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Unfortunately for screencast videos where you record your desktop and maybe overlay a webcam kdenlive is really really bad compared to alternatives available on

by nickjj 8y ago

Unfortunately for screencast videos where you record your desktop and maybe overlay a webcam kdenlive is really really bad compared to alternatives available on Windows and Mac such as Camtasia / Screenflow. It's one of the reasons why I continue to stick with Windows. Kdenlive feels like it's 10 years behind Camtasia in terms of UI polish and being able to accomplish simple tasks like put a little tooltip overlay on the screen and make it look reasonable. I think a lot of people who say kdenlive is good haven't tried Camtasia, or have created enough videos to really figure out kdenlive's shortcomings. I'm coming at this from the POV of creating 400 videos and have spent over 1,000 hours hardcore editing these videos. I don't want to tear it down too much because it's one of the better screencast video editing tools on Linux but if your profession involves creating screencast videos, you're going to be majorly disappointed compared to Camtasia (or Screenflow). Enough to where you'll probably abort the idea of using Linux even if you're primarily a developer. I wish I could throw money at the kdenlive devs and wake up tomorrow with a video editor that was as good as Camtasia.

codetrotter 8y ago
If you want to record your desktop in Linux with a live webcam overlay I strongly recommend Open Broadcaster Software, aka OBS. https://obsproject.com/ https://obsproject.com/ OBS lets you combine multiple sources easily including adding static and dynamic graphical overlays and is basically the what all of the streamers are using on all of the three platforms Linux, macOS and Windows these days, and aside from being able to stream live to Twitch etc it is also perfect for offline recording. However, OBS is not a video editor, so if your use-case is to first record your screen and to then record the commentary afterwards rather than commenting while you are screenrecording then OBS is probably not what you want.
- Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
  OBS is stable, packed with options, reliable, has intuitive UI, usually sets up hardware quickly and painlessly definitely try it.
  - eropple 8y ago
    OBS is technically very impressive and reliable, but I wouldn't call it "intuitive". I wrote an Android app for managing OBS mostly because of how much clunk there is to the UI.
- nickjj 8y ago
  Yeah I use OBS. It's the best thing ever for streaming and definitely is one of the best solutions for recording in general. But Camtasia is both a recorder and editor and it seamlessly integrates the 2. The main pros of Camtasia is that it's super optimized for editing screencast style videos (tooltip overlays, text, zooms / pans, really REALLY nice animations on any objects by just dragging a few sliders, etc.). The editing part is where kdenlive is way behind IMO, but that's where you spend most of your time.
  - eropple 8y ago
    Best free (as in beer) thing for streaming, I'll give you. But I switched to vMix as my primary video mixing software and won't look back until OBS has significantly better audio management. vMix literally got $700 out of me because it integrated a good, ASIO-capable mixer into it. A vMix Call equivalent that transparently wires into the audio board would also be really nice, but I don't wanna get greedy.
    - nickjj 8y ago
      > But I switched to vMix as my primary video mixing software and won't look back until OBS has significantly better audio management. vMix literally got $700 out of me because it integrated a good, ASIO-capable mixer into it. Fair enough but audio is a completely different animal that can be tamed in a number of ways: 1. You can buy a hardware USB audio interface + mixer for ~$200-400ish total which can do compression, basic EQs, noise gate, has multiple inputs, etc. and now that becomes your final source of audio so you don't need to process it with software. It's just a mic from your computer's point of view. 2. OBS has VST plugin support, so you can directly use hundreds of free VSTs to do various effects in real time without needing to mess around with audio redirection. No hardware needed except for your mic. 3. You can use REAPER (free but you should register it, sort of like Sublime Text) which is a DAW. From here you can use various VSTs and then use Jack (or comparable software) to redirect REAPER's output as input to another app (such as OBS). This takes a bit of initial set up but technically would work with any app, not just OBS and this is what I used to do before going with #1 because I didn't want to run all of these apps every time I wanted to start recording. In the end, you can get fantastic sounding audio with any of the above approaches and with #1 and #3 you can do it with any application where as with #2 you're limited to OBS only (which isn't a bad thing if you spend your time streaming and primarily recording with it anyways).
- platz 8y ago
  once you use compositing in OBS instead of the direct webcam passthrough, isn't there a noticeable delay?
vectorEQ 8y ago
camtasia is not free software nor open source. so its hard to compare the two, though input from someone actively using it is always better than the comments of people judging screenshots. so thanks for that :)
- nickjj 8y ago
  I think they can be compared because they compete for the same type of user, and if that user is doing this as part of their business then dropping $ on a tool that's a 9/10 instead of a 3/10 is going to be worth it. I want to see kdenlive overtake everything, but it's simply not there and given its progress over the years (I've been following pretty much every open source and closed source screencast oriented video editor for years) I don't see it ever getting there.
eddiezane 8y ago
Switched from macOS to Ubuntu around a year ago. Would happily pay for another license of Camtasia for Linux. Agreed that there's no experience like that I've found yet.
- nickjj 8y ago
  I went as far as posting about it on the Camtasia forums. Basically a "hey, there's people who want to run Linux but aren't because they really like Camtasia" type of post. Not a single person replied positively even though the post wasn't hostile in the slightest.
f_r_d 8y ago
Camstasia is a "Screen Recording & Video Editing Software" while Kdenlive is a video editor that has an feature to record your screen. Your shortcomings with it are the lack of screenrecording featuresit seems, not a fair comparison. Although it still has some ground to cover before it becomes a great nle it is getting there with every release.

