I saw this post hours after I finished a task where this would have come in handy. I had a bunch of HQ video clips from a professional Sony video camera that I needed to string together, with short simple fade transitions. The last time I did this(few years ago), I was using a Mac, and iMovie did the job well. This time, I was on a Windows NUC, and figured Windows MovieMaker should do the trick. Nope.
- Opening Movie Maker redirects to the Photos app, with a note that Microsoft Clipchamp has this functionality now and Movie Maker is deprecated.
- Install Clipchamp and see that its hilariously bad at batch-adding clips to the timeline. Adding 300 clips, one at a time, is a dealbreaker.
- Look up reviews for free 3rd party apps to do this on Windows. Find everyone recommending DaVinci Resolve. Fine. Install Resolve. Looks great. Import my clips, and get only audio. A quick Google search tells me that Resolve free version doesn't support importing 10-bit video. Welp.
- Let's try FOSS then. Shotcut is supposedly better than Openshot. Install Shotcut. Import all clips, add to timeline and export. Takes a few hours to export, displays a Success message and gives me the first few seconds of video, followed by a couple of hours of just audio.
- F** it, let's try Openshot. Hesitant because I've heard a lot of crashing happens, but what do I have to lose. Install. Import clips. Add to timeline. Let's me add transitions. Export takes a few hours. Gives me flawless output file.
Moral of the story: For occasional amateur video editing, Openshot is great.
- From what I have heard the Blender video editor for many people is a go to tool as well. In this case it likely would have been overkill, but figured it is worth mentioning.
I used kdenlive recently and it worked very well! Clipchamp charges for 4K export which seriously annoys me given we all know that’s just arbitrary, but kdenlive handled it just fine and was actually faster to use anyways
I completely missed looking up Kdenlive because I (rather stupidly, in hindsight) assumed KDE implied for Linux only.
I'll keep it in mind for the next time.
And yes, Blender would have been overkill, but I might've gone that route if Openshot didn't work out.
KDE actually has a lot of software on Windows (and is about to even put them on the MS/Windows store, if it hasn't already), in particular when it comes to content creation and document stuff - Krita, Okular, Kate, to name a few. And Kdenlive, of course.
> - From what I have heard the Blender video editor for many people is a go to tool as well. In this case it likely would have been overkill, but figured it is worth mentioning.
Blender is great as well if you happen to be a programmer, as everything is also callable as Python functions. The "built-in docs" in form of hovering over buttons and seeing what the equivalent Python code would be, makes it super easy to script together one-off scripts for doing things like "Add 300 video clips with a 100ms fade-in-out between all of them".
I recently went through a large video editing project on Ubuntu. Really wanted to use DaVinci resolve but it had multiple hard crashes and just wouldn’t open for some reason, doesn’t seem like they support Linux as well as Mac and windows.
I ended up using Blender, and while it’s powerful and super useful to be able to link scenes from other files, one huge missing feature is support for videos of varying frame rates. If your videos don’t match, the audio will be either much longer or much shorter than the video clips.
Had a few hard crashes too and lots of bugs, but definitely usable.
Oh gods. The Blender VSE is.... Technically professional-grade, but also isn't even multi-threaded. Switching to it from Kdenlive certainly felt like graduating, especially back when Kdenlive crashed every half hour or so, but honestly just use Kdenlive.
Middle-school-me's still waiting for Lightworks's free Linux release. Are Avidemux, Kino, Cinelerra, PiTiVi still around?
As a daily Blender user...
Never recommend the Blender Video Sequence Editor. Ever. I do everything in-camera just so I don't have to deal with that thing. It is powerful, but it's powerful in the same way plate tectonics is.
I would say for amateur video editing, that DaVinci Resolve free edition is ideal candidate, you can go quite in-depth, or just drag & drop and add some transitions; previously I used imovie on mac too (even build a hackintosh first and bought imovie license $12) but it does not add that small extra that was needed.
once I started working with DaVinci.. game changer, from start to finish, with some advanced motion tracking, title overlays, in less than a few hours. Upside is also that there are plenty of tutorials available for DaVinci, from beginner to advanced
I was looking for this comment. Hard agree. Every time I need some casual compositing tasks, or some transitions, Blender's never done me dirty. Every time I pull my head out of the ground and go hunting for another FOSS compositor, I always end up shrugging, "whelp, nothing really all that better than Blender, and I know Blender, soooooo . . "
EDIT also, since last I used it, the Blender Compositor has gotten a lot better. Dang.
