feasibility of building a video editing program in python

[Pete Shinners]

abe burmeister wrote:
> I'm interested in building a program that:
> 1 - manipulates and sequences static images and displays them on
> screen at video playback speeds.
> 2 - exports sequences as video
> 3 - has a GUI that allows for real time manipulation
> 4 - can be controlled with a MIDI interface
> 
> Is something that python can do? If so is python the right tool to
> accomplish this, or are there more optimal languages?

whoa.. the first thing you are going to need to do is figure out which C 
libraries you will need to do all this. if on windows i suppose you could 
use the various win32 video functions?

anyways, once you have the libraries you would start from, you will 
probably need to create a thin wrapper so you can call the functions from 
python (i'm assuming any of these libs won't come with python bindings?)

anyways, from there you won't be too bad off. using python to actually 
"interact" with the video isn't going to work, not fast enough. but using 
python to assemble a "pipeline" of builtin c filters and throw on a GUI 
should work very well.

in any event, this is an enormous project to write. it's a lot of work no 
matter which language you choose. in any event, i think whatever libraries 
you need to deal with to get all this functionality will determine how easy 
or hard this is.