Shotcut is a free, open-source, cross-platform video editor | Hacker News Reader

Shotcut is a free, open-source, cross-platform video editor

shotcut.org

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This is very cool! I've been looking for some time for a project that has:

- a stellar editing UI for "prototyping" a well-edited video

- a well-documented timeline-level API for the file format that can replace, timeshift, and add clips and tracks, and

- be able to run on cloud hardware as a render service

Imagine creating a promotional video, then automatically swapping in each client's logo and re-rendering it for each one! The possibilities here are endless.

DaVinci Resolve can't be beat for #1 and seems to support #3 well, but its API seems designed more for plugins than for automated authoring. For instance, the documentation at https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=9927... seems to give just read-only access to a lot of things at the TimelineClip level. And https://github.com/pedrolabonia/pydavinci has exactly one contributor.

By contrast, Shotcut seems to be built on, and by, https://mltframework.org/ with a close correspondence between the runtime API surface and the file system representation of a file, and it's fully open-source. Very possibly the sweet spot we've been looking for!

Also give https://kdenlive.org/ a try. I settled on it as a high-power, steep learning curve solution when I found myself hitting the wall with alternatives. It's clunky but it does everything I need.

Like Shotcut, it's all MLT underneath the hood. You can click "Generate script" on the render dialog, and get a .mlt file.

Another lead for you: https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/OpenTimelineIO

I haven't tried Shotcut yet, but I can definitely vouch for Kdenlive. Been using it on and off for a few years now and is still the best and stable option for video editing in the FOSS space

Every video editor based on the MLT framework that I have tried has been very unstable : (

Shotcut is unfortunately no different. Having used shotcut for hundreds of hours ctrl+s becomes your best friend.

Bannerbear can do something like what you want, programmatically [0].

[0] https://bannerbear.com

Shotcut has this one cool feature [1] - drop a bunch of pictures into it and it'll create an animated slide show automatically. I've looked for ways to automate that via something like ffmpeg, but haven't found any better options.

[1] https://forum.shotcut.org/t/slideshow-generator/19162

ffmpeg has an entire page in their wiki devoted to slideshows: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Slideshow

There is so much value in doing this in a normal application with a UI that lets you see what you're doing. ffmpeg is a fantastic utility if you already know what you need, but it's absolutely terrible for jobs where you need to be able to see and do things between the two states of "having input" and "having final output".

I agree, although it has to be noted that that you can preview most ffmpeg commands using ffplay. The syntax is the same as the ffmpeg command, without the final output filename obviously.

Right, but now we're going "replace this single app with a normal graphical interface for working with visual media with multiple command line utilities including the terminal that you're always going to have to look up the commands flags for" and that's not really selling it =P

Ffmpeg is a great tool for programmatically editing videos. For one-off jobs a gui editor is probably better.

If you want to create a slideshow for 300 folders of images, ffmpeg is really your best friend. For one, maybe use a gui editor.

Where I found that fell down was wanting to do things like slow zooms and interesting transitions. I'd love something like a Python or bash script to tweak that addressed those.

Like this?

Zoom in up to 1.5x and pan always at center of picture (not tested):

  import ffmpeg
  (
    ffmpeg
    .input(
        '\*.jpg', 
        pattern_type='glob', 
        framerate='1/5'
    )
    .zoompan(
        z='min(zoom+0.0015,1.5)', 
        d=700,
        x='in_w/2-(in_w/zoom/2)',
        y='in_h/2-(in_h/zoom/2)'
    )
    .output('output.mp4', pix_fmt='yuv420p')
    .run()
  )

stitching [0], [1], and [2]

[0]https://github.com/kkroening/ffmpeg-python#quickstart

[1]https://kkroening.github.io/ffmpeg-python/#ffmpeg.zoompan

[2]https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#Examples-133

EDIT: added options for slideshow style

Nice! I think iMovie does this, but I usually use https://www.photofilmstrip.org/en

Apple Photos does it as well.

So basically this[0] with a crossfade[1] between frames? Which would be (by stitching examples together)

  ffmpeg -framerate 1/5 -pattern_type glob -i '\*.jpg' -pix_fmt yuv420p -filter_complex xfade=transition=fade:duration=2:offset=2 out.mp4

(1 jpg image per 5 seconds with a 2 seconds crossfade in between)

[0] https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Slideshow

[1] https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#xfade (only available in >4.3)

Yeah, although I'd be surprised if this isn't what Shotcut does (it uses ffmpeg).

