
OpenShot – Open-Source Video Editor - peter_d_sherman
https://www.openshot.org/
======
cfaulkingham
I installed if for my daughter so she could complete her high school film
project only after paying for a copy of Sony Vegas (school recommendation)
that failed repeatedly to import her clips (mp4). OpenShot imported her clips
flawlessly. Editing was also similar enough that she was able to easily figure
it out. Multi-line title slides were a bit of challenge for her but she
eventually figured it out. She, also wished she could name her cut/clips on
the timeline for easy reference but she couldn't find any obvious way to do
that. Overall it was a pleasant experience for her.

------
sidcool
Feedback is an important part of any successful product. For open source
products it's even more challenging because of lack of funds and motivation.
Hence I urge the community here to provide constructive criticism and
feedback. Remember that the product is free and maintained by a a very small
team who may not work on it full time.

~~~
mikekchar
I evaluated it for my needs about 6 months ago, but ended up not using it
because it didn't address my biggest need: streamlined workflow. The workflow
(at the time) was too much mouse oriented and didn't accommodate facilities
for doing the same thing over and over again. For example, I often need to do
the same video effect again and again and again with just small variations in
parameters. OpenShot is just too slow for that. I ended up using Blender
because while the UI is _weird_ it is incredibly economical. I never sent this
feedback into OpenShot, though, mainly because I figure I'm not their target
audience. I figure they are looking to help people who are making relatively
small numbers of changes to video and who require ease of discoverability over
economical usage. I might be wrong.

~~~
cosarara
What resources do you recommend to learn to use blender for video editing?

~~~
mikekchar
I used a Youtube tutorial. Unfortunately, I can't for the life of me remember
which one it was. I think you can probably just watch a few and then start
editing some video. What I found was that there were little, "Oh wow. That is
so efficient" kind of moments and because the were surprising I found myself
remembering them. By far the most difficult thing is configuring everything at
the beginning, though. If you aren't familiar with Blender, it's just
baffling. IIRC I ended up surfing a lot of different videos suggesting ways of
setting things up and just tried all of them. This gave me some familiarity
with how it all worked. I remember setting the video speed to 0.25 and paying
attention intently to what they were doing :-). Usually I hate video for
learning stuff, but for some reason with Blender it worked for me.

~~~
snazz
Blender isn’t at all an intuitive interface, but it’s sort of like Vim in that
time spent learning it pays off exponentially.

But most people don’t want to invest that much time, so OpenShot is a good
solution.

------
hamoid
This [1] blog post describes the state in which the different Libre video
editors were in December 2018. It's a great blog to keep track of Libre
creative tools out there.

Personally I have edited over 150 tutorials with Kdenlive. By setting many
shortcuts the process became fast and intuitive. Except for some releases it
worked well. It's great to hear that alternative editors are all improving :)

[1] [http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/the-quest-for-
susta...](http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/the-quest-for-sustainable-
free-libre-non-linear-video-editors)

~~~
freedomben
I recently went through this, and tried both openshot and kdenlive and stuck
with kdenlive. However, the Fedora packages were broken.

I highly recommend using the flatpaks if available. There's enough moving
dependencies that it is complicated without the flatpak.

------
Random_Person
I switched to OpenShot about 2 months ago after working exclusively in Premier
Pro for 3 years. I made the change because the price I paid for Premier simply
wasn't justified for my video needs. I had looked at many free editors in the
past and never found one that could handle 1) variable framerate, and 2) .MOV
with transparency. OpenShot does so with very little trouble. It took me a
little while to adjust to the UI and shortcuts, but I'm doing daily videos
with minimal editing, and my editing time is comparable to what I experienced
with Premier Pro. The only thing I "miss" from Premier is the built-in audio
de-noiser... but I was using it as a crutch for poorly captured in-camera
auido and have since fixed my audio setup.

