Kdenlive 24.02 open source video editor released

I use Kdenlive about once or twice a year to edit/compile racecar footage. The UI has been friendly enough to relearn each time because I use it so infrequently. I've never had any complaints about it, though I'm not doing anything crazy. But it's extremely intuitive and even as a new user it doesn't seem to get in my way, which is just about the highest praise I can give to a piece of interactive software.

Unfortunately I can't compare against Lightworks or Blender, because I tried Kdenlive and it worked great, and there was no reason to search for alternatives.

I've used Kdenlive, Shotcut, Blender and Olive [1]. They all have strenghts and weaknesses, so I choose which one to use depending on what I'm trying to do, or sometimes I use two of them through a single video project.

One thing to note is that Kdenlive and Shotcut both use the MLT video editing framework [2] under the hood, so their capabilities and constraints are very close to each other's. That said, their UIs are their own and some things may be easier to do in one over the other, may be a matter of personal preference. AFAIK Shotcut is developed by the same people who built MLT, but I don't think that gives it any particular advantage. Also both of these apps have the largest ready-made effects toolbox out of the four apps I mentioned at the top.

Blender's VSE (video sequence editor) is great if you need fine-tuned 2D animations of elements because you can use all the same awesome keyframing tools you'd use for 3D animation, but it's severely lacking in other aspects, especially in the effects dept (you can crop, blur, mask, but not much else). For some reason you can't use Blender's compositor node system with video, which would enable many more capabilities if possible. There's also a steeper learning curve if you've never used Blender before because its UI breaks many conventions.

Olive is a newcomer that doesn't get enough attention, but IMHO it was at one point the most promising OSS video editor out there. Sadly the developer works on it on his free time, and he's recently said that he's pausing development because he doesn't have the resources to work on it any more. I'm really hoping a miracle happens.

There's two versions of Olive, 0.1 and 0.2 which is a complete rewrite. Both versions are good, but they work pretty differently. What got me excited about 0.2 is that its effects are node-based (unlike MLT-based editors which are stack-based), which enables far more advanced editing, although you probably wouldn't need that unless you're working on something quite ambitious.

1: https://www.olivevideoeditor.org/

2: https://www.mltframework.org/

Blender video editor is extremely feature rich in terms of the keyframing effects you can do with it, the only problem being: it's slow, and it doesn't always sync audio with video even when you ask it to.

With Kdenlive, it's frustrating to add a simple block of text (you can have to create an overlay, and then configure that overlay, and place it roughly where you want), but the final rendering takes only minutes and it's stable enough to work with for larger projects.

Can't comment on Lightworks.

I don't have experience with any of those, but I have used ShotCut [1], which is free an open-source. It works well enough on those rare occasions I've needed it (e.g. editing a video of my child playing an instrument for their class). If you're looking for "FOSS" and "easy to use" ShotCut might be worth looking at.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotcut

My experience has been: Kdenlive is full-featured and weird to use. Blender is missing features and weird to use. Openshot is simple and easy, but crashes. shortcut is simple and easy and does not crash.

In my experience, Kdenlive and Shotcut are more or less on par with iMovie. Da Vinci Resolve works on all three major OSes and is actively usurping the prosumer market previously held by Premiere and Final Cut Pro. (It even has an advanced, node-based compositing tool for visual effects and motion graphics.) It's not open source, though it's free unless you need some features aimed more at serious commercial stuff.

> Without getting into the philosophy of open source vs proprietary and the like, but just as someone who very occasionally needs to edit video on Linux, how does Kdenlive compare to something like Lightworks or the Blender video editor?

Blender features a node-based compositor (Like Nuke) and an NLE (movie editor). Both these tools are fine when used within a Blender workflow, but they are troublesome to use in a stand alone capacity.