I was just about to write that exact same command from my flawless recollection of stitching examples together from that wiki! But you beat me to it.

Honestly, I'd love a podcast called "Quinecast" where each episode consists of hosts talking in detail about the ffmpeg flags that were used to create the podcast.

Tried to use Shotcut years ago to edit a documentary and it crashed constantly. Neat idea, bad execution. Maybe it’s gotten better since then but it was unusable for serious work ca 2015.

My take: It worked excellent for unserious work a couple of weeks ago.

2015 was 7 years ago.

Yeah, it was bad enough that I gave up on my quest to use Linux for media production and switched back to macOS. Never had the occasion to try it again.

This looks like a great project, but after just now trying it a few times for the first time, it's crashing for me on Linux (Mint).

I really want this to work - it's exactly what I need. Does anyone know of any similar projects that work well on Linux? Are there plans to improve Shotcut Linux operability?

Did you try davinci? My brother went back to Windows after struggling, but after he found davinci he moved back to Linux and has been super happy. I think he uses Fedora but he ran opensuse for awhile too, I think because setting up Jack was easiest. With pipe wire coming it might level the playing field

It's not the most stable app I've used, but on Linux I rarely crash these days - much better than where it was 2 - 3 years ago.

The Windows version is quite volatile the last time I tried it however.

I've used it for editing 4k on linux somewhat recently (1 year +) and it was ok, the fact that it wouldn't GPU render was a real bummer but maybe that's fixed by now. Exporting a couple minutes of video could take an hour on an i7.

As an amateur I loved their interface because it was really easy to figure out.

If you are using this I recommend you to watch Tips on How to Speed Up Cinematic Editing & Reduce Lag with Proxy Editing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzHutxve2T0&t=3s.

Also from my experience M1 Mac build was lot faster than it running on Windows 11 with AMD Ryzen 9 3900. (This is with proxy files for both).

It did not crash for me on both OSes.

Yes, that was my experience too, maybe three years ago.

I had the same experience but I stuck with it and saved often.

I use it for work now from time to time and it is vastly more stable than it used to be.

I've created over 150 videos for a YouTube channel using Shotcut on Windows since October 2020. The GUI is not intuitive and it took quite awhile to learn many of the basics, but I've become fairly productive and crashes are extremely rare. If it warns about low memory, I reboot, and if I'm doing a large or complicated video I assemble it from smaller parts/projects. I'm using version 21.06.29 and never upgraded beyond that because it already offers me more than enough and I'm leery that a new version might break something I've become dependent on. It has a vast number of capabilities I've never even explored. If I can't figure out a feature I can inevitably find an online tutorial video that explains it sufficiently, though the tutorials tend to be of poor quality.

Why not use any number of popular/more reliable mainstream video editors, which would help you be significantly more productive and give you transferable skills? (This is not a dig at Shotcut, just curious about the benefits of taking what seems like a much harder path to a goal.)

Too hard to use after trying for awhile. By way of example adding text, then moving it & truncating it to only appear over part of the clip I could not intuitively understand. Perhaps its me.

Here's a bit of feedback, in the event anyone who manages the site reads this comment section:

1) I checked the FAQ and the 2nd and 3rd question in the FAQ were about crashing on Windows. I get the impression that this software is extremely unstable across OSes. This is a really bad foot to start off on.

Can anyone speak to the stability of Shotcut? I see a few comments below mentioning crashes, I just can't tell if we're talking every month or so, or every 5 minutes. If I were to switch video editors, having the program crash on me constantly is obviously a very big problem.

2) I didn't see any obvious language defining why I should switch to Shotcut. I use kdenlive to cut up screen shares and render them to webm; I do occasional light editing work to make tutorials for people. Kdenlive is a little clunky in some ways, but it gets the job done and I was able to figure out the basics after watching a quick tutorial on YouTube.

So...what does Shotcut offer that kdenlive doesn't? How could this task be made easier? Both software options can be used for commercial use, so what's the benefit of Shotcut over kdenlive? If Shotcut renders quicker, or supports more file formats, or makes it somehow easier to edit videos, I can see the appeal but there doesn't appear to be any introductory literature on their landing page or FAQ hammering these points home. Granted, I could probably devote the time to figuring this out myself, but it just seems like a lot of effort to learn something that should have been covered on the site.

One of those comparison breakdowns of side-by-side +/- images would have been a good starting point. Maybe it's buried somewhere else on the site, but if it is, it should be moved up to the front of the site, preferably on the main page.

