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How does it compare to Kdenlive?



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.


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.


There haven't been a lot of things that I miss after moving from OSX to Windows, but one of the things I do miss is iMovie.

Windows Movie Maker was an OK substitute, but it's basically no longer available.

There definitely is a market for an inexpensive quick and dirty editor. I purchased Cyberlink and Corel video editing software, but because they're more "powerful" than I need, I feel as though I need to jump through UI hoops to do simple quick cuts, which is most of the video work I do.


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?


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.


Am really curious about this, could you mention the important features that would keep you from switching over?


Camtasia is just really polished and optimized for screencast videos.

There's so many little UI enhancements to make the process of editing video feel really good and not buggy.

It's also extremely easy to make complex animations by just clicking 1 or 2 buttons and dragging a couple sliders[0], along with it being very easy to add great looking text overlays, tooltips, zoom / pans, transitions, blurs / highlights, etc..

Most of these things aren't possible to do in kdenlive or any other editor on Linux and it's not just a matter of "get used to the UI of the new app man!". I tried for hours. I actually spent full days (actual days) playing with a bunch of them. None of them are even comparable. Things are either really hard to do (ie. they take 5 minutes to do instead of 5 seconds) and there's so many UI bugs. It's just not an enjoyable or productive environment.

I would go as far as saying having a non-optimal video editor is even worse than having a non-optimal code editor. For the record I've recorded hundreds of screencasts and put in 100+ hours of editing video.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeSD17YRijk , This video was made entirely in Camtasia but the first 10 seconds of that video was also done in Camtasia too. I'm hardly an animation expert but that took seriously only minutes to implement by dragging a couple of sliders around without really knowing what anything did. I tried to replicate it in kdenlive for an entire day and didn't even come close to being able to do that.




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