~~~
bufferoverflow
FFMPeg has a few denoise filters: afftdn, anlmdn.

Or you can use this one via lv2:

[https://github.com/lucianodato/speech-
denoiser](https://github.com/lucianodato/speech-denoiser)

[https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#lv2](https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-
filters.html#lv2)

~~~
Random_Person
Awesome info. Thanks for the response!

------
jaddood
I used Openshot to edit an (originally) 2 hour-long video on my Linux machine
[1]. It was not a very complicated edit, but included adding a logo throught
the whole video, and trimming some parts of the video. I'm not a great video
editor, but I think it could be better. The interface is quite intuitive, but
there's a good deal of latency moving around in it, loading photos and other
files. In general, it's not as snappy as I expected it to be. I must say
though that it was the only reasonable open source editor that I could find,
so, I guess that says a bit about the condition of FOSS video editors...

[1] [https://youtu.be/mvIHoeZKn2U](https://youtu.be/mvIHoeZKn2U)

~~~
emanreus
Try Flowblade
[https://jliljebl.github.io/flowblade/](https://jliljebl.github.io/flowblade/)

------
Ochi
First off, let me assure you that I have a lot of respect for the developers
of free software projects like this one, and I hope that it continues to
evolve in the future. Still, from a user's perspective, none of the existing
open source NLEs have fulfilled my needs, even though my needs are not that
exotic.

I'm running a tiny YouTube channel for a few years now and I'm regularly
releasing videos on it. I need to edit and render projects in the order of 2
hours or more on a regular basis. This includes simple color grading, cutting,
multiple layers of videos and audio, simple effects and transformations (and
it must run on Linux).

I have basically tried them all: The MLT-based editors Shotcut, Kdenlive,
OpenShot, Flowblade, as well as Blender and Cinelerra. I used Shotcut (which
is made by the developer of the MLT framework) for a long time and also
contributed at least a little bit, mostly with bug reports and hints where the
problem may be in the code. I wanted to like Shotcut, but at the end of the
day, all of the solutions were too slow, had too few possibilities to realize
what I had in mind, or were too unstable.

After Shotcut even disabled the experimental and unstable feature of GPU-
accelerated effects, which really helped to make it usable performance-wise, I
finally gave up and tried one of the two commercial, cross-platform NLEs that
I'm aware of (DaVinci Resolve). And even though - like I said - I wanted to
like the open source alternatives, I have to admit that Resolve is on a whole
different level regarding performance and possibilities. (Note that other
editors like Kdenlive also support GPU acceleration, but at the end of the day
this is a feature of the underlying MLT framework, and it showed that it was
about as unstable in Kdenlive as in Shotcut.)

Maybe a NLE is just the kind of application that requires a big(ger) amount of
dedicated (and possibly paid) work to really lift it to a level that actually
makes it usable in the real world. Especially since the MLT framework is used
by so many different editors, which appear to be developed independently, it
would be worthwhile to join forces to develop one strong application and the
framework itself.

P.S.: If you want to try the free version of Resolve, be aware that features
like H.264 support and even audio output using non-Blackmagic-hardware is not
available in the free version (not sure about the new beta of version 16), but
they work beautifully in the paid version.

~~~
windyaskew
I used Shotcut to get me through my film certificate (video essay class, short
film class, etc.) and it was difficult to work with. Random freezes and
crashes left me very frustrated.

I switched to Flowblade [1] and it was so much better for my needs. I could do
basic color correction without crashes and editing audio is much more
powerful. All in all a better program (for my simple needs).

[1]
[https://jliljebl.github.io/flowblade/](https://jliljebl.github.io/flowblade/)

------
arthurfm
Does anyone know what the status is of VideoLan Movie Creator? [1]

I remember downloading it 9 years ago, but the project seems dead. [2]

Being based on the massively popular VLC Media Player, it seemed like a really
promising open source video editor.

[1] [https://www.videolan.org/vlmc/](https://www.videolan.org/vlmc/)

[2]
[https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlmc](https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlmc)

~~~
programLyrique
Seems like last commit was one year ago:
[https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlmc/tree/master/src](https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlmc/tree/master/src)

------
osrec
I'm an ardent Linux user, and I like openshot, but I struggle to love it.