I had it crash consistently on linux on startup, which as IIRC was something to do with the initial splash screen and was fixed by manually setting an option. Other than that, I've had it crash a couple of times when exporting, but I think that was the OS desperately reclaiming memory on an under-powered machine.

Can't help with comparing it to kdenlive.

So apparently in Shotcut you can make a transition between clips on the same track by just sliding them into each other. in Kdenlive you have to have them on different tracks and add transitions between them.

Not something that makes or breaks the editor, just something that caught my eye watching the tutorial videos. It's great for really simple home video editing.

Thanks for the info. I'm not sure how compelling that would be for my specific use case, but I'm sure some people would find that useful. Thanks! :)

When I last tried it, it frequently crashed and was very laggy on a high-spec machine with a good GPU and CPU. I also had trouble getting it to correctly do things like adjust playback speed of a clip. After an hour I gave up and used Davinci Resolve.

I sincerely hope Shotcut keeps making progress, since the last time I tried to find a good open source video editor of its type there wasn't one. Shotcut at least seemed to be the best of the available options, but it was laggy and crashed a lot despite being on a high spec PC and I had trouble getting it to correctly do basic stuff like adjust the playback rate of a clip.

It was really frustrating to end up settling on Davinci Resolve because that app sure is hard to use (apparently it originally only worked if you bought Blackmagic's custom control surfaces, so it sort of makes sense that its UI is terrible). Resolve is at least better than Vegas (which inexplicably costs money).

Anyone use this? Opinions?

It's good. For my use case, better than Kdenlive on Windows. Shortcut renders much faster than Kdenlive because Shotcut supports HW encoding using the integrated Intel GPU. Kdenlive only supports that on Linux.

I used it for a few projects. Very good for being free.

I've only used it for splicing together bike cam videos and then cutting them to 2 minutes before and after the incident for submitting to police (that's quite common for police forces in the UK when dealing with close-pass etc footage).

It was easy enough to figure out how to use it and I've got about zero knowledge of video editing. To be honest, I should really change to using ffmpeg instead as OpenShot can be a bit of a resource hog when exporting the video.

I have found the cross-platform support to be useful as I mainly use linux, but the more powerful PC that I've got is running windows (for running games).

Wow, the police actually care about stuff like that over there? what a world.

A good one, right?

It varies a lot between different areas as to how well they deal with it and they have inconsistent standards as to what consists of actionable evidence. I'm covered by Avon & Somerset which is one of the better ones.

Meanwhile here in the states the most significant police action in regard to cyclists rights I can identify is the time I took the lane in front of a police cruiser due to a car illegally parked n the bike lane, pointing at this infraction as I did so, and the pig riding shotgun rolled down his window to mock me as they cruised past.

You want "ffmpeg -ss <start time as hh:mm:ss> -t <length in seconds or as hh:mm:ss> -i <your video here>.mp4 -c copy output.mp4" or something along those lines.

I used to use OpenShot. I totally forgot how to use it after a few years hiatus and I could not find a way do what I remember I was doing, so I switched to plain ffmpeg. I use it to cut pieces of videos and extract the audio track. I use Audacity to denoise the audio, adjust the volume and silence some sequences. Then ffmpeg again to assemble everything into the final video. That never crashes and it's easier to document than working in a GUI.

I've used it. It's great. Pretty easy to learn, and output looks nice. Mind you I'm an enthusiastic amateur not a pro user. I've used other video editors before, like pinnacle, premiere elements etc, and while Shotcut is not as slick, it gets the job done with minimal fuss. And hard to argue with the price.

Didn't have all the bells and whistles that kdenlive had for my use case.

It's free.

It actually has quite a lot of functions, and effects, but the UI/UX is so so in my opinion.

Video rendering and export is fast enough which is a good thing, even when using effects.

The real test with most of these authoring tools is text support and how comprehensive it is, or not, as titling is an important aspect of video editing.

> The real test with most of these authoring tools is text support

So how's the text support?

I would say it is rather simplistic compared to other video editing tools.

I taught my 10 year old son how to use this because he wanted more than iMovie.

He loves learning how to use effects and titles, creating lots of cuts, and intercutting between different tracks. He even did some lightweight animation using it.

It's the most similar to the old-school feel of Premiere and Final Cut, and has given him a great foundation in non-linear editing and 2 years later he absolutely flies in it!

