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Comment by yesbut | Hacker News Reader

Kdenlive

I've tried this tool a few times over the years. It's quite far from being intuitive. Maybe it makes sense to professionals to work in the field full-time, but for a regular mortal who just wants to edit a video, it's impossible to grasp.

Even something as basic as opening a video file is a huge challenge. I can't just open a video file. Instead, I need to "create a new project", which requires that I specify the exact resolution and FPS of the video file beforehand (why!?). After I use a completely separate tool to extract these attributes from the video that I'm editing, I have a blank canvas onto which I can drag the actual video.

You are doing something wrong. What you need to do is launch kdenlive, then select Project → Add Clip or Folder and select the video. Then drag it into the timeline (I just did some googling the first time).

The UI is somewhat clumsy but I think it is pretty good that we have an open source video editor.

Been using Kdenlive for everything for years now and it's really feeling great now. There are a few quirks you need to learn but generally it's quite simple and intuitive with a huge community and most big LLMs can guide you through the processes!

I recently ( a few months ago ) finally caved an bought Davinci Resolve for linux and despite that I almost exclusively use Kdenlive instead every time I quickly want to make a video.

This of course is most likely a skill issue at my part but it really feels to me like kdenlive is getting in the way of my flow much less than davinci

I started using resolve last year and while I get it now and my hands know the shortcuts I don't feel it's a very intuitive editor.

Very nice color options though, that part is hard to beat

I really tried to onboard on Davinci Resolve but it's just too complex for the basic editing I need. It does have brilliant color grading options that are not available in Kdenlive but I'm using premade LUTs for 99% of my edits and Kdenlive supports LUTs really well these days!

Nice! I've never heard of Kdenlive. Do you know how it compares to Davinci Resolve's free version?

It runs on Linux.

Davinci Resolve also runs natively on Linux (with some codec licensing restrictions)

So does DaVinci

I've made a couple photo/music montages with both tools. Not an advanced user, but I found Kdenlive was more stable on Ubuntu and the UX is similar between the two.

Used it instead on Davinci Resolve on a few computer because Davinci Resolve require GPU and doesn't always recognize it - so it doesn't even start. Kdenlive doesn't have this issue.

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