Edward Hervey started working on PiTiVi in December 2003[1] as an end-of-studies project at the EPITECH engineering school in Paris.

[9] Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon stated "Back in 2006, the video editing situation was looking far more exciting.

PiTiVi will not be replaced on the ISO with another video editor and will remain available to users for installation from the Ubuntu repositories.

Due to the new engine, a lot of old code could be removed and the Pitivi codebase underwent massive reorganization,[17] cleanup and refactoring.

Phase 2 - Improving features, €1,925 for adding a magnetic time-line, €4,400 for interfaces for multi-camera editing, €4,766 for porting to Mac OS X.

[23] The fundraiser did not meet its targeted amount, reaching slightly above €23,000 as of 2015[update], allowing for partially funded development.

[25] Jean-François Fortin Tam gave a talk at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009, discussing how usability became a major focus for the Pitivi project,[26] and how design considerations impacted PiTiVi's user-interface, with examples such as the use of subtle gradients in timeline objects, drag and drop importing and direct manipulation, native theme integration, and reducing complexity by carefully evaluating the need (or lack thereof) to impose preference choices onto users.

[26] Another talk, focused on the economics of open source video editors, was given by Jean-François at Libre Graphics Meeting 2011.

[27][34][35][36] After this two-year effort, as Collabora's direct involvement gradually came to an end, a new team of contributors from the community took over the maintainership of the project, including former GSoC student Thibault Saunier.

In 2014, a public fundraiser was run through the GNOME Foundation to allow two maintainers, Mathieu Duponchelle and Thibault Saunier, to work for a year on bringing Pitivi to "1.0 quality".

[38] This point of view is further expanded in another article that showed that Hervey believed that "if the Linux desktop was going to have a nice and easy to use video editor any time soon, we needed to do something to increase the pace of development significantly".

[36] In a review of Pitivi 0.94 in January 2015 Red Hat Senior Systems Engineer Chris Long said: "It looked great and professional-esque, almost Avid/premiere like.