In my opinion, the most important feature of an NLE is its media optimization strategy without which editing is a chore. I now use DaVinci by Blackmagic, which is free. They inherited the amazingly efficient proxy system from the DaVinci colour grader. To this Blackmagic added their own codec voodoo which is not insubstantial. DaVinci and Blackmagic footage together run as smooth as butter.

Lightworks hands down has the absolute best workflow for cutting and assembling video. Nothing else comes close. But like you said, they want you to pay for for anything above 720p. The downside is that it is really slow on my Core i9 Mac with 32 GB memory. The forums lead me to believe this is just an issue with the Mac platform, so Windows and Linux user probably don't experience this. I'm not saying it is slow at playback or seeking—it is really just the UI that's slow like there's a noticeable latency from a click to when a menu appears and don't even try dragging stuff around.

Avid Media Composer is also free but limited to 1080p and has many other limitations that can make it tricky for all but the simplest projects. Again, if you pay up you get what Hollywood editors use, but at $20 to $50 per month subscriptions isn't great for occasional use. It requires some setup and configuration that's not intuitive. I had to google how to have it use only one display and not to just assume I want it to take over all attached displays. It also has a bunch of DRM and copy protection crap that requires a bunch of additional programs and runs permanent Java processes.

Blender has a video editor. That much is true. It just isn't very good. Editing is imprecise and clumsy. You have to manually add frame allotments to the timeline if you go past the runtime. It's only saving grace is the ability to do 4K (probably higher if you want). There's no previewing a clip before you place it on the timeline. All editing is done on the timeline by positioning the playhead. There is an upfront cost for proxy editing, so if your source material is high resolution and long, expect to wait a long time for it to process the clips before you can play or edit them. I've found that when performance starts to suck you'll have to manually rebuild the proxies—maybe go to lunch.

I haven't tried Kdenlive, but its editing ability looks similar to Blender in that you have to put the clip on the timeline before doing anything. Coming from Lightworks or Media Composer this workflow sucks. I'm still going to give it a try, but I'm not sure it is for me.

As someone who rarely edits video and doesn't need or want to become an expert, but had one to do last year, I ended up using Kdenlive. I know I also tried Shotcut and Openshot (because they're on my machine) but not why I rejected them, and I don't remember whether I tried DaVinci.

kdenlive is the easiest. It has annoying bugs but they're relatively easy to work around.

Of course, like any open source project, part of the reason why those bugs exist is my fault for not engaging with the project ... but let's ignore that

Both kdenlive and blender are not that great at working with text which makes them hard to recommend for serious use.

Likewise, was looking for something with a workflow similar to Sony Vegas and came across Kdenlive. I mostly just needed to perform some simple cuts and fades with multiple audio and video tracks, and was very impressed by its capabilities and how intuitive it felt to use.

I subscribe this comment, non-linear interpolation using curves would be extremely useful.

Another obvious thing I often miss is the ability to change the length (duration) of static image clips in the project bin (currently? - haven't tried the latest version yet - the only way is to set a length in the settings before importing). It seems like it doesn't matter at first, since it's a static image, but start adding effects and keyframes and any resizing done in the timeline can mess everything up.

I always use OBS for screen recording but otherwise the same story :)

I always use KDE as my primary desktop and love it. It's amazing. Kdenlive is only one of the many amazing apps they produce. And I'm proud to donate to them monthly.

Basically same, on Windows too. OBS for recording, kdenlive for editing.

how does it compare with ScreenFlow, which I have seen most people recommend for YouTube / Screencasts.

I am a newbie, so I am learning to make videos and edit them.

The one crash I regularly experienced about a year ago had to do with saving and reusing effect stacks. I'm not sure if that still happens as I stopped using that feature entirely.

Far less regularly, I've seen crashes when replacing video files used in the project.

I also recommend setting the framerate of a project first thing and then never touching it again.

I moved to Resolve because of this. It's maddening when you're new to editing and lose an hour's worth of work due to a crash like this.

The UI and features were plenty for my use case otherwise.