6 ms·

Shotcut – A free, open-source, cross-platform video editor

182 points by oridecon 11y ago

oridecon 11y ago
http://www.shotcut.org http://www.shotcut.org https://i.imgur.com/oYNJEHk.jpg https://i.imgur.com/oYNJEHk.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ZV9X1nv.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ZV9X1nv.jpg https://i.imgur.com/XMi93BV.jpg https://i.imgur.com/XMi93BV.jpg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjuv-Js1znyvErPy9vZf37A/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjuv-Js1znyvErPy9vZf37A/vid... I'm not affiliated with the project.
- hobs 11y ago
  Looks fairly interesting for some of my more casual use, I might give it a download. Any big gotchas that you have come across or any tricks using it (special plugins, etc)?
  - oridecon 11y ago
    Like most (all?) of the Linux video editors you have the occasional crash. It happens way less than Openshot or Pitivi but it's still present. I don't know if it also happens on Windows or OSX. You can version control your edits and do text operations since it's a MLT file so that helps. Not really my thing but you can insert HTML5 overlays and animations. There's a demo on the youtube channel but it's quite "verbose" for most users. GPU accelerated filters are really fast and I have no problems working with 1080p 15GB+ files. But that's nothing compared to what professionals use so I can't really comment on that.
    - WalterBright 11y ago
      > the occasional crash I don't get this. Why is this true for the genre? I've been trying various video editors for 10 years, and they all crash. Every last one of them. I recently gave up on Windows Moviemaker because it crashes rendering anything over 30 minutes long. (Not only does it crash, it freezes Windows so bad you have to powercycle.)
      - tomcam 11y ago
        Exact same experience here. I too would like to understand why this happens. Am guessing the excuse on Windows would at one time have been the huge variety of supported video hardware, but that no longer seems to be the issue. And that's only a guess. Not sure if it's DirectX or whatever they call it, device drivers, application-level code, or what. These experiences have made me loyal to exactly zero video editor programs.
- dbbolton 11y ago
  Is that first screenshot showing QT and the last one GTK, or is it just QtCurve or some other theme-trickery?
  - baghira 11y ago
    Per github page it's a Qt5 application. Qt can use Gtk2 to render its widgets, so that's probably what's happening in the ubuntu screenshot.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- michaelbuddy 11y ago
  thank you, you've provided exactly what every software website, open source or not needs and often doesn't have. Good large screenshots, and a true walk through, not some wonky thing using animated paper cutouts or some other showing of benefits displacing actual features. If a realtor wants to sell a house, they can talk up benefits in the car all they want, but ultimately they need to show the nooks and crannies of the house for any traction.
hendry 11y ago
Wish there was a Web app to edit video. Upload to S3 and away I would go creating (jump cut) edits which would be fed to ffmpeg to dice up.
- anc84 11y ago
  That sounds like an incredibly wasteful way of editing. Why would you want to use a web app?
  - deckar01 11y ago
    Although video editing requires a level of performance that javascript is not equipped for, a web video editor is not a terrible idea. I would imagine all the heavy lifting would need to be done by a plugin or a local media encoding server. Portability and a rich editing interface would be the key features. Collaboration and version control would be a nice feature too. I am surprised how terrible the top commercial video editing programs are at simply sharing a project file with another person. Video projects really need the cloud backing the source files and version control. All of this can be done in native applications, but imagine being able to work on a video project from any modern browser. Maybe you don't even need a local media encoder, the server could render your changes and stream them as needed. Edit: I would love to be able to edit video on my Macbook Air and have a GPU cluster in the cloud doing all my rendering.
    - jpgleeson 11y ago
      I'm having trouble finding a source at the moment, but I believe that the BBC attempted this a few years ago. They eventually abandoned the project because as the editors needed the full resolution file of everything they were using to ensure the shot was in focus etc., storing them locally was a better option. I can't really see that changing in the future either. An NLE that checked out files from a remote server and then made edits to a text based file from which anything could be shared would be very useful though.
- UserRights 11y ago
  youtube can do this. kaltura has something, too. nice for kids and building joke videos or maybe for building your next presentation. however, pro video files are BIG, and upload will take longer than actual editing process with usual upload rates. More important: nobody wants to have a bloated webapp that runs in an already bloated web browser (all of them are!) and eats all your cpu power just by executing some cool javascript gui framework - you need every bit of performance for rendering.
UserRights 11y ago
also very interesting: https://github.com/jliljebl/flowblade https://github.com/jliljebl/flowblade
ris 11y ago
Or if you want something that works now, you can use Blender, which has a very full featured video editor built in to it, and has had for a long time.
- oridecon 11y ago
  Blender is a good option too. You can cut and do things very fast using full timeline with overdrop or the regular flow. IMO for anything more complex than that the UI gets on your way. I even learned most of the keybinds but it just doesn't feel intuitive.
- tombh 11y ago
