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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

Anyone use this? Opinions?

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.

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 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'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 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.

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'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.

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.

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'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 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).

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 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.

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 a few projects. Very good for being free.

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

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