This is probably the best /advertisement/ of a product. If a 10yo can do things in it - then (at least) it has the UI what is understandable even to 10yo, for a pretty convoluted process of a non-linear editing.

I use it and like it, though I don't make videos often or have experience with non-free video editors. It's more than enough for me and was dead simple to learn.

I used both Shotcut and Davinci Resolve on MacOS. Shotcut provided the perfect amount of middle ground between iMovie and all the power user stuff in Davinci. More importantly, Shotcut worked well on my 2014 Macbook Pro with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage. Davinci is probably the better software but it ran very slowly once you added a couple of video/audio/photo layers. And the storage it ate up inside project files to store the cache was unbelievable. 30GB+ for for a 10 min 1080p video.

Reluctant to say "throw hardware at it", but I got one of the new M1 MBPs, my first Mac ever, and I can throw multi-cam 4K30 2/3 cams around with no optimized media, and it basically always runs without dropped frames, just using the H264/265 media generated by the cameras. I got the 2TB storage, because on my previous laptop I always was eating up so much space with optimized media, but it's way overkill now that I don't need that. But I didn't know that going into it.

When did you last use DaVinci? I've been using it for the past year and a half, and my project files are all under 10MB. I just checked my most recent video (around 30 minutes of 4K video), and the project file was 5.77MB

Edit: I just opened the project up because I was curious about the RAM and vRAM. When it's idle it took 1.5GB of RAM and 1GB of vRAM. Scrolling through the project very quickly pushed the RAM up to 4.5GB and vRAM up to 2GB.

For me, Shotcut, Openshot, Flowblade, Olive and Pitivi have been crashing to often to be worth using. Openshot used to be less flaky when I used it a few years ago when it was in GTK but the Qt version has not been stable to me.

Kdenlive is amazing though, especially the timegraphs for applying effects, and the clip proxying which makes it amazingly smooth for large projects on old laptops. I don't think any of the other free video editors come anywhere close.

I had a really bad experience last time I tried to use Kdenlive.

Even on a pretty powerful system, having a project timeline longer than an hour made the entire interface run at ~5fps for me when adjusting cuts. After that, I started using DaVinci Resolve, which definitely still has problems, but runs like nothing else I've seen.

> Even on a pretty powerful system, having a project timeline longer than an hour made the entire interface run at ~5fps for me when adjusting cuts.

Did you use proxy clips? It's not on by default[0].

[0]: https://userbase.kde.org/Kdenlive/Manual/Projects_and_Files/...

I did not, but the source footage I was editing was 720p 30fps so I don't think that would have been much help

We use kdenlive at work with the same results. Sometimes crashes but Auto save saves the day

This! Simply presume kdenlive will frequently crash. I found it very disconcerting at first, but I learned to treat kdenlive's frequent crashing as a mildly annoying glitch (peccadillo).

I use kdenlive for quite a bit. Crashing can be a problem when using the system repo version, but when using the flatpak it's very stable. If you haven't tried that, I would recommend it.

TIL. Thank you very much! I had no idea that a Flatpak would increase stability. I'll have to get it a try.

Never had Kdenlive crash on me. Win 11. Solid here.

kdenlive used to be fairly usable, but a recent upgrade messed up the interface, making it too large to be very usable

I used flowblade 2.6.0 for my teaching throughout the pandemic. It's a wonderful tool and I never experienced any crashes. Earlier I tried Shotcut, Openshot and others. They were slow to work with (laggy ui), slow to render and sometimes crashed.

My experiences were on Linux btw (Ubuntu 20.04) using well supported hardware.

Both Kdenlive and Olive a2.0 have been about as stable for me as Premiere Pro on Windows, which is to say usable, but keep your autosave time short. Kdenlive is far ahead in terms of functionality, but I'm 100% sold on Olive now that I've worked with the code a bit. It is so well-structured that I was able to jump in and make somw modifications and a custom node that I needed for a project in barely an hour, starting from zero - having never worked on a C++ project outside of embedded stuff.

Best that I've found for Linux. For cutting it's really good but if you need advanced object tracking or special effects, keep searching.

I used it for awhile, but there are a lot of short comings. It's very unintuitive and I would often spend more time trying to figure out how to do a thing than doing a thing. I switched to DaVinci Resolve (also free), and never looked back. I eventually spent the one time payment of around $300 for access to GPU accelerated encoding and a few additional filters and stuff.

Resolve is free as beer, but Shotcut is free as speech. Know the difference.

