Post-processing of digital video has, with few exceptions, remained a fairly expensive proposition for most — often requiring an investment of hundreds or thousands of dollars. An open source project called Jahshaka aims to change that, however. Now available as a “release candidate” of its 2.0 version, the software runs on Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. Both its source code and executable binaries are available, including a binary designed for Intel-based Macs.
Jahshaka is accelerated using OpenGL, and has been in development for more than six years — the developers claim more than half a million downloads to date. Jahshaka currently has realtime editing and effects capabilities, and will ultimately include modules for video and audio editing, compositing, animation, visual effects, graphics and paint.
Included with the 2.0 release is JahPlayer, a media player that supports 2K and 4K video playback of everything from media files to raw image sequences. It maintains the source’s aspect ratio and uses a hardware-accelerated pipeline.