The basic problem is stability and certain aspects of the UI. You can just
about do everything you need to, but if they make it a bit more user friendly,
they'd win over many more users.

~~~
Nux
I switched to Kdenlive after going through a similar experience. I find it a
bit more featureful and quite a bit more stable.

------
RasmusWL
They also offer a AWS marketplace AMI with a REST api, so you can do video
editing server-side. [https://www.openshot.org/cloud-
api/](https://www.openshot.org/cloud-api/)

I have not seen any other product offering such an easy solution for
serverside video editing.

~~~
amelius
What is the usecase for server-side video editing?

~~~
RasmusWL
We're building a product that provides a web interface for creating videos
that users can share as stories on social platforms. This includes applying
transitions and effects to input images/videos, and generating a resulting
video.

Maybe we could be using ffmpeg for this. We never really explored that in
depth since OpenShot seemed like an obvious solution :P

------
Animats
I use it, but it's just OK. The UI is a bit sluggish and the timeline is hard
to navigate.

As with most open source programs, the artistic components, such as the
default title templates, are terrible.

------
teel
Having never heard of OpenShot before, I needed a video video editor, saw
OpenShot and downloaded it, managed to cut a short clip, add extra music
track, do other small adjustments and export it suitable format rather
quickly. Very nice!

Most problems were related to (accidentally) clicking something and not
knowing what it does, trying to revert the changes but messing up things even
more instead. Once I figured out what to do and what _not_ to do, the process
felt very polished and easy.

I think the problem is the same as with other software that are still being
developed: you google the program name, download latest version and there are
new features that haven't been added to documentation and tutorials yet. So
you have bunch of settings and buttons that do something but to find out what
they are and how they work, googling gets you to development mailing lists and
where you get lost very quickly without answers.

Will definitely keep this installed and follow the development.

~~~
0xfeba
I've used the cheap AVS video editor which works really well for the price. I
tried OpenShot for a small clip and had the same feelings bumbling around at
first.

The UI did feel a bit slow at times, and I had other specific complaints that
I don't recall now but I was happy to have an open-source video editor.

------
zie1ony
I used OpenShot once for a 5min clip and it was really easy. Now I need to do
another project and I chose to use Blender. So far, so good :)

------
kkapelon
If you don't care about open-source Davinci resolve runs on Linux as well.
There is also Lightworks

~~~
rixrax
If you run CentOS (anyone, hello?!?!?) that is for Davinci Resolve[0]. If
anyone has it working on Ubuntu 18.x or 19.x, let me know how because I’d like
to use it.

[0] [https://medium.com/@sethgoldin/running-davinci-resolve-on-
li...](https://medium.com/@sethgoldin/running-davinci-resolve-on-linux-and-
the-meaning-of-stability-70d2730b73a1)

------
yrro
I couldn't figure out how to change the resolution of the output video. I'd
have to try again to come up with a useful description of why I found it
confusing but I do remember not being able to just enter a width height and
frame rate. And if I remember correctly, changing the video size and or
feamerste to one of the presents screwed up the position and timings of the
clips and and animations I'd edited in the timeline.

------
peteforde
Anyone with experience that can comment on this vs. kdenlive?

~~~
shard
I recently edited a small project, a 15 second video with multiple video and
audio tracks, some basic white balance and color correction, and minor
animations, on OpenShot, ShotCut, and KdenLive, in order to figure out which
one was more appropriate for me. I also watched some tutorial videos on each
of the video editors. My conclusion was that OpenShot was too basic for even
such a small project, KdenLive was usable but lacked some tools which made
editing somewhat burdensome, and ShotCut was the winner with its toolset and
UI, although it crashed the most out of the three.

