15 years ago I bought a cheap laptop, removed windows to install Ubuntu 6, took it backpacking through Asia for the next 6 months and started editing my travel video on Kdenlive [1] at the tail end of it. It was my first real leap into Linux and Kdenlive was so far ahead of anything else I never looked back. Props to the community for such a solid product and for making me fall in love with open source.
Without getting into the philosophy of open source vs proprietary and the like, but just as someone who very occasionally needs to edit video on Linux, how does Kdenlive compare to something like Lightworks or the Blender video editor?
On Linux for the last 6 or 7 years, I've used Lightworks just because the free version has been good enough for what I've needed for nearly everything, and for the few times I need higher resolution I have just paid like $20 for one month of "premium". I didn't have any objective criteria for choosing Lightworks, other than "it's been used for 'real' movies!"
That said, I'd prefer to keep things open source, so I'd rather move to a FOSS thing like Kdenlive or Blender, if they're comparable (or better!) than Lightworks. Anyone have experience with all three?
I use Kdenlive about once or twice a year to edit/compile racecar footage. The UI has been friendly enough to relearn each time because I use it so infrequently. I've never had any complaints about it, though I'm not doing anything crazy. But it's extremely intuitive and even as a new user it doesn't seem to get in my way, which is just about the highest praise I can give to a piece of interactive software.
Unfortunately I can't compare against Lightworks or Blender, because I tried Kdenlive and it worked great, and there was no reason to search for alternatives.
I've used Kdenlive, Shotcut, Blender and Olive [1]. They all have strenghts and weaknesses, so I choose which one to use depending on what I'm trying to do, or sometimes I use two of them through a single video project.
One thing to note is that Kdenlive and Shotcut both use the MLT video editing framework [2] under the hood, so their capabilities and constraints are very close to each other's. That said, their UIs are their own and some things may be easier to do in one over the other, may be a matter of personal preference. AFAIK Shotcut is developed by the same people who built MLT, but I don't think that gives it any particular advantage. Also both of these apps have the largest ready-made effects toolbox out of the four apps I mentioned at the top.
Blender's VSE (video sequence editor) is great if you need fine-tuned 2D animations of elements because you can use all the same awesome keyframing tools you'd use for 3D animation, but it's severely lacking in other aspects, especially in the effects dept (you can crop, blur, mask, but not much else). For some reason you can't use Blender's compositor node system with video, which would enable many more capabilities if possible. There's also a steeper learning curve if you've never used Blender before because its UI breaks many conventions.
Olive is a newcomer that doesn't get enough attention, but IMHO it was at one point the most promising OSS video editor out there. Sadly the developer works on it on his free time, and he's recently said that he's pausing development because he doesn't have the resources to work on it any more. I'm really hoping a miracle happens.
There's two versions of Olive, 0.1 and 0.2 which is a complete rewrite. Both versions are good, but they work pretty differently. What got me excited about 0.2 is that its effects are node-based (unlike MLT-based editors which are stack-based), which enables far more advanced editing, although you probably wouldn't need that unless you're working on something quite ambitious.
Blender video editor is extremely feature rich in terms of the keyframing effects you can do with it, the only problem being: it's slow, and it doesn't always sync audio with video even when you ask it to.
With Kdenlive, it's frustrating to add a simple block of text (you can have to create an overlay, and then configure that overlay, and place it roughly where you want), but the final rendering takes only minutes and it's stable enough to work with for larger projects.
I tried blender video editor just the other day, and this problem was still there -to the point that I actually went out and found kdenlive the same day!
I don't have experience with any of those, but I have used ShotCut [1], which is free an open-source. It works well enough on those rare occasions I've needed it (e.g. editing a video of my child playing an instrument for their class). If you're looking for "FOSS" and "easy to use" ShotCut might be worth looking at.
My experience has been: Kdenlive is full-featured and weird to use. Blender is missing features and weird to use. Openshot is simple and easy, but crashes. shortcut is simple and easy and does not crash.
In my experience, Kdenlive and Shotcut are more or less on par with iMovie. Da Vinci Resolve works on all three major OSes and is actively usurping the prosumer market previously held by Premiere and Final Cut Pro. (It even has an advanced, node-based compositing tool for visual effects and motion graphics.) It's not open source, though it's free unless you need some features aimed more at serious commercial stuff.
The free version has h264 and h265, as far as I can tell. I rendered a mp4, h264 video in resolve today. My first time using the software and it was surprisingly capable. (I needed to blur a moving face in a video)
On Mac and Windows, the free version of Resolve supports H.264 and H.265 (using OS-supplied codecs IIRC).
