I have used iMovie and Final Cut Pro for video projects. I find them easy to work with and intuitive to some degree. After I finish the project, I may want to change one word that appears multiple times, and I have to do it by hand. Also, the projects take a lot of space.
I am looking for a video editor where the video project file is plain text, which I understand to be an edit decision list. My goals are:
- to separate heavy digital assets from the light edit decision list
- to put the edit decision list into a version control system like Git and GitHub
- to automate some parts of editing with the keyboard, e.g. find-and-replace on captions, change times and durations, and adjust multiple dB levels
- to have a cross-platform solution for collaborators on different operating systems (Windows, macOS, and Linux)
Two examples outside of video production are OpenSCAD in 3D modelling, which generates STL files from plain-text files that are two orders of magnitude smaller; and Inkscape, which reads and writes plain-text SVG files.
I found this article on opensource.com that mentions Kdenlive and Flowblade, but plain-text files seem an export rather than the proejct file itself.
The closest that I found would be Bash scripting based on FFMPEG for video concatenation and effects, and SVG for graphic overlays.
Does such a tool exist?