However, even with such a simple project, none of the three FOSS tools were
easy to use, and all were barriers to my efficiency and creativity. I then
searched for commercial offerings, and am currently using Davinci Resolve,
which is free for the basic version, but even the basic version is light years
beyond the FOSS choices in terms of speed, ease of use, and features. As
someone who uses FOSS tools (GIMP, Inkscape) for ideological reasons, I'm a
bit disappointed by how large of a gap there is between FOSS and commercial
video editors.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
I know that Blender is often cited as an unlikely but very good FOSS video
editor. Did you consider it also for your comparison?

~~~
shard
When I was researching which FOSS video editors to try, I read a few reviews
which talked about how Blender is less intuitive and more difficult to use
than the other choices (OpenShot, Shotcut, KdenLive) so I did not try it. I
did a quick search just now, and saw that Blender offers vectorscope and
waveform functions, which when I started doing editing I did not know about,
but now I find extremely helpful in getting white balance and color correction
right. If I haven't already been spoiled by the speed and ease of use of
Davinci Resolve, I think I would have tried Blender.

------
nekopa
Has anyone here used Cinelerra recently? I tried to use it about 5-6 years ago
and had a lot of problems trying to install it. But it did seem pretty good
feature wise.

------
white-moss
OpenShot uses ffmpeg, so I'm always concerned patents like h.264, h.265, etc.
Open-source video editor is very very great, but software patents prevent that
popularization. I know that end-user will unlikely asked responsibility, but
editing video means you may be content distributor, not just a end-user...I
have a little fear for that. And patent license cost is not cheap. Am I
paranoiac?

~~~
teilo
Yeah, pretty much. I mean, it's not as if there's zero risk, but for all
intents and purposes, if you are not selling your encoded content, there is
zero risk.

The software patents have not prevented Handbrake or OBS from being popular.
They won't prevent OpenShot from being popular either.

But, aside from all that: If you are really paranoid, then use AV1 and Opus.
FFMpeg is just as capable of encoding to fully free formats. Or do your final
encode using a licensed product (On Mac, Compressor is relatively inexpensive
- $50), and use open source software for everything else.

~~~
white-moss
Hm, you are right. I was paranoiac.

Then, I'll bet on AV1. Final encoder method also sounds good.

Thank you for your reply!

------
JeremyBanks
OpenShot might not be as polished as commercial tools with millions in budget,
but its been quite easy and effective for some recent small editing work I've
had to do, and I recommed it. It's quick and relatively simple, except for
video encoding settings, but at least it does expose enough options there it
should be possible to get the results you need.

I appreciate the developer's work.

------
upbeatlinux
O wow. This takes me back.

For about 10 years there's was a pretty similar / reliable SaaS offering -
ShotRunner (1). Looks like it's now defunct.

Looking to try this out over the weekend!

1\.
[https://web.archive.org/web/20111107015621/http://shotrunner...](https://web.archive.org/web/20111107015621/http://shotrunner.com/)

------
superqd
Given the existence of free very feature rich alternatives, like DaVinci
Resolve, why would someone spend so much time building this? Just to have an
open source alternative? I don't really get who would want to use this, if
there are free options that are light years ahead of something like this. Or
did they start this just for fun to learn?

~~~
webmobdev
As someone here pointed out,

> P.S.: If you want to try the free version of Resolve, be aware that features
> like H.264 support and even audio output using non-Blackmagic-hardware is
> not available in the free version (not sure about the new beta of version
> 16), but they work beautifully in the paid version.