Linux H.264 and H.265 support is Studio-only[1] (presumably because royalties).
If you don't care about any other Studio features, converting to/from an intermediate codec — DNxH[DR], say — on import/export using another tool like FFmpeg seems like a reasonable workaround for most applications.
Since Resolve doesn't support H.264/H.265 passthrough (on any platform), the only generation loss added by this approach will be from DNxH[DR] encoding, which, assuming a sufficiently high bitrate for the intermediate codec, should be minimal.
Note that even Resolve Studio doesn't support AAC audio on Linux[2], so, for many H.264/H.265 projects, you'd end up with pre-/post-conversion steps even if the video codecs were supported.
> Without getting into the philosophy of open source vs proprietary and the like, but just as someone who very occasionally needs to edit video on Linux, how does Kdenlive compare to something like Lightworks or the Blender video editor?
Blender features a node-based compositor (Like Nuke) and an NLE (movie editor). Both these tools are fine when used within a Blender workflow, but they are troublesome to use in a stand alone capacity.
In my opinion, the most important feature of an NLE is its media optimization strategy without which editing is a chore. I now use DaVinci by Blackmagic, which is free. They inherited the amazingly efficient proxy system from the DaVinci colour grader. To this Blackmagic added their own codec voodoo which is not insubstantial. DaVinci and Blackmagic footage together run as smooth as butter.
Lightworks hands down has the absolute best workflow for cutting and assembling video. Nothing else comes close. But like you said, they want you to pay for for anything above 720p. The downside is that it is really slow on my Core i9 Mac with 32 GB memory. The forums lead me to believe this is just an issue with the Mac platform, so Windows and Linux user probably don't experience this. I'm not saying it is slow at playback or seeking—it is really just the UI that's slow like there's a noticeable latency from a click to when a menu appears and don't even try dragging stuff around.
Avid Media Composer is also free but limited to 1080p and has many other limitations that can make it tricky for all but the simplest projects. Again, if you pay up you get what Hollywood editors use, but at $20 to $50 per month subscriptions isn't great for occasional use. It requires some setup and configuration that's not intuitive. I had to google how to have it use only one display and not to just assume I want it to take over all attached displays. It also has a bunch of DRM and copy protection crap that requires a bunch of additional programs and runs permanent Java processes.
Blender has a video editor. That much is true. It just isn't very good. Editing is imprecise and clumsy. You have to manually add frame allotments to the timeline if you go past the runtime. It's only saving grace is the ability to do 4K (probably higher if you want). There's no previewing a clip before you place it on the timeline. All editing is done on the timeline by positioning the playhead. There is an upfront cost for proxy editing, so if your source material is high resolution and long, expect to wait a long time for it to process the clips before you can play or edit them. I've found that when performance starts to suck you'll have to manually rebuild the proxies—maybe go to lunch.
I haven't tried Kdenlive, but its editing ability looks similar to Blender in that you have to put the clip on the timeline before doing anything. Coming from Lightworks or Media Composer this workflow sucks. I'm still going to give it a try, but I'm not sure it is for me.
As someone who rarely edits video and doesn't need or want to become an expert, but had one to do last year, I ended up using Kdenlive. I know I also tried Shotcut and Openshot (because they're on my machine) but not why I rejected them, and I don't remember whether I tried DaVinci.
kdenlive is the easiest. It has annoying bugs but they're relatively easy to work around.
Of course, like any open source project, part of the reason why those bugs exist is my fault for not engaging with the project ... but let's ignore that
Likewise, was looking for something with a workflow similar to Sony Vegas and came across Kdenlive. I mostly just needed to perform some simple cuts and fades with multiple audio and video tracks, and was very impressed by its capabilities and how intuitive it felt to use.
Same. I was a Vegas guy through the late 90s/early 00s, and then got out of the area for a few years. When returning I really just wanted Vegas like from before and tried all kinds of stuff. It was very surprising to me how hard it was to find! Kdenlive is really, really great and is super intuitive to me.
When I was looking into it I was discussing with someone how Sony's refusal to meet the market led to Vegas being the top 5 most pirated software. I learned that Sony sold it to Magix during a big selloff, who apparently thrived by simply switching to a realistic pricing model and resuming maintenance.
Kdenlive is great! I just used this recently to create some transitions with transparency. I normally use DaVinci Resolve but I couldn't figure out how to export a video with a straight alpha channel, only premultiplied (it only lets you do this for individual clips, not compound clips or a whole timeline).