  +1 for Blender. Easy to install, stable, intuitive and feature rich. I've tried a lot of free video editors and Blenders been the only one that I've actually achieved anything in.
deckar01 11y ago
> Leap Motion for jog and shuttle control. I love this idea. I added the ability to scrub through the history of my paint app [1]. The circle gesture provides the direction, size, and speed which can be used to create a very expressive scrubbing tool. Fast tight circle scrub really fast and large slow circles scrub really slow with high precision. Can't wait to check out their implementation. [1] http://youtu.be/DM1JtYyr88k http://youtu.be/DM1JtYyr88k
anon3_ 11y ago
Nice! I'm excited about this. Why GPLv3? Why not make the license permissive as possible?
- 254m4 11y ago
  Although permissive licenses are great for libraries, they aren't that good for applications. Why would you let someone make a closed source version of your open source video editor? No, you never ever want that happens, that's when copyleft comes into play, it's ideal for applications like this.
  - anon3_ 11y ago
    > Why would you let someone make a closed source version of your open source video editor? How is that a bad thing? I think that's a zero sum game way of looking at it. No damage is done if someone makes a closed source version. They can add value and stimulate competition. More often, they fail. Occasionally, core developers may enrich and provide additional functionality upon a permissive core. Why not look at Postgres as an example? And what harm is done? Lost code contributions? Some have no interest in collaborating on software they can't incorporate / copy from later without restriction. It takes time to wrap ones brain around a codebase. Why would someone take time to understand the internals of a GPLv3 app, when they could never incorporate pieces of it in their code later on? > it's ideal for applications like this. Ideal is subjective. Judging by the above, it seems as if enforcing envy trumps programmers doing as they wish with the code.
    - eropple 11y ago
      > Why would someone take time to understand the internals of a GPLv3 app, when they could never incorporate pieces of it in their code later on? ...to make it better for their uses, rather than their products? "Enforcing envy," though--please, be more of a jerk. I'm curious as to what large-scale applications have you developed and released under a permissive license that make you such an authority on what others should do with tens of thousands of their man-hours.
    - 11y ago
hackeyed 11y ago
Not to mention Kdenlive, which is being actively developed again and has been the most capable and stable of the free video editors I've used this past year (including Openshot, Pitivi, and Flowblade)
- oridecon 11y ago
  is there a way to get Kdenlive in a single folder with all it's dependencies, isolated? or even the new version that's using KF5 I'm not using KDE and had a few problems in the past after pulling too many things. > 0 upgraded, 109 newly installed, 0 to remove and 30 not upgraded. After this operation, 289 MB of additional disk space will be used. edit: nevermind, daily-builds https://kdenlive.org/download-development https://kdenlive.org/download-development but it still needs some things installed
- tombh 11y ago
  And Blender! I've found it more intuitive, feature-rich and stable than anything else. And it installs straight from Debian's default repos.
  - michaelbuddy 11y ago
    Blender could almost replace aftereffects for a lot of us, but it does so much it would probably confuse a new user as to how you could replace AE.
ecesena 11y ago
Partially OT, but does anyone know any open source video editor or better library for merging multiple videos into a 360 degree video? (python would be awesome)
- kej 11y ago
  MoviePy might do what you need, particularly the CompositeVideoClip class. See https://zulko.github.io/moviepy/ref/VideoClip/VideoClip.html#compositevideoclip https://zulko.github.io/moviepy/ref/VideoClip/VideoClip.html...
  - ecesena 11y ago
    Thanks, I'll look into it!
kazinator 11y ago
Name looks too annoyingly like a typo for "shortcut". How about "CTTC". "With CTTC, you can trim your video of boring dialog, and just keep the exciting chase at the end!" "CTTC is pronounced 'see-tick', or by uttering its expansion: Cut to the Chase."
- danvoell 11y ago
  I thought the same. At first I thought typo. Then I thought they took a shotcut on spelling shortcut. Then I realized it was for video apps.
beatpanda 11y ago
I've been using shotcut for over a year and I highly reccomend it. It is leaps and bounds ahead of most Linux-supporting video editors.
rogerbinns 11y ago
Folks may also be interested in the Openshot cross platform video editor (no affiliation other than as a user). They use (and helped develop) some of the libraries used by Shotcut. http://openshot.org/ http://openshot.org/ However openshot did commit the cardinal sin of second system effect. Version 1 was doing well, with a whole bunch of changes queued for version 2 including going cross platform, changing the UI toolkit, updating/changing the media toolkit, and a thousand other features. Version 2 has been imminent for well over a year now, and still doesn't seem too close to release.
- maheart 11y ago
  The relationship extends further than that. Openshot 1.x was developed on top of the MLT (Media Lovin' Toolkit) Framework. MLT and Shotcut are developed by the same person.
pbreit 11y ago
Comparisons to iMovie?
bobbles 11y ago
Is there a simple way to do a picture in picture effect (with unlimited levels of PIP?) Trying to do this for a recent project with anything else just did my head in with complexity... (I guess the best i can think of as a comparison is the TED intro? where lost of different clips fly across the screen)
- michaelbuddy 11y ago
  aftereffects could probably be scripted for this.
Klasiaster 11y ago
From UI perspective as well as the architectural design behind I would rather recommend Pitivi, as it's based on GStreamer.

