
Kdenlive: an open-source video editor - brudgers
https://kdenlive.org/en/features/
======
m52go
I'm a simpleton when it comes to video editing, but I was able to make a
series of professional-looking videos without a whole lot of trouble in
February.

I only run Linux, so I'm not sure what I would've done without Kdenlive since
I don't see what else I could have possibly used.

Huge thanks to everyone who contributes to the project!

~~~
anonova
Davinci Resolve runs on Linux:
[https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/](https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/)

~~~
linsomniac
I tried it recently, but it just segfaulted. System was running Ubuntu 18.04.
Just FYI.

~~~
glenda
I got Resolve set up on Ubuntu 18.04 this morning - the trick for me was
switching to the nvidia drivers, before that it segfaulted on my machine too.

~~~
linsomniac
That mostly seemed to be my problem, the 18.04 OpenCL causes Resolve to
segfault. I grabbed the AMD "pro" Linux drivers, installed them (which was
tricky, their provided scripts bombed out so I manually had to resolve a bunch
of dependencies).

Once I got opencl installed and rebooted the machine, I was able to start
Resolve and get into the main interface. It couldn't find a GPU though
("clinfo" showed one), I'm guessing that it really,truly does need an nVidia
card. I brought home a card from work to try, just to see if it would make a
difference, but someone put a AMD card into the box of a nVidia card.

I tried Resolve on my wife's Win10 laptop with Intel GPU, and it seemed to
install and work no problem. Since I'm basically going to be using the machine
for just editing when I'm editing, I may just set it up with Windows and call
it done.

From some of the introductions I've watched, it looks like Resolve is the
software I want. Lightworks has worked well, but Resolve looks like a space
age rocket ship. I guess we will see...

------
nickjj
Unfortunately for screencast videos where you record your desktop and maybe
overlay a webcam kdenlive is really really bad compared to alternatives
available on Windows and Mac such as Camtasia / Screenflow.

It's one of the reasons why I continue to stick with Windows. Kdenlive feels
like it's 10 years behind Camtasia in terms of UI polish and being able to
accomplish simple tasks like put a little tooltip overlay on the screen and
make it look reasonable.

I think a lot of people who say kdenlive is good haven't tried Camtasia, or
have created enough videos to really figure out kdenlive's shortcomings. I'm
coming at this from the POV of creating 400 videos and have spent over 1,000
hours hardcore editing these videos.

I don't want to tear it down too much because it's one of the better
screencast video editing tools on Linux but if your profession involves
creating screencast videos, you're going to be majorly disappointed compared
to Camtasia (or Screenflow). Enough to where you'll probably abort the idea of
using Linux even if you're primarily a developer.

I wish I could throw money at the kdenlive devs and wake up tomorrow with a
video editor that was as good as Camtasia.

~~~
codetrotter
If you want to record your desktop in Linux with a live webcam overlay I
strongly recommend Open Broadcaster Software, aka OBS.

[https://obsproject.com/](https://obsproject.com/)

OBS lets you combine multiple sources easily including adding static and
dynamic graphical overlays and is basically the what all of the streamers are
using on all of the three platforms Linux, macOS and Windows these days, and
aside from being able to stream live to Twitch etc it is also perfect for
offline recording.

However, OBS is not a video editor, so if your use-case is to first record
your screen and to then record the commentary afterwards rather than
commenting while you are screenrecording then OBS is probably not what you
want.

~~~
nickjj
Yeah I use OBS. It's the best thing ever for streaming and definitely is one
of the best solutions for recording in general.

But Camtasia is both a recorder and editor and it seamlessly integrates the 2.
The main pros of Camtasia is that it's super optimized for editing screencast
style videos (tooltip overlays, text, zooms / pans, really REALLY nice
animations on any objects by just dragging a few sliders, etc.). The editing
part is where kdenlive is way behind IMO, but that's where you spend most of
your time.

~~~
eropple
Best _free_ (as in beer) thing for streaming, I'll give you. But I switched to
vMix as my primary video mixing software and won't look back until OBS has
significantly better audio management. vMix literally got $700 out of me
because it integrated a good, ASIO-capable mixer into it.

A vMix Call equivalent that transparently wires into the audio board would
also be really nice, but I don't wanna get greedy.

