Olive Video Editor

About

Olive Video Editor

Olive is a free open-source cross-platform non-linear video editor founded in 2018 by Australian developer Matt Mayfield. The project is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 and aims to bring node-based compositing and modern non-destructive workflows to an open-source NLE. Olive is still in active pre-1.0 development with the 0.2 branch as the current focus, but publishes builds for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Olive was founded in 2018 by Australian developer Matt Mayfield, better known online as MattKC among a community of retro-technology and open-source enthusiasts. Mayfield started the project to fill a gap in the open-source video editing landscape: a professional-facing non-linear editor that combined a familiar timeline model with node-based compositing similar to the approach used by Nuke, Fusion, and Blackmagic Resolve's Fusion page. Olive is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3, distributed as free source and prebuilt binaries through olivevideoeditor.org, and coordinated openly on GitHub at olive-editor/olive. The application is still pre-1.0. The 0.1 branch produced early usable builds, and development moved to the 0.2 branch that introduces a rewritten node-based rendering pipeline that treats every clip, effect, and composite as a node in a directed graph. That architecture is intended to make Olive suitable for VFX and colour work rather than only for straight cut-based editing, and the design borrows from Blackmagic Fusion, Natron, and other node-first compositors. Features implemented in the 0.2 development builds include a multi-track timeline, GPU-accelerated preview through OpenGL, exports through the OpenColorIO colour management library, high-bit-depth internal processing, and support for standard delivery codecs through the FFmpeg backend. Olive Video Editor is coordinated through the olivevideoeditor.org site, a small Discord community, the olive-editor GitHub organization, an active subreddit at r/OliveVideoEditor, a YouTube demonstration channel, and a Patreon that supports Mayfield's development time. Because the software remains in pre-1.0 development, users should treat exports as experimental and preserve source projects before delivering a finished cut. The project is one of the most technically ambitious free video editor efforts and has attracted long-standing interest from the open-source VFX community.