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!
A year or two ago I tried basically all of the free video editing software available on Linux and Kdenlive was definitely the best (factoring that I couldn't be bothered to learn Blender in the time I had). Others were buggy or clunky or didn't have basic features. This may have changed recently but I was really thankful for kdenlive at the time.
Same here, I struggled for years with basic editing and tried numerous packages with poor quality results. I had to film and edit a series of interviews last year, and Kdenlive was the first video editor I was able to produce good quality output with.
I wish I had tried it earlier but I think the KDE dependencies put me off, fortunately it's also released as an AppImage and runs perfectly on my Ubuntu desktop.
> 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.
Lightworks should run on Linux. It was used to edit Pulp Fiction, The Wolf of Wall Street and other blockbuster movies.
I used it on Windows a while ago and my basic requirements were met, despite the free version having some limitations (like export resolution and formats).
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.
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).
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.
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...
I've used Kdenlive pretty extensively (as a hobbyist). It has an impressive collections of features. Different releases tend to vary greatly in terms of stability. I've had it eat my project (and even corrupt save files). Back up frequently if you use it. The last time I used it, it was pretty stable, so possibly they are improving in that area. My biggest complaint is that the workflow is tedious. There are absolutely not enough keyboard short cuts. If you apply the same transformations over and over again with slight changes, you're going to be hugging that mouse pretty tightly. My next biggest gripe is that the sound editing was really flaky when I was using it. I eventually gave up and did all my sound editing in Audacity. I often liked to do transformations with sound and video at the same time and it was really hit or miss if you could preview it, or if it would bug out, or if it might crash things.
The thing is, I really want to like Kdenlive because it is really close to being able to do what I want, but I just felt that every step of the way I had to be very creative just to figure out a workflow that would work well. I eventually moved to the video editor in Blender which has a lot fewer features, but the workflow is really exceptional. I figured that what time I saved struggling with Kdenlive I could spend using other tools for features that aren't in Blender.
I don't do any video editing any more (I decided video isn't really a medium that I enjoy being expressive in), so take my comments with a grain of salt.
I tried to used Kdenlive to make some very simple videos (a couple of fade-in, fade-out, some overlays here and there). Even with the latest versions (and me being a very patient person) it suffered from stability problems: random crashes, file saving problems, file corruption, horrible preview mode.
I don't know on Linux, but for Windows I also had to search around and manually install some codecs because otherwise it wouldn't render to a given format (I believe it was mp4).
I‘ve used it a few years ago to edit a video* and it was great. It uses the same UI paradigm as most non-linear video editing software, a timeline with tracks on which you can place, drag and trim clips. I used Final Cut Pro 7 before and had no problems to get up to speed. It was also stable. The only reason I don‘t use it at the moment is because I‘m on OS X for now.
I use it a bit for small things and more in-depth for a 30 minutes montage.
For a free (as in free beer) software, it is really good. It support a wide variety of feature that can be extended through plug-ins, has a decent UX (even though some stuff required me to look in the documentation) and has a decent documentation (although some of it is outdated).
Overall, if you are looking for a free video editor, my experience is that KDenLive is the best you will get (as of 2019).
It has some obvious drawback (last time I used it, it was crashing fairly frequently, but a lot has been fixed), but if you are looking to do some amateur/semi-pro video-editing, KDenLive should do it for you.
Linux has a GREAT video editor, though it is not open source. Davinci Resolve is fantastic and my favorite video editor over Premiere, Vegas, Kdenlive etc. by a large margin.
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).
I have a 5 years of experience in tinkering with After Effects (which doesn't mean that much but I can get around doing stuff)
I tackled various realm of creative production, namely motion graphics and electronic music. This all started when I was using Windows and pirated program of famous tools like AE, but I was able to get around in Linux with FOSS tools. I use LMMS like a pro. I even used GIMP on Windows.
This was NOT the case with video production. I was making a simple lyrics video on kdenlive, but I had to scrap the project because every time I tried to add a little bit of effect, it was half-baked or simply impossible. I cannot change size of the video without having a major headache on anchor points. I cannot "crop" a content right on kdenlive. The problem? Kdenlive is actually the most feature-rich video editor I ever tried on Linux.
If you only do light editing it may work for you, but ONLY light editing. You can't have custom stuff going on as video creation tool is basically not there. I also use it as a subtitle tool... which basically sums up what your expectation should be.
I probably fit under the 'newbie just wanting to trim some footage' category. I had to put a presentation together using Kdenlive. Nothing special or fancy, just put together a bunch of 'day-out' clips into something nice.
Not once did I have to resort to Google or documentation for help -- it was all fairly intuitive. I want to reiterate that I wasn't doing anything fancy, just trimming bits and pieces off clips here and there.
When I had the need for a video editor a few years ago, i was quite happy with OpenShot. I have nod idea how it evolved though, but back then I found it was the best balance between being easy/efficient and not crashing with the hours and hours of raw videos I had.
It's the only non-commercial, non-toy video editor for Linux.
I'm actually not aware of another one that uses proxy files on Linux, and with even cell phones shooting at 4K any video editor that doesn't is unusable in most cases.