~~~
nickjj
> But I switched to vMix as my primary video mixing software and won't look
> back until OBS has significantly better audio management. vMix literally got
> $700 out of me because it integrated a good, ASIO-capable mixer into it.

Fair enough but audio is a completely different animal that can be tamed in a
number of ways:

1\. You can buy a hardware USB audio interface + mixer for ~$200-400ish total
which can do compression, basic EQs, noise gate, has multiple inputs, etc. and
now that becomes your final source of audio so you don't need to process it
with software. It's just a mic from your computer's point of view.

2\. OBS has VST plugin support, so you can directly use hundreds of free VSTs
to do various effects in real time without needing to mess around with audio
redirection. No hardware needed except for your mic.

3\. You can use REAPER (free but you should register it, sort of like Sublime
Text) which is a DAW. From here you can use various VSTs and then use Jack (or
comparable software) to redirect REAPER's output as input to another app (such
as OBS). This takes a bit of initial set up but technically would work with
any app, not just OBS and this is what I used to do before going with #1
because I didn't want to run all of these apps every time I wanted to start
recording.

In the end, you can get fantastic sounding audio with any of the above
approaches and with #1 and #3 you can do it with any application where as with
#2 you're limited to OBS only (which isn't a bad thing if you spend your time
streaming and primarily recording with it anyways).

~~~
eropple
To be clear: I am a semi-professional A/V engineer, it's not my day job but I
produce pretty large shows. So it's not about getting "fantastic sounding
audio". It's about getting controllable audio that scales; when you're running
a nontrivial live video show; my yearly charity event is 24 hours long and
typically runs 5 cameras, and between 6 and 12 audio feeds, not all of which
are coming in over XLR). Which is to say that along the way I've done each of
the options you outline. They're bad. (There is one moderately better one I
will cover. It's not good either.)

#1: that USB mixer acts as a mixer only for inputs that you can plug into that
mixer. That may sound obvious. It becomes concretely painful when you have
video inputs that also have sound attached. For HDMI captures, you might have
an audio takeoff or you might use an HDMI extractor, which is...fine, such as
it is, but suboptimal. If you use a professional stack--my video stack is SDI-
based--this is completely inadequate. If you use NDI for video transmission
over your network (and my stack has a switch in it, 24 gigabit and 2 10G SFP+,
in order to take between six and ten NDI streams into the video mixer), you're
_boned_ ; the only option that OBS offers, and it's a bad one, is to replace
your cue/monitor output (assuming you have an extra audio out in your video
mixer) with the NDI output. This means you can't practically mix NDI stream
output that isn't currently on-screen because you only get one cue.

2\. This isn't a solution because the OBS mixer is deficient. Modifying levels
on the fly is impractical because they're just local UI widgets that lack the
usual affordances for mouse-driven audio control. And this could be fixed with
hardware but far as I am aware (this one might have changed since I last used
it, OBS is now just an NDI slave for me), you can't connect a MIDI slider
controller to the OBS mixer in the first place. You _definitely_ can't send
signals back to a MIDI controller to enable the use of motorized faders, which
are one of those "I can't go back, I won't go back!" things now that I have
them in my stack.

3\. Similar problem to #1, only in software. Redirection turns into a virtual
patch bay and you end up having to figure out how to run things back and
forth. And the tooling on both ends is very rarely automatable, so you'd
better hope you don't lose your setup.

The _best_ option, and it also gets you screwed over because of UI
affordances, is to use obs-asio with bassasio (and yeah, this means you're
using Windows, but you probably should be anyway because #3 is better with a
more serious DAW option, like Ableton Live, as your audio backend). You can
pull every channel off your interface and expose them in OBS and you can
squint at Qt sliders to your heart's content.

Personally, I use vMix instead and have good iPad-based applications that I
don't have to write myself (like I said elsewhere in this thread, I wrote
this[1] to control OBS remotely, it's not nearly as good as the stuff already
available for vMix!) for both audio and video switching and I can, and do,
wire up MIDI surfaces for physical controls (motorized faders, etc.).

Don't get me wrong: OBS is fine if your needs are small. I got pretty far with
it. When your needs are no longer small, it turns into a Jenga stack of hacks.
I hang out in the OBS Discord, I think the team is very talented, but the
software has trouble scaling up even to my relatively modest needs compared to
commercial solutions (vMix and NewTek VT being the best options in that space,
though VT is gonna cost you both arms and both legs).

Had I infinite time, I would go take a chainsaw to the entire audio stack in
OBS, but...I don't, and vMix already does it capital-R Right: multiple ASIO
devices, first-class mixer inputs for everything from audio interfaces to
cameras to NDI feeds to _WebRTC calls_ (seriously, vMix Call is _great_ ). And
it comes with a pervasive automation suite built around multiple kinds of
input devices--DirectInput joysticks/controllers, keyboard shortcuts, MIDI
signals (and not just notes, but faders etc.)--with signal-returns to enable
stuff like motorized fader boards (which have gotten super cheap, too). Given
all that, and the lack of having to do any of it myself? $700 is cheap. ;)

[1] - [https://bit.ly/buymyapp](https://bit.ly/buymyapp)