Yes I'm aware :). Notice I didn't say, "DaVinci (also free OSS)". I wasn't trying to mislead anyone, but I feel like OSS can sometimes be overhyped just because it's Open Source. Not all closed source software is bad (pretty much every major game is closed source), and not all OSS is good.

However I try to avoid non-free (speech) software at all costs. I'll be happily using an inferior OSS product instead of a free (beer) one, as long as it gets the job done.

I use it every few days to create game videos to share with friends. I like that it's super easy to extract and combine segments from multiple videos and easy to add a second audio track (like from a microphone). It's never crashed on me and it feels relatively polished compared to the other free applications I've used (the names of which escape me).

I've used it for youtube videos and some school projects for the kids. I'm happy that it's free. It did not have any crashes, but definitely I'm not a heavy user. I used it in Linux.

The user interface could be easier, for example deleting "ahs and ums" and silent time is a bit tedious. Also there are many output options, and it's confusing for a light user which to choose.

I've also used Lightworks, which is much nicer, but not free (except for 720p). Many of the non-free options want you on a subscription basis.

I've tried every open source video editor. They're all pretty awful. Even something as simple as iMovie is frankly several leagues ahead of them.

The one I always come back to is Blender. It too has serious issues, but it is actually improving fairly rapidly. In the latest releases you can scrub through video without it crawling to a halt (wow I know right!) and it has a non-tedious way to add text, etc.

Basically its interface is ... well if you've used Blender you know what it's like. But it does at least not crash, and you are unlikely to run into "you can't do that" issues, even if doing some simple things like changing the speed of a clip involves several YouTube tutorials and a bunch of caveats.

So yeah, open source video editing still sucks.

I tried it before the pandemic.

I got some crashes and random slowdowns; on par with other open source editors.

I found the UI unintuitive. For example: I tried to put one video next to another one (a presenter, with slides captured from the projector). I had to crop the presenter video but also adapt it to the height of the screen. The thing is that when I tried changing the crop horizontally the height of the video changed, as if the editor was trying to preserve the rectangle's proportions at all costs.

I love Shotcut but I'm not a professional user. I've used it for personal small projects it is a great piece of software for that as far as I am concerned.

I've been using it to create a 1min teaser trailer. The UX is mostly good, though at times atrocious; the Undo/Redo implementation isn't 100% there, frustratingly; the audio always stutters when beginning in-editor playback. However, it seems to be working great for most of what I want to accomplish, including some decent keyframe support for certain filters.

I’ve used Shotcut to edit almost all my videos that are on YouTube. It’s not the perfect UX, but it’s surprisingly flexible and capable.

I did a pair of videos a few years ago, neat product, had a bunch of crashes the first time (like every few hours while editing, but never while exporting), not so much the second. Encoding options were confusing, so as a total novice I just choose at random until I was happy with the results.

I use it for small video processing. It is better than openshot in my experience in terms of stability. The interface is reasonably good, with the exception of cropping, where you have to turn to ffmpeg (to be fair, all visual video editors do cropping badly).

Avidemux does it well. I find myself returning often when every other editor frustrates me.

I've been looking for an easy-to-use video editor for some time.

I've used all the big ones, hit film and davinci resolve, but they're a bit too complicated for my tastes. Thanks for sharing. Excited to use this!

I thought this was Openshot for some reason, but then realised it wasn't :)

not very portable, requires GLIBC_2.25/2.27 at least.

Obligatory "strongly consider switching to Davinci Resolve".

Can you explain for someone who is not familiar with this line of work?

My experience was: shotcut makes the hard things hard, and the easy things even harder. DaVinci felt like a straightforward, no BS, just get the job done kind of tool in comparison. I guess my big takeaway was UX was horrible in Shotcut compared to DaVinci.

Davinci Resolve is non-free but good. Shotcut is free but non-good.

I’ve only used resolve a handful of times but it’s fantastic. Also pretty sure you get a lot of features in the free version of Resolve… it was more than capable for my needs.

congrats, what a cute name.

This looks identical to Kdenlive, how is this different from kdenlive? https://docs.kdenlive.org/en/user_interface.html#user-interf...

In terms of history, looks like Shotcut had Windows support a few year before Kdenlive, for one. Also the main developer of Shotcut was one of the co-creators of MLT, which is the multimedia framework behind both Shotcut and Kdenlive.

As for features I haven't used Kdenlive enough to compare, since Shotcut works fine for me (never had any crashes, though this was using the Windows version so ymmv)

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