Ehh. The VSE's always been the weakest part of Blender IMO. Not even multithreaded, and IIRC there's some ways it can't integrate with the compositor (requiring intermediate renders), plus time bugs during preview with some types of OGG and MP4 videos. …Still good, but a noticeably frustrating experience compared to a lot of other Blender features.
> EDIT also, since last I used it, the Blender Compositor has gotten a lot better. Dang.
The compositor's always been great. What's changed? It looks pretty much the same as it always did even around the 2.4X days?
Speaking respectfully, does anything look the same as the 2.4 days? That was before the giant UI flush, when they decided, "screw it, make it look like Maya" (I was pretty hostile at first, especially since half my Python scripts stopped working, but I eventually got used to it. I keep an old EXE for the old scripts I really need, but with geo nodes I'm hitting those less and less).
The aesthetic changes are mostly just theming, really. For a long time they even kept shipping a 2.4X-style theme IIRC— It looked old enough to prevent my old high school teacher from getting scared, in maybe the late 2.6X days. Looks like there's still a default "XSI" theme that gets pretty close to that. And up until pretty late you could still make the properties panel horizontal instead of vertical with a RMB menu option (which I can't seem to find in the latest versions), though the layout didn't really work too well in that mode.
It seems to handle whatever junk I throw at it in whatever format it comes in. I guess because it is used to remix all kinds of junk video files that people find around the Net.
Not great for vertical cellphone video (1080x1920). The video will import horizontally and any efforts to set it vertically will either fail, or the exported (vertical 1080x1920) version is horrid.
For simple horizontal edits, it can be quite convenient. But they really need to fix a bug or two, especially considering the amount of footage by phones out there.
Agreed. The first time I used Openshot it was a buggy mess that ignored my output settings when rendering... Within a year or two of that, I gave it another shot, and the glaring issues were fixed. It just did what I needed with no problems.
I think partway through that frustration I'd learn what arguments I need to put into ffmpeg to do that. I may be biased because I've used it for limited editing already though.
I've noticed that a lot of these tools are based on MLT framework. One thing I noticed when taking a glance at MLT framework is that it seems like it lacks robust end-to-end support for hardware acceleration. It makes me wonder if this is a broader design problem, or something that could be worked on with funding. Surely something like this is far from the top priority, but some of these open source video editors are getting kind of serious, and being able to scrub 4K timelines smoothly and render using GPU accelerated compositing and effects feels like it would put these editors much closer to real-world editing territory. That said, these are all just musings from someone who largely does not use NLEs and has written very little video software. Still, seeing the success that Blender has become makes me yearn to see their success repeat in more fields...
I've tried many of them and I keep turning to kdenlive, both on linux (my main driver) and windows. I've been using it for years, although occasionally. From my perspective it's the best FOSS NLE out there both in terms of features and stability. For the occasional user it gets the job done. Kdenlive used to crash a lot years ago but I'm not having any issue at all in the last couple of years (while Clipchamp, promoted by MS, crashes all the time).
Kdenlive has been my choice too, despite the fact that I am a GNOME user and find the UI a little strange. I've really tried to like Openshot but it isn't really up to the job.
People sometimes suggest Blender, which is of course high quality software, but most people reaching for a video editor benefit from a tool with fewer options that is more aimed at basic use cases.
I also see this happening often with Mac only tools here.
I wonder if we should just accept it or if we really want every tool to list supported operating systems already in headlines?
(and nowadays mobile probably counts too)
As a desktop Mac user, I see exactly what you're saying.
For clarity, my comment was more along the lines of 'saved you a click' than expectations/aspirations for every tool to cover every popular-ish environment.
As a user I want the most polished program available and am not against using closed source if it meets my needs as is and I don't need to modify it beyond it's supported options.
Davinci Resolve works on Win, Mac and Linux. Switching to it from Adobe's Premier and Aftereffects was the best decision I've made. Oh, and it's free (not the Studio version).
Black Magic also provide a custom Rocky Linux ISO with each release. It's not widely-advertised and I found it at the end of their release notes PDF.
>For users setting up new systems or looking to use a standardized DaVinci Resolve environment, a standard Rocky Linux 8.6 ISO is available to download at:
>The ISO file can be burned to a bootable USB flash drive or a DVD for the installation process. Before installation, ensure that you have backups of your files, including media and Resolve project libraries. Turn off UEFI Secure Boot in BIOS configuration and boot from the ISO.