~~~
nickjj
We have very different use cases.

I'm coming at from a single person trying to record screencast videos in a
controlled environment.

~~~
eropple
I understand that. But your reply seemed to minimize what I was saying in a
way that read to me as dismissive. Not saying you meant to, but this stuff is
stuff I take pretty seriously--and I was in a meeting so I had time to kill.
;)

And OBS _is_ in my standard kit. It's just fine as an NDI satellite. But also,
for what you describe, there's a $60 1080p vMix package...and it's got most of
the bells and whistles I described, too. Automation and control are easy to
overlook until you don't have them!

~~~
nickjj
I think my current set up is pretty automated.

I open a recording program (either Camtasia or OBS depending on what I'm
doing), hit record and talk. Then I hit stop.

That's it. At this point my audio is leveled and comes out sounding good since
all of the processing happens in hardware in real time. It's also sync'd with
the video.

Editing is where kdenlive falls apart which is really what my reply was about.

------
fuball63
I'm a musician and Linux user, so I have to lean on open source for recording
and production. I use Kdenlive to do basic video creation; background music to
a picture. It works really well for my purposes, in fact, I've had much fewer
problems with kdenlive than with Audacity or Inkscape. Inkscape locks up my
entire machine (AMD card most likely to blame) and I can't get through a
recording project without Audacity crashing (been using it for years with
different machines/configs, never had good luck).

~~~
bitbang
If you're working on recording projects on linux, why the heck are you using
Audacity? Seriously, save yourself a lot of headaches with Ardour.

~~~
hellcow
I've tried using Ardour, but I've never been able to get it to work with my
USB Snowball mic. It starts with audio out, but once I configure my mic, it's
input only and I have to restart the program to hear anything I've done. No
other program I've used has ever behaved like this. I'm sure it has terrific
features, but it'd be great if they could nail the simple out-of-the-box
configuration.

~~~
bitbang
That's because the device is input only. By default Ardour uses the same
device for capture and monitoring. The reason is that different audio devices
have their own internal clocks, and using more than one devices introduces
clock drift.

You get around this be setting JACK to use the snowball device for capture
only (and by doing so you are using its clock) and then attach whatever device
you are using for monitoring as a JACK client using zita_j2a from the zita-
ajbridge tools package.

~~~
hellcow
That makes a lot of sense. Speaking for the "hobbyists" out there, it'd be
great to have that as an option in Ardour itself and not have to fiddle with
setting up client/server/bridges just to plug in a microphone (which seems
like a really common use-case!). FWIW I don't even need live monitoring where
latency matters -- I just want to record, then stop recording, then play it
back and edit it.