by nickjj 8y ago

codetrotter 8y ago

If you want to record your desktop in Linux with a live webcam overlay I strongly recommend Open Broadcaster Software, aka OBS. https://obsproject.com/ https://obsproject.com/ OBS lets you combine multiple sources easily including adding static and dynamic graphical overlays and is basically the what all of the streamers are using on all of the three platforms Linux, macOS and Windows these days, and aside from being able to stream live to Twitch etc it is also perfect for offline recording. However, OBS is not a video editor, so if your use-case is to first record your screen and to then record the commentary afterwards rather than commenting while you are screenrecording then OBS is probably not what you want.

Erlich_Bachman 8y ago
OBS is stable, packed with options, reliable, has intuitive UI, usually sets up hardware quickly and painlessly definitely try it.
- eropple 8y ago
  OBS is technically very impressive and reliable, but I wouldn't call it "intuitive". I wrote an Android app for managing OBS mostly because of how much clunk there is to the UI.
nickjj 8y ago
Yeah I use OBS. It's the best thing ever for streaming and definitely is one of the best solutions for recording in general. But Camtasia is both a recorder and editor and it seamlessly integrates the 2. The main pros of Camtasia is that it's super optimized for editing screencast style videos (tooltip overlays, text, zooms / pans, really REALLY nice animations on any objects by just dragging a few sliders, etc.). The editing part is where kdenlive is way behind IMO, but that's where you spend most of your time.
- eropple 8y ago
  Best free (as in beer) thing for streaming, I'll give you. But I switched to vMix as my primary video mixing software and won't look back until OBS has significantly better audio management. vMix literally got $700 out of me because it integrated a good, ASIO-capable mixer into it. A vMix Call equivalent that transparently wires into the audio board would also be really nice, but I don't wanna get greedy.
  - nickjj 8y ago
    > But I switched to vMix as my primary video mixing software and won't look back until OBS has significantly better audio management. vMix literally got $700 out of me because it integrated a good, ASIO-capable mixer into it. Fair enough but audio is a completely different animal that can be tamed in a number of ways: 1. You can buy a hardware USB audio interface + mixer for ~$200-400ish total which can do compression, basic EQs, noise gate, has multiple inputs, etc. and now that becomes your final source of audio so you don't need to process it with software. It's just a mic from your computer's point of view. 2. OBS has VST plugin support, so you can directly use hundreds of free VSTs to do various effects in real time without needing to mess around with audio redirection. No hardware needed except for your mic. 3. You can use REAPER (free but you should register it, sort of like Sublime Text) which is a DAW. From here you can use various VSTs and then use Jack (or comparable software) to redirect REAPER's output as input to another app (such as OBS). This takes a bit of initial set up but technically would work with any app, not just OBS and this is what I used to do before going with #1 because I didn't want to run all of these apps every time I wanted to start recording. In the end, you can get fantastic sounding audio with any of the above approaches and with #1 and #3 you can do it with any application where as with #2 you're limited to OBS only (which isn't a bad thing if you spend your time streaming and primarily recording with it anyways).
platz 8y ago
once you use compositing in OBS instead of the direct webcam passthrough, isn't there a noticeable delay?

vectorEQ 8y ago

camtasia is not free software nor open source. so its hard to compare the two, though input from someone actively using it is always better than the comments of people judging screenshots. so thanks for that :)

nickjj 8y ago
I think they can be compared because they compete for the same type of user, and if that user is doing this as part of their business then dropping $ on a tool that's a 9/10 instead of a 3/10 is going to be worth it. I want to see kdenlive overtake everything, but it's simply not there and given its progress over the years (I've been following pretty much every open source and closed source screencast oriented video editor for years) I don't see it ever getting there.

eddiezane 8y ago

Switched from macOS to Ubuntu around a year ago. Would happily pay for another license of Camtasia for Linux. Agreed that there's no experience like that I've found yet.

nickjj 8y ago
I went as far as posting about it on the Camtasia forums. Basically a "hey, there's people who want to run Linux but aren't because they really like Camtasia" type of post. Not a single person replied positively even though the post wasn't hostile in the slightest.

f_r_d 8y ago

Camstasia is a "Screen Recording & Video Editing Software" while Kdenlive is a video editor that has an feature to record your screen. Your shortcomings with it are the lack of screenrecording featuresit seems, not a fair comparison. Although it still has some ground to cover before it becomes a great nle it is getting there with every release.