>Selecting the Automatic option will erase all the files on your connected drives during installation. Please ensure that you only connect a single boot drive to install the OS onto. Alternatively, select Manual configuration and customize the target drive and partitions when installing the OS.
>The installer takes care of all dependencies - including standard libraries, Nvidia drivers and DeckLink drivers. When the installation is complete, you can reboot the system once, and download and install DaVinci Resolve using the instructions above. When upgrading DaVinci Resolve, please check this section in the new installer for any special instructions you may need for the new version.
I sometimes edit videos for a raptor conservation charity. I found Resolve to be great for standard tasks such as creating videos from multiple input clips, trimming / fading / transitioning and editing out bloopers. It was also excellent for audio editing, e.g. getting rid of background wind noise, etc.
Some of its built-in tools are quite sophisticated, e.g. setting up key frames that follow a moving object (a bird in this case), and then adding tracking 'targeting graticules' or changing orientation from landscape to vertical (i.e. for mobile), but dynamically changing the screen clipping coords so that a bird flying across the landscape view remains central when converted to vertical.
This was all with the free version. I've some prior experience with video editing software so the learning curve wasn't too bad. I did watch some of DaVinci's tutorials to understand the basic conventions, e.g. around the major tool modes, use of the node-graph editor for assembling effects, etc.
Resolve has a all-in-one approach to movie making: it has a NLE (copy/paste/trim/arrange video clip), a very advanced color grading tool (in fact it was born as one), an audio editor (née Fairlight), and even a compositor (née Fusion).
All of those components are production-ready, free (as in beer), have a dedicated team working on the product. Plus, the parent company seems in very good health and doesn't seems to make stupid decision (probably because they're making most of their money on hardware ?)/
What I like about it is that it is an industrial grade tool and pretty reliable, and allows 4K output for free, and the full version is fairly reasonably priced. You will not be limited by the tool, it can basically do anything you'd want to do in this space. There is also plentiful help on the net showing you how to do it. The simple stuff is really no harder than in any of the other tools I tried, and the hard stuff is possible.
Another comment suggests the free version simply doesn't accept 10 bit input files. I use kdenlive for my limited editing and was thinking to try Davinci but that seems like a deal breaker as 10-bit is coming fast to consumer, prosumer devices.
I'm not aware of a Resolve compatibility matrix that encompasses every possible platform, host OS, and format, but it doesn't take long to just try the free version. If the Sony source doesn't work directly, I'd recommend using ffmpeg to convert a test file to ProRes before giving up.
Worst case, the $300 one-time cost is one of the best deals in commercial/professional software.
How does this compare to shotcut, because most video editors are just unintuitive unless you know the layout of timeframes and the separate frame windows. Why cant we have a single film strip where we can trim and splice videos with ease.
I tested a few such as openshot, flowblade, ... about 10 months ago.
flowblade has the best UI IMHO (more streamlined), but it was annoyingly restrictive for quick edits such as opening a clip, apply just a trim and maybe add 1 filter (usually crop).
It also wasn't very stable.
I ended up with shotcut for most of my needs. It's very flexible and has a good balance in ui/features: intuitive enough that I had to spend zero time learning it, yet has more than what I will ever need. Although it's not as smooth performance-wise as flowblade. It never crashed on me yet.
I didn't like the UI of openshot, but this is a subjective thing. Felt space-wasting and oversimplified, which might be a plus to some. It also did crash a lot for me.
I use avidemux a lot for cuts. It's the fastest editor for this by FAR. UI is minimal. I would say underrated, although it's a pretty well-known tool, just in a different class (not a NLE).
I was a big fan of "cinelerra" some years ago. It's blazingly fast, but very restrictive in the formats it accepts, which is why I stopped using it. I mostly cut random videos coming from random cameras/phones/etc, so I value free-form over standardized workflows.
Don't forget Blender. For some more complex stuff, I successfully used blender's NLE to track/mask clips. Worked perfectly, absolutely stable even for complex videos, although it needed slight more RTFM than the other options and noticeably heaver in terms of system requirements.
Adding one datapoint here: I made several projects with Shotcut and am glad it exists, but I had to learn to expect a crash and work defensively; That's how often it happened. The most usual crash was while moving clips around, the application died and the window closed, work lost.
I recently used Shotcut and it did crash a few times, but both times it still had my changes after reopening.
