Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software company that makes software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, product design, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. It bills itself as a “… leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software”.
The company was founded in 1982 by John Walker, who was a joint developer of the first versions of AutoCAD, the company’s best known software application. Autodesk is listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, it has over 15,000 employees, and is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area.
While Autodesk develops many high quality applications they are proprietary software. And the vast majority of their products are not available for Linux. This series looks at the best free and open source alternatives.
Autodesk Motion FX is software to create real-time video effects using your computer’s camera. It’s also a video editor.
Motion FX is proprietary software and is not available for Linux. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.
1. OpenShot Video Editor
OpenShot Video Editor is designed to be an easy to use, quick to learn, and surprisingly powerful video editor.
OpenShot can read and write most video and image formats. It comes with a powerful key frame animation framework, and it’s capable of an unlimited number of key frames and animation possibilities. There’s unlimited tracks/layers, over 400 video transitions with real-time previews, advanced timeline, frame accuracy, audio mixing and editing, and much more.
It doesn’t offer all the functionality compared to Final Cut Pro. But for many of you, it offers a great alternative for video editing. And it’s under active development with new features being added.
2. Kdenlive
Kdenlive is another awesome open source video editor.
It offers all the essentials including multi-track video editing, it supports almost all audio and video formats directly, offers tons of effects and transitions, and much more.
3. Shotcut
Shotcut is another powerful cross-platform video editor. Like Kdenlive it’s based on the awesome FFmpeg libraries and therefore supports hundreds of audio and video formats.
We love the software’s interface and the program’s hardware support. There’s AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA hardware encoding, OpenGL GPU-based image processing, a wide range of capture devices are supported. There’s also multi-core parallel image processing.
| Alternatives to Autodesk's Products | |
|---|---|
 | 3ds Max is a 3D computer graphics program for making 3D animations, models, games and images. |
 | Arnold is software for rendering three-dimensional, computer-generated scenes using unbiased, physically-based, Monte Carlo path tracing techniques. |
 | AutoCAD is computer-aided design (CAD) and drafting software. It's used in industry, by architects, project managers, engineers, graphic designers, city planners and others. |
 | EAGLE is a scriptable electronic design automation (EDA) application with schematic capture, printed circuit board (PCB) layout, auto-router and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) features. |
 | Flame is 3D visual effects (VFX), finishing, and color grading software. It includes AI-powered tools and remote solutions. |
 | Maya creates assets for interactive 3D applications (including video games), animated films, TV series, and visual effects. |
 | MotionBuilder is 3D character animation software. The software is designed for virtual cinematography, motion capture, and traditional keyframe animation. Capture, edit, and play back complex animations. |
| Motion FX is software to create real-time video effects using your computer’s camera. It's also a video editor. |
 | Mudbox is 3D digital painting and sculpting software. Sculpt and paint highly detailed 3D geometry and textures. |
 | ReCap lets you create rich and accurate digital models of existing conditions. Capture high-quality, detailed models of real-world assets. |
 | ShotGrid is project management software used for visual effects and animation project management in television shows and movie production and video game development. |
 | Sketchbook is a raster graphics software app intended for expressive drawing and concept sketching. It's also useful for making animations. |
 | Tinkercad is an online 3D modeling program that runs in a web browser. Tinkercad uses a simplified constructive solid geometry method of constructing models. |