I think it's fair to say Kdenlive exposes much more power to the user, but I felt that I had a bit of learning to do to understand a few things which have opinionated defaults in programs like Davincei Resolve. For instance, I had to use a composition between two tracks and choose the type of compositing to use between them in order to get transparency exported, whereas in other programs this would default to add or multiply which behaves in a predictable way with less effort (but with less control).
In saying that it feels like Kdenlive is an incredible amalgamation of very powerful plugins and parts!
I wish it had a bezier curve editor for things like fades or tweaking keyframe animations.
After a while I switched to blender (since I used it to create the source footage) but it was a little glitchy, the video somehow getting out of sync with animated opacity and it confused me how you "Render Animation" in blender which is the same option as for rendering your (3D) Scene in blender, and where to find the option to turn off the video editor composition which overrides this as soon as you start adding clips to the video editor. It doesn't really compare as it's just blender, with all it's intricacies, and video editing bolted on to it, whereas Kdenlive is just about video editing.
I subscribe this comment, non-linear interpolation using curves would be extremely useful.
Another obvious thing I often miss is the ability to change the length (duration) of static image clips in the project bin (currently? - haven't tried the latest version yet - the only way is to set a length in the settings before importing). It seems like it doesn't matter at first, since it's a static image, but start adding effects and keyframes and any resizing done in the timeline can mess everything up.
That's another great suggestion, and probably a pretty easy contribution to tackle for someone. I'll make a mental note to look in to it next time I'm on holiday.
I've been using kdenlive ever since i switch to Linux back in 2016. All my YouTube videos are a combination of simple screen recorder and kdenlive, although i don't put much effort in them
I always use OBS for screen recording but otherwise the same story :)
I always use KDE as my primary desktop and love it. It's amazing. Kdenlive is only one of the many amazing apps they produce. And I'm proud to donate to them monthly.
Same. Most of my videos aren't public, but I use this stack for everything. Linux base, OBS for recording, and Kdenlive for editing.
Do you do green screen? I've had a horrible time finding a web camera that doesn't mess up the green screen by auto color correcting. It ends up putting a weird tint on the video that looks awful. Any web cam recommendations that work good with linux/obs?
No, I don't record myself directly. I usually use it together with a HDMI capture module to record meetings. My work only allows recording Teams meetings to Microsoft Stream which has really crap quality and we can't download from it so I can't edit them, and we can't install any software like OBS directly on our laptops.
Sometimes I need to archive trainings for later use. So I use the HDMI out to record it from another computer. Then I can edit the video to make it more to the point, add some on-screen popups etc. Then I share those on MS Stream (because unfortunately that is the platform we have to use despite it being crap).
It's a bit of a workaround but it does the job. The cheap Aliexpress HDMI dongle does the job admirably, it gets really really hot but it survives the day :)
I use Kdenlive once a week for a quick top/tail edit. Always amazed at how well it runs on low-end hardware. Excited to see how the new version feels under Wayland.
I've used Shotcut in the past but not Kdenlive. Shotcut doesn't support subtitle files at all, so I'm quite pleased to learn that Kdenlive supports input and output of multiple subtitles files now.
> The initial implementation of the long awaited easing interpolation modes for keyframes has landed.
Yes! I'm a professional editor and I've waited years for this. Seems it's not quite there, but they're getting close. At work I have to use Premiere I have to use Premiere and Resolve, but at home I'm on this long quest to open source everything. The lack of easing has held me off from Kdenlive even for home use. Nothing looks more amateurish than those stiff linear animations and transitions.
Nice editor. I'm not sure how it compares to professional ones, but it was more than enough to make some video compositions when I needed it and it was easy to use and figure out.
Been using Kdenlive for a while now and it is really good for all of the basic video editing i need. So far I've been updating it manually. Would anyone know if there is an auto-update feature available within Kdenlive?
The one crash I regularly experienced about a year ago had to do with saving and reusing effect stacks. I'm not sure if that still happens as I stopped using that feature entirely.
Far less regularly, I've seen crashes when replacing video files used in the project.
I also recommend setting the framerate of a project first thing and then never touching it again.
The free version has this issue "The free version of DaVinci Resolve on Linux does not support h.264 and h.265." Having to transcode to dnxhr is a bummer. I should probably just buy a dongle though.
It's not just that. With kdenlive (awesome software, btw, kudos to developers!) I can be pretty sure it will still be around next time I need it. With proprietary software, who knows? Maybe Adobe will buy them and start charging exorbitant monthly fees. Or they will go out of business, or...
Yeah I've been bitten by that before. Invest a ton of time in learning a tool and then they drop the free tier or neuter it. Or drop the whole thing altogether like 123D Design :(
[1] https://youtu.be/6ZCL4Jr9qs8?si=QTp9fEpgLwP5REYU