A release date for the Linux version of Editshare’s professional-grade video editor Lightworks has been set.

October 30th will see an alpha release of the editor made available for Linux users to download.

This isn’t the first time that a release date has been given for the Linux version of the editor. It was originally intended to see release in late 2011.

Tiered Membership

Open-sourcing of Lightworks was announced back in 2010, with a Windows version of the app following shortly after.

Although the application is free to download for all users a tiered membership programme is also available. This is designed to giving professional users affordable access to industry-standard 3rd party codecs and tools that are subject to licensing fees.

As Editshare explain:

“…an important factor is how we go about incorporating professional features, such as production-quality codecs (Apple ProRes, Avid DNxHD etc), [which] require EditShare to pay license fees to the owners of the technology.”

And the prices aren’t actually that bad: –

Free User: Free

Free Educational User: £20/€25/$30 year

£20/€25/$30 year Professional User: £40/€50/$60 year

For the non-pro’s free will work fine (supports Avi, Mpeg, Mov, etc).

Support

The non-linear editor will initially only support Ubuntu 12.04 (though I’d be surprised if it didn’t run without issue on Ubuntu 12.10).

Editshare aim to add support for other Linux distributions at ‘a later date.’

There’s no word yet on whether the Lightworks keyboard – which offers dedicated keys for ‘just about every Lightworks function’ – will support Linux, but here’s hoping.

Excited? You should be. Notable films edited using the software include ‘The King’s Speech‘ and ‘Hugo‘.

Editshare, via Thijs