7 ms·

I have been editing my podcast and guides with NLEs on Linux for the past decade. Kdenlive, OpenShot, Olive, Cinelerra, Blender and Pitivi all lack one key feat

by Venn1 3y ago

I have been editing my podcast and guides with NLEs on Linux for the past decade. Kdenlive, OpenShot, Olive, Cinelerra, Blender and Pitivi all lack one key feature. Stability. You can lose a staggering amount of work between auto saves. After a day of playing with the free version of Resolve in 2017 I gave BlackMagic some cash for a license & capture card for audio. The early versions lacked ALSA support. Editing sessions can last 8 to 10 hours and I can't remember the last time it spite-crashed. Granted, this doesn't prevent me from mindlessly tapping Ctrl+S every few minutes.

__mharrison__ 3y ago
Resolve is amazing. I also tracked pitivi and Cinelerra for years. Really hard to beat the free version. However, the studio version paid for itself quickly.
Racing0461 3y ago
> After a day of playing with the free version of Resolve in 2017 I gave BlackMagic some cash for a license & capture card for audio I see you've came to the same conclusion i did years ago. I look at it not as paying for software, but buying my time back at this point. Linux "open source"/free professional software seems to lack the Je ne sais quoi needed to make it worthwhile. It works, but the software is in the "uncanny valley" so to speak compared to polished Mac/Windows paid professional software.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  There is an old saying: "Time is money." When you buy something, you are exchanging your money to obtain someone else's time. In this case, time that someone else spent to make sure a program works. The F in FOSS stands for free, so nobody is under any obligation to spend their time so you don't spend yours.
  - hn_acker 3y ago
    > The F in FOSS stands for free, so nobody is under any obligation to spend their time so you don't spend yours. Your conclusion generalizes to no-charge software, not to all FOSS. The "free" in FOSS stands for free software, meaning free as in freedom rather than free as in price. If a program is free software [1] then a user of the program can read the source code, modify it, and distribute (including sell) unmodified and modified versions of the program/code. A user who lacks the program or the code isn't entitled to the freedoms but can get the software from someone else who has it. Developers of free software can charge for it. One way of making money from free software is charging for access to the developer's server. Another way is charging for more expansive user support. (Alternatives to charging for the software itself include requesting donations and selling physical merchandise.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      I'm fully aware the F in FOSS stands for free-as-in-libre. I'm also aware that FOSS developers by and large refuse the exchange of any and all money both as buyers and sellers for services rendered. You say developers of free-as-in-libre software can charge for them, but in practice any developer that tries to sell his free-as-in-libre software will be viciously laughed out of the room by everyone else. The F in FOSS in practice stands both for free-as-in-libre and free-as-in-beer. And you don't get to talk about the quality of free beer.
      - Racing0461 3y ago
        Can you guys lemma know when is the year of the linux desktop? I wanna add it to calcurse.
        Qem 3y ago
        If Micro$oft keeps enshittifying their OS at current rates, I bet a lot of people will get fed up and jump ship to Linux after one or two more windows releases. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    > The F in FOSS stands for free, so nobody is under any obligation to spend their time so you don't spend yours. This is why I really dislike the term "FOSS". It's both redundant and erroneously misleads people to thinking things like this. Free Software can absolutely be developed under contract, in which case yes, you are entitled to the developers time under the terms of the contract.
- belugacat 3y ago
  A lot of open source projects suffer from “pet project” syndrome. Some maintainers have very strong opinions about how/what things should be done regardless of actual user demand or feedback, and there’s no one with the power to rebuff them because the product owners deciding what to implement and the engineers doing implementation work are one and same. Commit right makes might. In a (healthy) company, you have PMs and executives who will tell the overly opinionated engineers to STFU and actually implement things that move the needle and solve problems users are facing. This is also why most open source projects have terrible UI/UX and any designer who attempts to help and improve things finds themselves ignored, with no means to actually carry out any decision, and walk away soon after.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    If maintainers are paid to produce a feature, they should produce it regardless. Otherwise they're breaking a contract.
  - davidhyde 3y ago
    > “and there’s no one with the power to rebuff them” Except for those that discover the fork button. /s In all seriousness I think that what you mean is that people rarely have the power to fork a project and drag all the users and development expertise over to their version. Especially if they are simply users of the system and not contributors. Users of commercial software can get companies to do stuff for them with their wallets.
  - prox 3y ago
    It stems from a bias, developers are power/expert users and their interface behavior is likely matching, which means they are heavily reliant on keyboard shortcuts (Think Blender 1.x and Blender 2.x who leaned heavily and even exclusively on shortcuts) This gives them the idea that their software is very powerful (and probably is) but this creates a cliff to the beginner and intermediate level users. A lot of examples can be found in “About Face: On interaction design” by Alan Cooper.
  - oefrha 3y ago
    In fact larger open source GUI projects also tend to suffer from the opposite: with multiple equally powerful maintainers, a good number of contributors, and no one to rally them behind a coherent design, you get a messy bag of poorly documented features spread all over the place. Design by programmer is usually bad enough; design by a loosely-connected web of programmers working almost independently is even worse. Also, a lot of the developers/users are ideologically motivated and heavily invested, when you point out how bad the software is for the average user, instead of reflecting on it they often get defensive.