I do know that programs like Adobe Audition on Windows offer that in a plug-
and-play way.

------
linsomniac
Within the last month I got an action cam and have started to edit videos to
post on Youtube. Mostly "HOWTO" videos, because I've learned so much by
watching HOWTO videos. I'm just finishing up a major remodel of my kitchen,
with youtube videos being a large contributing factor to my success.

Kdenlive I haven't tried yet, but is on my short list to try.

I've been using LightWorks under Linux and it works pretty well. I mean, I
have nothing else to compare it to, but I'm doing 4K30fps video, and a friend
of mine tells me that his Macbook Pro with Adobe tools isn't up to the task.
I'm running on a 5 year old PC I had in the closet (870K CPU, 16GB RAM,
Radeon, SSD), and it works fairly well.

The only downside of Lightworks so far has been that to export to Youtube at
4K you have to "subscribe", you can't just buy the software. You can do your
editing and play with it, and export 720p video.

But to export 4K, you have to either pay $25/mo or $170/year. I wasn't sure
how much I'd like editing video, so I didn't want to pay $170. so I did the
$25 for a month. I'm really enjoying it, but I kind of wish I could just pay
$200-$300 and be done with it. Which I realize isn't rational, because that'll
buy a lot of $25 months.

Other ones I want to try: Kdenlive, Davinci Resolve (tried it and it
segfaulted, $170/year), Cinelerra (looks kind of crappy), Flowblade. Pitivi
looks to be abandoned. Maybe I should try Blender, but I don't want to do any
3D stuff, don't want to get sidetracked.

There's also an online NL video editor that my daughter has used for school:
wevideo. She showed it to me after seeing me running LightWorks and
recognizing the workflow. I'm dealing with 75-200GB though, don't think that's
going to work for online. Smaller video will probably work, my daughter uses
it to voice-over a series of photos turned into video.

There are a few rough edges, but Lightworks has mostly let me, as a neophyte
video guy, to make great videos. Took me an hour to import an MP3 this weekend
though.

~~~
dsego
Don't forget Shotcut.

~~~
linsomniac
I edited a video yesterday in Shotcut and it looks pretty good. I do seem to
end up with a lot of glitches that I have to go back and clean up, usually
repeated frames at clip transitions, though one seems to be repeated frames
within a clip. I imagine it is something I'm doing, like how I drag the clips
together? But I haven't had that problem in any other editor.

I think I'm sold on Davinci Resolve though. It's pretty sweet, extremely full
featured, free for most uses and reasonably priced for the full kit ($300
IIRC. That adds the ability to do multi-GPU and have multiple users
collaborating, plus 6K and 8K editing).

I had to upgrade my GPU though. My old one had 2GB and Resolve was like "Oh,
that's ADORABLE!" It was a 5-6 year old computer though. I also put it under
Windows, it just seems to run better there. I had battled for an hour to get
to the point where it stopped segfaulting under Linux and started complaining
about not enough video RAM. But now that Linux install is janked, something
related to the AMD GPU packages. Probably not TOO hard a fix, since it was all
.debs.

------
noodlesUK
One of the things the Linux desktop sorely needs is a good video editor. I’ve
heard of kdenlive before but never tried it. How is it (both for experienced
users doing complex editing and for newbies just wanting to trim some
footage)?

I’ve also seen that black magic’s editor is available for Linux, but it is an
_enormous_ package...

~~~
phosphophyllite
Linux desktop needs consistency and freedom (yes, open source desktop needs
freedom).

Freedom of updating and installing newer versions of software without waiting
for maintainer/distro half of year to build new package (outdated next week
because it's STABLE package).

This is main problem of any linux desktop initiative - linux users get newer
gimp after windows users.

Hope snaps/flatpack/appimage solve this problem in future (snap versions of
apps look ugly now).