Not being used to the concepts of video editing, I found it easy to find a workflow that worked for me (cutting out mistakes and stitching remaining ends).
I love Resolve, but I've rarely been so miserable as when I tried to get it working under Linux. I'm a real seasoned Linux Sys Admin, but I spent 10-ish hours trying to get it installed 3-4 years ago and just totally failed.
I ended up using Windows and had a just barely usable system. I had a lot of problems with poor scrubbing performance and renders that sometimes had black frames randomly in them that I fixed by converting everything to prores (and blowing up into huge files).
My long term fix was to get a mac, where it runs flawlessly with basically no effort. It's a great tool, but there are some pitfalls.
I run Resolve (Studio) on Linux/Mac/Windows and, you are right, getting it to work on used to be a pain in anything but a set version of Centos. However, this project:
.. allows one to execute Resolve in a container (Docker AND Podman)... and now Linux is my go-to env for running Resolve. Just being able to run N+1 versions of Resolve on the same workstation is a lifesaver.
Not sure about Shotcut, but from my experience the layout of Flowblade seems pretty standard. Anyone who has used premier or DaVinci should be up and running in no time. The NLE interface is pretty much a done deal at this point. Major changes in interface philosophy would be of doubtfully utility.
Natron was meant to clone a compositing program called Nuke, but it crashed every few seconds. It can't even open and stay open without crashing immediately even if doing nothing. I don't know why anyone would go to all that work and release it in that state, but that was my experience.
Love Flowblade! I use it for post-processing lectures and technical talks on my Linux laptop. Tried a bunch of other (better known) editors and they were all disappointing in comparison (slow, unstable or both). Anyway, wonderful project. Thank you devs!
Any good open source video editor for Windows? Top google results include https://www.openshot.org/ and https://shotcut.org/, but both don't have obvious links to the code repositories and it took me a while to find them which is often not a good sign.
Listen, buddy, if I followed this advice, I wouldn't be able to use any software. As a matter of fact, Kdenlive is actually one of the better behaved tools in my toolbox. Nothing's perfect, but at least there are almost always reasonable workarounds (like saving your work early and often).
Is not a sign of dark patterns if that is what you think.
There is a popular prejudgement (IMHO fact based) that artists are picky so FLOSS tools for artists often try to communicate secondarily that is FLOSS and where is being developed.
For "picky" I mean statements like "is not photoshop", "is not premiere" and if you go to Adobe sites there are no links to code repositories. This projects try to sell themselves similarilly. (hope I made myself clear)
I just used openshot for a project. It wasn't terrible, ran into one bug where I think it saved over my project without me hitting save but can't be sure. Clunky UI meant I accidentally overwrote some of what I was doing but it didn't take long to fix.
Just copy/pasting the same butthurt response, eh? Kinda lame.
Yes, Resolve is great. If you're not using it in Linux, at least.
IN Linux, however, I've found Kdenlive to be a bit rough, but completely reasonable for many medium editing tasks. Yes, it occasionally crashes, but not with any frequency where it makes it unusable. I haven't really lost much in the way of work when it does crash, either. Save early, save often. Etc.
Yes, we found that other online video editors are not very usable, pay to remove watermarks, can't be used on mobile and export is very slow etc. So we make chillin,if you want to simply add effects, keyframes, animations, merge several clips, or crop a video, Chillin is a good choice.
- Opening Movie Maker redirects to the Photos app, with a note that Microsoft Clipchamp has this functionality now and Movie Maker is deprecated.
- Install Clipchamp and see that its hilariously bad at batch-adding clips to the timeline. Adding 300 clips, one at a time, is a dealbreaker.
- Look up reviews for free 3rd party apps to do this on Windows. Find everyone recommending DaVinci Resolve. Fine. Install Resolve. Looks great. Import my clips, and get only audio. A quick Google search tells me that Resolve free version doesn't support importing 10-bit video. Welp.
- Let's try FOSS then. Shotcut is supposedly better than Openshot. Install Shotcut. Import all clips, add to timeline and export. Takes a few hours to export, displays a Success message and gives me the first few seconds of video, followed by a couple of hours of just audio.
- F** it, let's try Openshot. Hesitant because I've heard a lot of crashing happens, but what do I have to lose. Install. Import clips. Add to timeline. Let's me add transitions. Export takes a few hours. Gives me flawless output file.
Moral of the story: For occasional amateur video editing, Openshot is great.