182 points by oridecon 11y ago

http://www.shotcut.org http://www.shotcut.org https://i.imgur.com/oYNJEHk.jpg https://i.imgur.com/oYNJEHk.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ZV9X1nv.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ZV9X1nv.jpg https://i.imgur.com/XMi93BV.jpg https://i.imgur.com/XMi93BV.jpg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjuv-Js1znyvErPy9vZf37A/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjuv-Js1znyvErPy9vZf37A/vid... I'm not affiliated with the project.

hobs 11y ago
Looks fairly interesting for some of my more casual use, I might give it a download. Any big gotchas that you have come across or any tricks using it (special plugins, etc)?
- oridecon 11y ago
  Like most (all?) of the Linux video editors you have the occasional crash. It happens way less than Openshot or Pitivi but it's still present. I don't know if it also happens on Windows or OSX. You can version control your edits and do text operations since it's a MLT file so that helps. Not really my thing but you can insert HTML5 overlays and animations. There's a demo on the youtube channel but it's quite "verbose" for most users. GPU accelerated filters are really fast and I have no problems working with 1080p 15GB+ files. But that's nothing compared to what professionals use so I can't really comment on that.
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    > the occasional crash I don't get this. Why is this true for the genre? I've been trying various video editors for 10 years, and they all crash. Every last one of them. I recently gave up on Windows Moviemaker because it crashes rendering anything over 30 minutes long. (Not only does it crash, it freezes Windows so bad you have to powercycle.)
    - tomcam 11y ago
      Exact same experience here. I too would like to understand why this happens. Am guessing the excuse on Windows would at one time have been the huge variety of supported video hardware, but that no longer seems to be the issue. And that's only a guess. Not sure if it's DirectX or whatever they call it, device drivers, application-level code, or what. These experiences have made me loyal to exactly zero video editor programs.
dbbolton 11y ago
Is that first screenshot showing QT and the last one GTK, or is it just QtCurve or some other theme-trickery?
- baghira 11y ago
  Per github page it's a Qt5 application. Qt can use Gtk2 to render its widgets, so that's probably what's happening in the ubuntu screenshot.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
michaelbuddy 11y ago
thank you, you've provided exactly what every software website, open source or not needs and often doesn't have. Good large screenshots, and a true walk through, not some wonky thing using animated paper cutouts or some other showing of benefits displacing actual features. If a realtor wants to sell a house, they can talk up benefits in the car all they want, but ultimately they need to show the nooks and crannies of the house for any traction.

