editing Services library, we are laying solid foundations for the future based upon over a decade of experience. Built atop the giant shoulders of the industry-standard GStreamer multimedia framework, GES reduces fragmentation and risk while allowing diversity for application writers and adaptability for all kinds of purposes.

See what others have to say about it!

Take a look at some of the praises/positive comments we have received so far.

What, you wanted a boring list of features?

  • Unlimited video/audio track layers
  • Full undo/redo history
  • Frame stepping, keyboard controls and shortcuts
  • Trimming, splitting/cutting
  • Snapping
  • Ripple edits/roll edits
  • Sound mixing of multiple concurrent audio layers
  • Volume keyframe curves
  • Keyframable audio effects
  • Audio waveforms
  • Keyframable video effects
  • Opacity keyframe curves
  • Video thumbnails with two-stage caching
  • SMPTE video transitions
  • Ability to specify custom aspect ratios and framerates
  • Ability to create presets for project settings and rendering
  • Greeter that helps you start a project or load recent projects quickly
  • Ability to preview video, audio and image files directly in the file chooser before importing
  • Fast, playhead-centered zooming
  • Mousewheel integration with modifier keys for timeline navigation
  • Scrubbing
  • Grouping and ungrouping of clips
  • Importing support for all video/audio/image formats provided by GStreamer plugins. Pitivi was the first open source video editor to support the Material eXchange Format for professional digital video and audio media.
  • Rendering in any container and codec properly supported by GStreamer plugins
  • Nanosecond precision
  • Accepts both timecodes and frames
  • Automated project backups
  • Tarball export
  • Commandline processing and rendering mode using GES
  • Scripting capabilities using GES
  • Plugins
  • Developer console
  • Written in Python, with a clean and modular codebase
  • Hardware-accelerated and touch-capable user interface

A must-have feature is missing? You can certainly help us implement it.