Comment by magnio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by magnio | Hacker News Reader

During my high school, I had a bunch of (amateur) projects involving video editing. As a broke student in a poor country who didn't want to just torrent Premiere and call it a day, I started exploring several FOSS video editors:

- OpenShot: simple interface, but crashes quite a lot

- Kdenlive: clunky and crashes way too much

- Shotcut: good for quick edit and the most stable out of the three

The biggest problem I had as a novice is the lack of tutorials/documentation. I then tried some freeware options (including HitFilm Express which I also found to be good) before finally settled with Resolve. When it comes to features and stability, especially in SFX and color grading, Resolve is far more superior and also has more resources to learn from. Of course, that means it is heavier and more complex, but it satisfies my needs so well that I don't mind roasting my CPU. It remains one my favorite piece of software and has only improved since then.

On Windows, OpenShot kept crashing for me whenever i dragged video clips around, snapping also didn't really work and it was pretty much unusable.

Shotcut's UI was a little bit confusing and the performance wasn't great.

Personally, i largely stuck with Kdenlive for basic video editing, it's a capable alternative to something like Sony Vegas (considering the fact that it's free).

I don't have anything against Resolve either, it's definitely an interesting project and definitely more polished than Kdenlive!

I like kdenlive, I have the feeling it crashes a lot with certain codecs as input materials and does fine with others.

I'ved used Resolve, Premier and Final Cut, but I haven't found anything as intuitive as Sony Vegas. I'm just faster with Vegas, it could be because it's the first video editor that I got serious about.

Maybe try the latest Kdenlive a shot, it appears very stable. I'm dozens hours in already, no issues so far (Mint, latest Kdenlive with snap), and others also report it improved drastically.

Many people don’t know that most of Resolve is included in the free version. While Adobe continues to provide student “discounts” so that they can recruit new users to the salt mine.

There is also Blender Video Sequencer, which has a terrible UI but also a good compositor.

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