Makes you think - What's the use of a crippleware, even if it is free?

~~~
shard
Between the choice of being crippled in my ability to edit video in
OpenShot/ShotCut/KendLive, and being crippled in the choice of output formats
in Davinci Resolve, I think the output format is the lesser issue. I have
outputted FHD video with audio with no problem with just the basic free
version of Resolve, and if I have to transcode it, the work there is minimal
compared with the effort I saved and the result I was able to achieve from
using Resolve.

I had started using FOSS video editors due to ideological reasons (I use
GIMP/Inkscape/Audacity regularly) and loathed to have my video edits be locked
in a proprietary format, but at some point I had to admit that the end result
means much more than the intermediate process, and switched to a commercial
product.

------
EugeneOZ
Tried to use it, but even simple tasks were tricky to complete because of
counter intuitive UX.

------
otikik
I tried it some months ago. It was rough around the edges: I tried to mount
two videos together (a speaker on one side and a bunch of slides on the
other). I found the interface unintuitive, and the speed was daunting.

------
la_fayette
I use openshot on windows and it works well. There are some minor issues in
the UI, however oveall an awesome product! I tried several other oss video
editing tools but can only recommend openshot!

------
aceperry
One of the easier video editing programs that I've tried on linux. There are
surprisingly quite a few video editing programs for linux, but for me it was
easier to learn and use.

------
btreecat
What's with the timing on this post? Seems like it's only being posted because
KDENLive just dropped a huge new release yesterday.

------
omani
I used openshot for severals weeks, but it was just buggy and crashed a lot of
times. so I switched to lightworks.

ubuntu 18.04 here.

------
parvoberoi
The ease of use coupled with free distribution makes this one of the best
video editor softwares out there

------
hasahmed
Awesome. Can't wait to try this out. Been looking to escape the clutches of
Adobe

~~~
kkapelon
Take a look at Davinci Resolve. Free as in beer.

~~~
Tor3
I wanted to try the free version, but is there any way to download it without
giving them my telephone number? I don't have a way of generating a throw-away
one.

~~~
helb
Just fill in anything. The form just gives you download button after
submitting, without even verifying e-mail…

------
thrownaway954
Am I missing something??? I don't see a link to the repo anywhere.

------
nkg
Openshot is the best free editor. Keep up the good work!

------
didnt1able
How does it compare to Kdenlive?

~~~
nickjj
I tried pretty much every video editor on Linux.

If you're editing screencast style videos (ie. not live video) kdenlive is
pretty much as good as it gets on Linux but it's still waaaaaaaaay behind
video editors available on Windows and Mac such as Camtasia. So much in fact
that if video editing is an important aspect of what you do, it might not be
worth switching to Linux over this alone.

~~~
anthonybennis
This was the main reason I left Linux. It had everything I needed, Blender for
3D, GIMP for photo editing, Krita for painting and Gravit Designer for Vector
illustrations (not open source). But I just could not use OpenShot, KDENlive
and others. The UX killed my time. I had to look up documentation to do some
very basic tasks (smooth cross fade, Pan and Zoom etc). I think there's great
potential in a "Windows Movie Maker" type video editor and OpenShot could come
close with some UI tweaks.

~~~
Nexxxeh
If you have Blender in muscle memory, is using it as a video editor an option
for you? Supposedly it's pretty good once you get over the learning curve,
does knowing Blender for 3D help with that?

~~~
nickjj
I tried Blender for many hours. It's not even in the same galaxy as a
dedicated screencast editing tool like Camtasia.

Even adding something as simple as a good looking text overlay in Blender was
a massive undertaking and it didn't look anywhere near as nice as Camtasia out
of the box.

It was also extremely slow when editing videos. Like the timeline and preview
were super laggy on a basic 1080p recording of my desktop.

------
laythea
The website says "free forever".

This reminds me of other software package that was "free forever" but then
became popular and lost its "free forever" title. (I forget the name)

How will this not happen here?

I'm just sceptical of wild claims like these. Surely if this software grew
legs the devs would have to charge?

~~~
dangus
[https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html)

> When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our
> General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom
> to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish),
> that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can
> change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you
> know you can do these things.