hendry 11y ago

Wish there was a Web app to edit video. Upload to S3 and away I would go creating (jump cut) edits which would be fed to ffmpeg to dice up.

anc84 11y ago
That sounds like an incredibly wasteful way of editing. Why would you want to use a web app?
- deckar01 11y ago
  Although video editing requires a level of performance that javascript is not equipped for, a web video editor is not a terrible idea. I would imagine all the heavy lifting would need to be done by a plugin or a local media encoding server. Portability and a rich editing interface would be the key features. Collaboration and version control would be a nice feature too. I am surprised how terrible the top commercial video editing programs are at simply sharing a project file with another person. Video projects really need the cloud backing the source files and version control. All of this can be done in native applications, but imagine being able to work on a video project from any modern browser. Maybe you don't even need a local media encoder, the server could render your changes and stream them as needed. Edit: I would love to be able to edit video on my Macbook Air and have a GPU cluster in the cloud doing all my rendering.
  - jpgleeson 11y ago
    I'm having trouble finding a source at the moment, but I believe that the BBC attempted this a few years ago. They eventually abandoned the project because as the editors needed the full resolution file of everything they were using to ensure the shot was in focus etc., storing them locally was a better option. I can't really see that changing in the future either. An NLE that checked out files from a remote server and then made edits to a text based file from which anything could be shared would be very useful though.
UserRights 11y ago
youtube can do this. kaltura has something, too. nice for kids and building joke videos or maybe for building your next presentation. however, pro video files are BIG, and upload will take longer than actual editing process with usual upload rates. More important: nobody wants to have a bloated webapp that runs in an already bloated web browser (all of them are!) and eats all your cpu power just by executing some cool javascript gui framework - you need every bit of performance for rendering.

UserRights 11y ago

also very interesting: https://github.com/jliljebl/flowblade https://github.com/jliljebl/flowblade

ris 11y ago

Or if you want something that works now, you can use Blender, which has a very full featured video editor built in to it, and has had for a long time.

oridecon 11y ago
Blender is a good option too. You can cut and do things very fast using full timeline with overdrop or the regular flow. IMO for anything more complex than that the UI gets on your way. I even learned most of the keybinds but it just doesn't feel intuitive.
tombh 11y ago
+1 for Blender. Easy to install, stable, intuitive and feature rich. I've tried a lot of free video editors and Blenders been the only one that I've actually achieved anything in.

deckar01 11y ago

> Leap Motion for jog and shuttle control. I love this idea. I added the ability to scrub through the history of my paint app [1]. The circle gesture provides the direction, size, and speed which can be used to create a very expressive scrubbing tool. Fast tight circle scrub really fast and large slow circles scrub really slow with high precision. Can't wait to check out their implementation. [1] http://youtu.be/DM1JtYyr88k http://youtu.be/DM1JtYyr88k

anon3_ 11y ago

Nice! I'm excited about this. Why GPLv3? Why not make the license permissive as possible?