- poulpy123 3y ago
  the "je ne sais quoi" is called money
unixhero 3y ago
Can confirm. Used Kdenkive and Pitiwi, and they crashed on me. I lost a lot of work.
dharmab 3y ago
The free version of Resolve is so good. I looked for a reason to pay them- nope, free version did literally everything a non-professional would need. And they even have free downloadable lessons on how to edit - not just use their editor, but edit in general- on the website.
- Aerroon 3y ago
  Last time I looked at it the free version didn't use your GPU for playback during editing. Has it changed since then?
  - dharmab 3y ago
    It depends on the host OS and codec. On Windows if your OEM didn't include the H.265 license with your default installation you have to buy it for $1 from the Windows store (this is a Windows thing, not a Davinci thing). On Linux I think you have to pay for the Pro version which includes the license. I think if you're working with DNxHD files you don't have to worry about this.
  - Nihilartikel 3y ago
    I did some semi-serious work in Linux on the free version earlier this year. Performance was pretty good, and I believe that it did use the GPU. The only big annoyance for me was the lack of a h265 codec. I had some FFMPEG shell scripts for the final exports, but it was a pain and I eventually paid for the full version, which I am very happy with considering it is a lifetime license. Some premium features like speech transcription, where you can select a video segment by simply selecting dialog from a text box, were a big time saver too. With my last editing experience being Adobe Premiere in the early 2000s, Resolve was simply amazing.
    - dharmab 3y ago
      Similarly, I use Shutter Encoder as an early stage of my pipeline to convert to less painful codecs.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
vindarel 3y ago
I spent dozens of hours in kdenlive since last year with 1 well-identified crash. The situation might have drastically improved since 2017?
- ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
  Yes, but users that you have lost because of crashes don't come back if they've found an usable alternative.
- prox 3y ago
  Same here, kdenlive has been rock solid for me. It was crash prone and even sluggish a few major versions ago.
- raudette 3y ago
  I have used kdenlive for a dozen videos over the last 5 years - my use case, taking 15 minutes of footage down to 2-3 minutes, syncing video with voice over, building product demos, tutorials. It has been solid, on Windows and Linux. When my youngest was 10, she worked with OpenShot and Kdenlive, and settled on Kdenlive on Windows - probably edited 20 videos of hours of Roblox footage down to 2-3 minute videos, syncing characters activity with music, voice over, etc... It was pretty cool - it worked well for her.
ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
Yes, the samé for me, just that I've used the Pro(?) version of Lightworks before BM released Resolve. But the least stable, unusable piece of (compositing/video) shi^H^H^Hsoftware had been Discreet's (now Autodesk) Combustion, which I got for free with a Quadro graphics card. If the first sentence in the press release is > Discreet's Combustion is a robust 3D compositing package you now what to expect ;) https://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2001/Volume-24-Issue-1-January-2001-/Combustion.aspx https://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2001/Volume-24-Issue-1-...
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  Seriously, you're still complaining about a 22-year-old piece of software? Not victim-blaming here, but it's unfortunate that you didn't experience the other end of the spectrum, the highest-end compositor there was: Shake.
stuaxo 3y ago
I understand why (the complexity in the codecs) but it's certainly frustrating. Anyone building one of these now needs to build it from the start with the knowledge these lower level parts may crash, or maybe Gstreamer itself could provide some crash protection.
thefz 3y ago
Resolve is so good I paid for the full version even if all I do is edit GoPro videos.
LanternLight83 3y ago
Can anyone speak to linux support, free or otherwise?
flaburgan 3y ago
Did you try Shotcut? https://www.shotcut.org/ https://www.shotcut.org/ I had the same bad experience than you with Pitivi, Openshot and KDEnlive. Then I discovered shotcut and I was finally able to work. And it's FLOSS.
- chupapimunyenyo 3y ago
  I tested many open source video editors and shotcut was the best compared to the rest. It has a lot of (basic) features that are missing in other editors
  - culi 3y ago
    How does it compare to Kdenlive? I'm not an editor and also looking into floss video editors now. From what I see the most popular are: 1. Kdenlive 2. Avidemux 3. Openshot 4. Shotcut 5. Olive Video Editor 6. PiTiVi 7. Cinelerra
    - chupapimunyenyo 3y ago
      To be honest it looks like I completely missed Kdenlive. It looks very advanced compared to openshot, from what their website shows. May be worth a try for both of us
    - mxchris2121 3y ago
      The feature I need is syncing 16 audio tracks recorded in mp3 to the embedded (scratch) audio track recorded in the video. Resolve will sync with waveforms and even an LTC track (once I got that to play reliable every time I record). What besides Resolve supports this?
- suby 3y ago
  I don't edit videos too often, but Shotcut is what I use. I'll be trying out Pitivi because I'm not quite happy with it, it crashes quite a bit.
ho_schi 3y ago
Regarding Pitivi I have to confirm that. I tried it multiple times on a novice-level (just cutting and accelerating). Unreliable and crashing, both on AMD and Intel. The quality of encoded result is also bad, even with H265 and highest quality. And the preview window is always “popping” out and doesn’t went back into the main UI. Is it me or are others more successful with it? I wonder if and how much Gstreamer is responsible for situation. I’m honestly more apt to ffmpeg. MPV and Celluloid work always reliable. Firefox probably had also a reason to prefer ffmpeg. I will try another editor in future, maybe it is not Gstreamer but Pitiv.
- imtringued 3y ago
  The default settings in pitivi are infuriatingly bad. I had the same problem with the preview window.
0x0203 3y ago
Does Resolve work on non-nvidia GPUs? Last few times I've tried to run Resolve, it claimed to not support my AMD Radeon video cards.
bean-weevil 3y ago
KDEnlive used to be awful about this, but it's a lot better now. I haven't had crashes in ages.