~~~
bingerman
I personally solved this by switching to antergos (which is based on arch, but
fully usable out of the box). Been running the same installation without any
problems for about 5 years now, completely updated irregularly.

Using "stable" distros makes little sense for other than complete newbies and
enterprise-like critical usage and such imo. If you don't need bleeding edge
stuff they are a good choice though, but for average users modern rolling
releases are definitely stable enough.

The freedom is there.

~~~
monetus
I've been eyeing antergos. Any hardware problems along the way?

~~~
vytviytffdpoi
Hardware support is pretty solid, since the kernel, like all packages, is
fairly up to date. There's also an option to install proprietary GPU drivers
out of the box. And when reinstalling an old ThinkPad, it was also the only
distro among the few I had handy that actually came with the correct Intel
wifi firmware so I could, you know, install. Two thumbs up for Antergos.

~~~
ekianjo
Antergos is not a standalone distro though. Its just an installer for Arch.

------
jancsika
Has there ever been an attempt to build a FLOSS video editor pinned to a
single distro and a single piece of hardware (or at least single GPU)?

It just seems like Linux cannot currently guarantee anything about the
stability or even existence of GPU-acceleration on an arbitrary machine. So to
start with that and then smear the software across multiple LTS versions of
multiple distros seems like a perfect recipe for our current reality.

Could maybe even build a funding model off of that. Compare a fundraiser
trying to gain general stability for a buggy video editor to a fundraiser for
getting "Paradise Video Editor" to extend its rock solid UX to a 2nd piece of
hardware. I bet the maker of that hardware would find value in such support.
:)

~~~
shmerl
General purpose GPU acceleration is accessible through standard APIs like
Vulkan.

If you mean specialized GPU video encoding / decoding, there is VAAPI, which
is also pretty much supported on all GPUs and distros. But selection of
particular codecs depends on the hardware.

~~~
jancsika
No, I mean limiting support to X distro on Y arch with Z GPU. Any usage
outside of those constraints is completely unsupported and isn't allowed to be
added to an official bug report.

For example, let's say Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on x86_64 with GPU... (dunno, choose a
decent one that has a respectable open source driver).

Here's my question-- how much more stable would such a video editor be than
the extant ones that ship with general Linux support?

I'm asking because I see lots of reports that so-and-so crashes because the
user installed from the ancient Debian package, or the Nvidia driver is
garbage, or some library doesn't play well on some distro/arch/distro-arch-
combo. I'm just curious how much of the eternal bugginess of Linux video
editors can be ascribed to those problems vs. the more narrow problem of
designing fast-and-stable video editing software.

~~~
shmerl
I see no reason to support ancient drivers and ancient distros. Supporting
recent enough ones is expected. But there is no point to limit architectures
as long as given setup has GPU with enough functionality to provide hardware
acceleration and drivers that expose that.

------
s3xham
Shotcut and openshot crash less for me in general under linux, maybe I should
give kdenlive a chance again after reading about the GUI fuzzing progress. My
experience has been that kdenlive is prone to crashing and saving your project
often is a must

~~~
Erlich_Bachman
Also for any user thinking of switching to or starting with Kdenlive, they
should know that in addition to crashing often (as reported by many users) it
also does not support a relatively common video editing feature as multiple
timelines. In Kdenlive, in one project/file, you are only given a single
timeline to do all your editing in. You cannot nest them, combine them, there
are no timelines to combine, there is only one of them.

Since this will be a dealbreaker for many users, they should know this
upfront.

All respect to open source software, but for many projects using Kdenlive is
just not an option as of yet.

~~~
s3xham
Very true and another advantage for shotcut. Layering and multiple timelines
is the defining feature between "oh look it's Windows Movie Maker, except
worse" and a quality non linear editor.

I've definitely grown cynical but I will try out kdenlive and see if it has
matured. Shotcut has been my Linux go-to for several years now.

~~~
f_r_d
Make sure to try the refactoring version. It will be out for the 19.04 release
schedule.

------
pmoriarty
What is it with kdenlive crashing?

There's are so many other large, complex applications on Linux, but I've never
in my life experienced or seen as many reports of crashes as I have with
kdenlive.

Is stability just not a priority for its developers?

