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Comment by moksha256 | Hacker News Reader

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!

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Davinci Resolve runs on Linux: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/

I tried it recently, but it just segfaulted. System was running Ubuntu 18.04. Just FYI.

I got Resolve set up on Ubuntu 18.04 this morning - the trick for me was switching to the nvidia drivers, before that it segfaulted on my machine too.

Did you follow a particular tutorial for that? I'm an Ubuntu noob (okay, a Linux noob entirely who happens to be running Ubuntu) and I couldn't figure out what to do with a giant .sh file that complained I wasn't running RedHat.

Interesting that might have been my problem. I installed the packages that it needed to stop giving library problems, and wasn't particularly concerned about the nvidia libraries because I don't have an nvidia video card. Maybe that was it.

That mostly seemed to be my problem, the 18.04 OpenCL causes Resolve to segfault. I grabbed the AMD "pro" Linux drivers, installed them (which was tricky, their provided scripts bombed out so I manually had to resolve a bunch of dependencies).

Once I got opencl installed and rebooted the machine, I was able to start Resolve and get into the main interface. It couldn't find a GPU though ("clinfo" showed one), I'm guessing that it really,truly does need an nVidia card. I brought home a card from work to try, just to see if it would make a difference, but someone put a AMD card into the box of a nVidia card.

I tried Resolve on my wife's Win10 laptop with Intel GPU, and it seemed to install and work no problem. Since I'm basically going to be using the machine for just editing when I'm editing, I may just set it up with Windows and call it done.

From some of the introductions I've watched, it looks like Resolve is the software I want. Lightworks has worked well, but Resolve looks like a space age rocket ship. I guess we will see...

Tried, can't even change aspect ratio.

I've found the (opensource) Shotcut to be good on Linux (its also available for Mac and Windows).

[1]: https://shotcut.org/

I havent tried it recently but it used to be very unstable (crashing all the time). Kdenlive is the only editor on Linux which is stable enough to work with.

Whats amazing is that a few years ago the biggest complaint about Kdenlive was that it was that it was terribly unstable.

They've done a fantastic job of fixing that.

Both Shotcut and Kdenlive use the MLT framework under the hood. I used both for a few weeks now and they seem equally stable for small projects.

Tried, no option to change aspect ratio of the video.

That's one of those weird quirks with Shotcut -- it takes the aspect ratio / resolution settings from the first video/clip you import into the app.

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.

I am not able to change video aspect ratio in kden live, does it even work?

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).

https://www.lwks.com

LOVE Lightworks But I have moved on to Davinci Resolve which is also on Linux. Lightworks workflow is the best but the learning curve is more like a cliff.

Davinci Resolve seriously might be the biggest Video Editor on all three platforms int he next three years. Highly recommended.

Davinci Resolve is good, however rather unstable on Linux in my experience. I've tried it on a couple of distros and kept getting random crashes every so often.

I'm on OpenSUSE Leap and it has been rock solid. I had it on a rolling release on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and it was a problem with all the updates.

When I use Linux for Audio and Video I DON'T update the computer and I don't have anything else really on that image. I use a second image for non-Audio/Video production. I did the same thing with Windows for decades.

Did you have to use http://www.danieltufvesson.com/makeresolvedeb ? I found the entire installation process on Ubuntu a bit of a pain (even though it did work) - I think the instability on my system is probably as a result of the rather convoluted installation steps.

Yeah, especially with that free tier exporting up to 4k/60fps. Then you get the node compositing and souped up mixer for audio. I had to switch to an nvidia driver to get it working on Kubuntu but it works great. For me, it only crashes only when using a specific few filter effects. But I now use the massive filter set that was bundled with Natron so I don't even need DaVinci's bundled filters.

If you can get it working, the thing's a glorious beast.

Not sure I'd call it a cliff, I've never done video editing before and over the last two weeks I've create 3 videos using it and been pretty happy with it. I really want to try Davinci Resolve, but I'll need to try installing it again, had problems last time.

I am also looking for a video editor to change aspect ratios etc...

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

I've edited two student movies in the Blender Vse, its quite a capable though not quite as initiative as the other video editors out there.

I used Blender to edit videos back around 2010. Even then it was amazingly simple once you got the basic concepts down. Like 'g' to grab/move a video clip, simple things like that.

While rendering those videos I remember just being dumbstruck at how much you could really accomplish in Blender. You didn't really need much more even to be a professional video editor.

The trade-off that never seems to go away, though, with any software, is that in order to avoid all "bugs" [in common parlance, just things the software won't let you do], you need to know a tiny bit about video and audio codecs, the basics of how compression works, frame rates, and what kind of file at which dimensions your customer / delivery target needs. This eliminates like 99% of the quality problems that people will report with their exported videos: Doesn't play in my client's video software, etc.

www.pitivi.org is a very good video editor. All videos on my YouTube channel (Two-wheel Therapy) are edited using Pitivi.

It is simple, so am I.

I use Arch Linux as my OS.

I used the version of Pitivi available in Ubuntu 18.04 yesterday and for the life of me I could not get it to render anything but potato quality video (500 MB file for 60 minutes at 1080p).

The deb from Ubuntu 18.10 had unmet dependencies, which is not a surprise given how interwoven it is with gstreamer.

Finally, I installed the most recent version via flatpak and it rendered fine.

Your comment reminded me of the "First rule of Arch Linux."

... Is you don't talk about Arch Linux?

;)

"Always mention that you are running Arch Linux."

Blender can be used as a video editor.

I tried it once but found it way too sophisticated! It would probably work, but it would probably require hours to learn, whereas with Kdenlive I could get up and running almost instantly with a 2-minute YouTube tutorial here and there to clarify certain functions.

Try Blender v2.80 beta - it really is looking awesome, and much more usable for the average user. You will need to sit through a tutorial or two first though.

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