DaVinci Resolve is also extremely good (probably even better than Kdenlive), but it's a commercial software although they do have a free unlimited version.
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. :)
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
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.
Although Kdenlive has had its fair share of crashes, maybe of them happen due to bad packaging, mostly by using wrong MLT version. Using the AppImage is a good solution.
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?
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)
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.
I have created several screencasts and used https://www.openshot.org/. I haven't used anything else yet to compare it to. But i will definitely try kdenlive!
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?
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.
[+] [-] moksha256|7 years ago|reply
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|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nacs|7 years ago|reply
[1]: https://shotcut.org/
[+] [-] ropeladder|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tombrossman|7 years ago|reply
I wish I had tried it earlier but I think the KDE dependencies put me off, fortunately it's also released as an AppImage and runs perfectly on my Ubuntu desktop.
[+] [-] PhilippGille|7 years ago|reply
Lightworks should run on Linux. It was used to edit Pulp Fiction, The Wolf of Wall Street and other blockbuster movies.
I used it on Windows a while ago and my basic requirements were met, despite the free version having some limitations (like export resolution and formats).
https://www.lwks.com
[+] [-] sexgirlyt|7 years ago|reply
It seems iMovie latest removed the ability to do that.
Do you guys have any recommendations for Mac? Free is better.
I create videos of product reviews for my followers
I need it to create video ads for products, mostly Facebook ads/Instagram
[+] [-] szbelieves|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msiyer|7 years ago|reply
It is simple, so am I.
I use Arch Linux as my OS.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] sangnoir|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] executivetech|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] nickjj|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fuball63|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linsomniac|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] noodlesUK|7 years ago|reply
I’ve also seen that black magic’s editor is available for Linux, but it is an enormous package...
[+] [-] mikekchar|7 years ago|reply
The thing is, I really want to like Kdenlive because it is really close to being able to do what I want, but I just felt that every step of the way I had to be very creative just to figure out a workflow that would work well. I eventually moved to the video editor in Blender which has a lot fewer features, but the workflow is really exceptional. I figured that what time I saved struggling with Kdenlive I could spend using other tools for features that aren't in Blender.
I don't do any video editing any more (I decided video isn't really a medium that I enjoy being expressive in), so take my comments with a grain of salt.
[+] [-] scoutt|7 years ago|reply
I don't know on Linux, but for Windows I also had to search around and manually install some codecs because otherwise it wouldn't render to a given format (I believe it was mp4).
Then I've found OpenShot, that was enough for my requirements (https://www.openshot.org/). It has a Linux version. Source code here: https://github.com/OpenShot/openshot-qt
[+] [-] schrijver|7 years ago|reply
* https://vimeo.com/107907361
[+] [-] maeln|7 years ago|reply
For a free (as in free beer) software, it is really good. It support a wide variety of feature that can be extended through plug-ins, has a decent UX (even though some stuff required me to look in the documentation) and has a decent documentation (although some of it is outdated).
Overall, if you are looking for a free video editor, my experience is that KDenLive is the best you will get (as of 2019). It has some obvious drawback (last time I used it, it was crashing fairly frequently, but a lot has been fixed), but if you are looking to do some amateur/semi-pro video-editing, KDenLive should do it for you.
[+] [-] CyberDildonics|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phosphophyllite|7 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] imsesaok|7 years ago|reply
I tackled various realm of creative production, namely motion graphics and electronic music. This all started when I was using Windows and pirated program of famous tools like AE, but I was able to get around in Linux with FOSS tools. I use LMMS like a pro. I even used GIMP on Windows.
This was NOT the case with video production. I was making a simple lyrics video on kdenlive, but I had to scrap the project because every time I tried to add a little bit of effect, it was half-baked or simply impossible. I cannot change size of the video without having a major headache on anchor points. I cannot "crop" a content right on kdenlive. The problem? Kdenlive is actually the most feature-rich video editor I ever tried on Linux.
If you only do light editing it may work for you, but ONLY light editing. You can't have custom stuff going on as video creation tool is basically not there. I also use it as a subtitle tool... which basically sums up what your expectation should be.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] darkpuma|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wired-voyager|7 years ago|reply
Not once did I have to resort to Google or documentation for help -- it was all fairly intuitive. I want to reiterate that I wasn't doing anything fancy, just trimming bits and pieces off clips here and there.
[+] [-] boudin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtzaldo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkkollaw|7 years ago|reply
I'm actually not aware of another one that uses proxy files on Linux, and with even cell phones shooting at 4K any video editor that doesn't is unusable in most cases.
DaVinci Resolve is also extremely good (probably even better than Kdenlive), but it's a commercial software although they do have a free unlimited version.
[+] [-] jancsika|7 years ago|reply
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. :)
[+] [-] s3xham|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Erlich_Bachman|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] f_r_d|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmoriarty|7 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] bibyte|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meruru|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcelerier|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arminiusreturns|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PorterDuff|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] la_fayette|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dusted|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonas21|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] proctor|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marknadal|7 years ago|reply
Thanks again for such great software!
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] faissaloo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brosper|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diimdeep|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavelbr|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elsjaako|7 years ago|reply