If it works on your setup, DaVinci resolve. If not, Kdenlive. Those are the only really professional video editing programs available at the moment.
this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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There's Lightworks, too, although it's geared toward the editing process. I like it, though, and have been able to make it work for general video editing. The color correction tools are better than Kdenlive and not as good as DaVinci Resolve, but unlike Resolve, it will decode/encode H.264 and AAC. It's powerful without being quite as overwhelming as Resolve can be for newbies. There's no advanced setup involved unlike Resolve. The playback is responsive even with 4K footage. Kdenlive is great too, if you don't need more advanced features or are working with a lot of 4K footage.
In addition to all of the open source options that have been offered, Davinci Resolve runs well on Linux and has all of the above features (and many, many more). It's also a buy once keep forever situation rather than a subscription since they make their real money on hardware. OSS it isn't, but it's incredibly powerful, has an extensive free (as in beer) edition and beats the hell out of paying a monthly fee.
As for DaVinci Resolve, installation can be a bit weird if you don't happen to run one of the officially supported Distros. Because of that, the easiest way to run it is probably via DistroBox, Michael Horn made a great tutorial about that: https://youtu.be/wmRiZQ9IZfc
Are there distro-specific issues? I've always just downloaded the zip and run the installer with no issues.
Personal example: Fedora (38 - 39). Resolve uses libs which depends on some older versions of a lib, which they don't ship in the installer.
So I had to replace the depending libs so that Resolve can run with Fedoras more recent libs.
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I (very occasionally) use Kdenlive. I think it's pretty good.
+1 for kdenlive
I used Sony Vegas/what ever it's called now for years, moving to kdenlive was pretty painless and I don't feel like I'm missing any features.
I had the most luck with shotcut. I've been meaning to try kdenlive again though but there were a few fx I needed that immediately apparent in shotcut that I could not find quickly in kdenlive.
I suspect kdenlive has it covered but timelines dictated that I not change horses mid race, and I haven't got back to retry.
Basically, either is good!
Shotcut is great, especially because ffmpeg, GPU acceleration and very easy to learn workflows (although admittedly not so intuitive that you get them right away).
I don't know about Kdenlive, but I tried Openshot and found it to be much slower and lacking functionality, although it's even easier to use for the basics.
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You could try https://kdenlive.org/ and https://www.openshot.org/
I haven't done much editing, but they are fairly popular and decent tools. They also come as an AppImage, which means they pretty much 'just work.'
And https://handbrake.fr/ gets a mention for transcoding.
You ever try KDENLive? It's pretty good imo
You've probably got your answer already, but just wanting to confirm that Kdenlive can do all the things you listed.
Though the editor itself is very easy to use and obvious (if you previously have used premiere etc), you might find the UI for some of the individual effects a bit confusing. There's tool tips and sometimes help videos and stuff, but you might find yourself dragging a few sliders left and right to find out what they actually do :)
Note that generally speaking, Kdenlive doesn't currently support graphics-card-accelerated timeline preview very well, so if you're packing on the effects, you might not get real-time playback in the timeline without "preview rendering". If you ever used Premiere 20 years ago, it works the same as that.
From memory, Olive has the best "in-timeline" graphics card acceleration - but is otherwise at a much earlier stage of development.
As others have mentioned, some or all of these are also doable in Shotcut, Openshot, Olive.
Also, you might be interested in TJFree Tutorials on YouTube, which has a playlist of Kdenlive tutorials - for older versions, but it's mostly going to be the same. He also has tutorials in loads of other FOSS creative software. I found he tended to be "clear and efficient" and doesn't take 5 minutes to give you 1 minute's information.
Thank you, I'll keep that in mind if I need to do more.
Currently, I just have a 5 minute clip that needs cutting, stabilizing and some color correction, and Shotcut let me do that without tutorials or manuals.
Brilliant - I'll have to have a look at Shotcut again. It used to be quite "crashy", but it's been in solid continual development for a few years now.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Kdenlive is preety good now
I was both surprised and impressed with Kdenlive.
The only one I know of is kdenlive, not sure of it can do all of that but it has always been enough for everything I needed for video editing.
Something I haven't seen mentioned is Blender's built in video editor.
Blender?
Yeah, Blender. This piece of software never ceases to amaze me.
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- Kdenlive
- Openshot
- Shotcut
- Pitivi
I've used Kdenlive for my personal projects and in a professional setting. It's easier to install than Divinci Resolve and almost as powerful.
Nobody mentioned Olive yet, that one is very good, though I'm always concerned about the continuation of its development.
Kdenlive is great, I've been editing a lot of my videos on there and some shorts on YouTube. It's got a pretty unappealing UI but one you get to know and figure out where everything is you can get some content out :)
Kdenlive or Shotcut, or if you want something more powerful but not open source, Davinci resolve.
Thanks. I tried both, and Shotcut was the one where I actually understood how to import, edit and export a video without consulting the manual, so I'm going with that.
I've found Shotcut to be more stable than Kdenlive. Tho I haven't tried the latest kdenlive yet. Both have glaxnimate support so motion graphics is possible with both.
I used shotcut a lot and it's fantastic.
Kdenlive's pretty good.
Am I the only one who kind of likes the video editing profile Blender has?
TIL Blender has video editing
blender is almost like the emacs of multimedia software, it's got 3d modeling and rendering, 3d animation, grease paint (2d animation), non-linear video editing, and probably other features i haven't heard of.
+1 kdenlive. However, I can see why it's no sufficient solution for everyone
Openshot for me. It's very lightweight and hassle-free.
Huh, how come I've never heard about this, but it looks so professional (?), at least for the website presentation.
Is it better than the common Kdenlive and Blender in your experience?
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For sure try out olive You can't do automatic stabilization but manual works fine, However I will always use gyroflow whenever possible anyways. If needed you can easily script motion tracking data from 3rd party sources.
but it is properly color managed throughout the entire editor so doing color correction works properly and accurately. the node system is really powerful despite it's early nature, and as far as I know olive is the only FOSS editor with proper OCIO integration, which means you get industry standard color management tooling including things like ACES support. You also have OTIO support for importing and exporting editorial cutting information.
Kdenlive is what I used a while back when I was editing a video. You also can do it with ffmpeg from the command line if your a real chad
Pitivi is really nice
If you're familiar with blender, it works pretty well but renders slow
For whatever reason, many of the editors mentioned here never worked for me ... like OpenShot, ShotCut or PiTiVi were really unstable the last time I tried (might be a distro or DE thing). Also I found it hard to cut precisely when they worked. Lightworks, Da Vinci, Cinelerra, I had a hard time getting them to run. Maybe that changed in the meantime.
I ultimately stuck with Kdenlive, which is stable enough and allows for reasonably precise cutting.
If you want a very simple editor, try avidemux.
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