254m4 11y ago
Although permissive licenses are great for libraries, they aren't that good for applications. Why would you let someone make a closed source version of your open source video editor? No, you never ever want that happens, that's when copyleft comes into play, it's ideal for applications like this.
- anon3_ 11y ago
  > Why would you let someone make a closed source version of your open source video editor? How is that a bad thing? I think that's a zero sum game way of looking at it. No damage is done if someone makes a closed source version. They can add value and stimulate competition. More often, they fail. Occasionally, core developers may enrich and provide additional functionality upon a permissive core. Why not look at Postgres as an example? And what harm is done? Lost code contributions? Some have no interest in collaborating on software they can't incorporate / copy from later without restriction. It takes time to wrap ones brain around a codebase. Why would someone take time to understand the internals of a GPLv3 app, when they could never incorporate pieces of it in their code later on? > it's ideal for applications like this. Ideal is subjective. Judging by the above, it seems as if enforcing envy trumps programmers doing as they wish with the code.
  - eropple 11y ago
    > Why would someone take time to understand the internals of a GPLv3 app, when they could never incorporate pieces of it in their code later on? ...to make it better for their uses, rather than their products? "Enforcing envy," though--please, be more of a jerk. I'm curious as to what large-scale applications have you developed and released under a permissive license that make you such an authority on what others should do with tens of thousands of their man-hours.
  - 11y ago

hackeyed 11y ago

Not to mention Kdenlive, which is being actively developed again and has been the most capable and stable of the free video editors I've used this past year (including Openshot, Pitivi, and Flowblade)

oridecon 11y ago
is there a way to get Kdenlive in a single folder with all it's dependencies, isolated? or even the new version that's using KF5 I'm not using KDE and had a few problems in the past after pulling too many things. > 0 upgraded, 109 newly installed, 0 to remove and 30 not upgraded. After this operation, 289 MB of additional disk space will be used. edit: nevermind, daily-builds https://kdenlive.org/download-development https://kdenlive.org/download-development but it still needs some things installed
tombh 11y ago
And Blender! I've found it more intuitive, feature-rich and stable than anything else. And it installs straight from Debian's default repos.
- michaelbuddy 11y ago
  Blender could almost replace aftereffects for a lot of us, but it does so much it would probably confuse a new user as to how you could replace AE.

ecesena 11y ago

Partially OT, but does anyone know any open source video editor or better library for merging multiple videos into a 360 degree video? (python would be awesome)

kej 11y ago
MoviePy might do what you need, particularly the CompositeVideoClip class. See https://zulko.github.io/moviepy/ref/VideoClip/VideoClip.html#compositevideoclip https://zulko.github.io/moviepy/ref/VideoClip/VideoClip.html...
- ecesena 11y ago
  Thanks, I'll look into it!

kazinator 11y ago

Name looks too annoyingly like a typo for "shortcut". How about "CTTC". "With CTTC, you can trim your video of boring dialog, and just keep the exciting chase at the end!" "CTTC is pronounced 'see-tick', or by uttering its expansion: Cut to the Chase."

danvoell 11y ago
I thought the same. At first I thought typo. Then I thought they took a shotcut on spelling shortcut. Then I realized it was for video apps.

beatpanda 11y ago

I've been using shotcut for over a year and I highly reccomend it. It is leaps and bounds ahead of most Linux-supporting video editors.

rogerbinns 11y ago

Folks may also be interested in the Openshot cross platform video editor (no affiliation other than as a user). They use (and helped develop) some of the libraries used by Shotcut. http://openshot.org/ http://openshot.org/ However openshot did commit the cardinal sin of second system effect. Version 1 was doing well, with a whole bunch of changes queued for version 2 including going cross platform, changing the UI toolkit, updating/changing the media toolkit, and a thousand other features. Version 2 has been imminent for well over a year now, and still doesn't seem too close to release.

maheart 11y ago
The relationship extends further than that. Openshot 1.x was developed on top of the MLT (Media Lovin' Toolkit) Framework. MLT and Shotcut are developed by the same person.

pbreit 11y ago

Comparisons to iMovie?

bobbles 11y ago

Is there a simple way to do a picture in picture effect (with unlimited levels of PIP?) Trying to do this for a recent project with anything else just did my head in with complexity... (I guess the best i can think of as a comparison is the TED intro? where lost of different clips fly across the screen)

michaelbuddy 11y ago
aftereffects could probably be scripted for this.

Klasiaster 11y ago

From UI perspective as well as the architectural design behind I would rather recommend Pitivi, as it's based on GStreamer.