Open source is well established in cloud infrastructure, web hosting, embedded devices, and many other areas. Fewer people know that open source is a great option for producing professional-level audio-visual materials.

As a product owner and sometimes marketing support person, I produce a lot of content for end users: documentation, web articles, video tutorials, event booth materials, white papers, interviews, and more. I have found plenty of great open source software that helps me do my job producing audio, video, print, and screen graphics. There are a lot of reasons[1] that people choose open source over proprietary options, and I've compiled this list of open source audio and video tools for people who:

  • want to switch to GNU/Linux, but need to start slowly with cross-platform software on their regular operating system;
  • are already open source enthusiasts, but are new to open source A/V software and want to know which options to trust;
  • want to discover new tools to fuel their creativity and don't want to use the same approaches or software everyone else uses; or
  • have some other reason to use open source A/V solutions (if this is you, share your reason in the comments).

Fortunately, there is a lot of open source software available for A/V creators, as well as hardware that supports those applications. All of the software on this list meets the following criteria:

  • cross-platform
  • open source (for software and drivers)
  • stable
  • actively maintained
  • well documented and supported

I've divided this list into graphics, audio, video, and animation solutions. Note that the software applications in this article are not exact equivalents of well-known proprietary software, they'll require you to learn new applications, and you may need to modify your workflow, but learning new tools enables you

Read more from our friends at Opensource.com