~~~
jl6
It became much better for me after throwing tons of RAM at it.

------
bibyte
A really interesting thing is that unlike on other tasks (programming?) open
source is not that visible in the graphics/animation space.

~~~
meruru
Blender is widely used for 3D I believe.

~~~
bibyte
You are right but Blender is the exception rather then the rule.

------
marknadal
Kdenlive saved us, it was the best libre/open source editor we could find, and
were able to produce several professional interviews with it. You can check
them out here: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-UMfJVuezk-
YgNUNSgpv...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-UMfJVuezk-YgNUNSgpv-
fE6q5Qjokdp)

Thanks again for such great software!

------
arminiusreturns
So I maintain a list of good gpl software, and I would also like to remind
people about shotcut. I see constant activity on its github. In the Foss world
usually it one give you problems the other will do. (not trying to steal any
limelight from kdenlive, which is also doing great, I just like to show people
Foss options)

~~~
davidandgoliath
Is this list public? My biggest battle using linux is keeping a list of great
software! :)

~~~
arminiusreturns
Let me get back to you on that... I have an abandoned version on github that
is so sloppy it's embarrassing.

------
PorterDuff
As an old bored guy, I wonder if they need some help? This is a thing I know a
little about.

I wonder if they deal with closed captioning, titling, synching with a VTR,
multicamera, drivers for video I/O cards, proper file parsing (depending on
things like FFMPEG is not such a great idea), etc.

~~~
f_r_d
There is a big code refactoring going on and after that multicam is on the
roadmap. There is also a project to rewrite the titler. I am sure any kind of
input is most welcome. You can use the irc/telegram channels as well as
mailing list to contact the team.

------
la_fayette
I have created several screencasts and used
[https://www.openshot.org/](https://www.openshot.org/). I haven't used
anything else yet to compare it to. But i will definitely try kdenlive!

------
dusted
I've done a bit of editing in kdenlive, and it's by far the best open source
video editor I've come across.

------
faissaloo
Hands down the best libre video editor I've used, good enough to make some
fairly dank memes

------
jonas21
Maybe this is a dumb question, but how is "Kdenlive" supposed to be
pronounced?

~~~
arawde
I've only used it a few times, but I pronounce it along the lines of "kayden-
live"

------
proctor
what about cinerella? when i researched what video editor to learn next after
kdenlive it was cinerella. it seems to work fine, and i am surprised not to
see any comments regarding it. seems like it is completely out of the running?

------
Brosper
Why this project is not on for ex. GitHub?

~~~
eitland
You mean why they are using git as intended instead of introducing a single
point of failure? ;-)

Many in the free software movement shun commercial software. To make things
worse, GitHub recently got aquired by one of free softwares old enemies.

Personally I've used and even recommended GitHub before Gitlab became
available and I don't shun them or even Microsoft, but I also see where they
might be coming from.

~~~
quadrangle
Don't use "commercial" when you mean "proprietary". The free/libre software
community isn't opposed to commerce, only to restrictions on liberty.

------
diimdeep
Why is KDE software almost always available only as compile only for macOS ?

~~~
pavelbr
Maybe software for specifically Linux is kinda KDE's whole thing. I'm just
happy they go out of their way to package and test their code against other
OSs in the first place.

------
danilocesar
kdenlive is horrible. Really. If you ever worked with professional video
editing you know that for a fact.

That said: Kdenlive is, by far, the best option OSS available on Linux.
openshot is trying, but is pretty unstable and not reliable for big videos.

~~~
akerro
Wow, pears are horrible for making apple pie!

kdenlive is replacement for windows movie maker, not professional video
editing.

~~~
ciaron
However, the homepage claims "Our software was designed to answer most needs,
from basic video editing to professional work."

~~~
btreecat
"Professional" just means someone paid you for the work.

