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I recently edited a small project, a 15 second video with multiple video and audio tracks, some basic white balance and color correction, and minor animations,
by shard 8y ago
I recently edited a small project, a 15 second video with multiple video and audio tracks, some basic white balance and color correction, and minor animations, on OpenShot, ShotCut, and KdenLive, in order to figure out which one was more appropriate for me. I also watched some tutorial videos on each of the video editors. My conclusion was that OpenShot was too basic for even such a small project, KdenLive was usable but lacked some tools which made editing somewhat burdensome, and ShotCut was the winner with its toolset and UI, although it crashed the most out of the three.
However, even with such a simple project, none of the three FOSS tools were easy to use, and all were barriers to my efficiency and creativity. I then searched for commercial offerings, and am currently using Davinci Resolve, which is free for the basic version, but even the basic version is light years beyond the FOSS choices in terms of speed, ease of use, and features. As someone who uses FOSS tools (GIMP, Inkscape) for ideological reasons, I'm a bit disappointed by how large of a gap there is between FOSS and commercial video editors.
- semi-extrinsic 8y agoI know that Blender is often cited as an unlikely but very good FOSS video editor. Did you consider it also for your comparison?
- shard 8y agoWhen I was researching which FOSS video editors to try, I read a few reviews which talked about how Blender is less intuitive and more difficult to use than the other choices (OpenShot, Shotcut, KdenLive) so I did not try it. I did a quick search just now, and saw that Blender offers vectorscope and waveform functions, which when I started doing editing I did not know about, but now I find extremely helpful in getting white balance and color correction right. If I haven't already been spoiled by the speed and ease of use of Davinci Resolve, I think I would have tried Blender.
- wazoox 8y agoI also heard good things of Olive ( https://www.olivevideoeditor.org/ https://www.olivevideoeditor.org/ ).
- shard 8y agoI took a brief look at the development status of Olive but did not try to edit video with it. It looked to be at a stage that's earlier than even OpenShot, so I did not consider it as a viable choice. Please let me know if I am mistaken.