by Venn1 3y ago

__mharrison__ 3y ago

Resolve is amazing. I also tracked pitivi and Cinelerra for years. Really hard to beat the free version. However, the studio version paid for itself quickly.

Racing0461 3y ago

> After a day of playing with the free version of Resolve in 2017 I gave BlackMagic some cash for a license & capture card for audio I see you've came to the same conclusion i did years ago. I look at it not as paying for software, but buying my time back at this point. Linux "open source"/free professional software seems to lack the Je ne sais quoi needed to make it worthwhile. It works, but the software is in the "uncanny valley" so to speak compared to polished Mac/Windows paid professional software.

Dalewyn 3y ago
There is an old saying: "Time is money." When you buy something, you are exchanging your money to obtain someone else's time. In this case, time that someone else spent to make sure a program works. The F in FOSS stands for free, so nobody is under any obligation to spend their time so you don't spend yours.
- hn_acker 3y ago
  > The F in FOSS stands for free, so nobody is under any obligation to spend their time so you don't spend yours. Your conclusion generalizes to no-charge software, not to all FOSS. The "free" in FOSS stands for free software, meaning free as in freedom rather than free as in price. If a program is free software [1] then a user of the program can read the source code, modify it, and distribute (including sell) unmodified and modified versions of the program/code. A user who lacks the program or the code isn't entitled to the freedoms but can get the software from someone else who has it. Developers of free software can charge for it. One way of making money from free software is charging for access to the developer's server. Another way is charging for more expansive user support. (Alternatives to charging for the software itself include requesting donations and selling physical merchandise.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    I'm fully aware the F in FOSS stands for free-as-in-libre. I'm also aware that FOSS developers by and large refuse the exchange of any and all money both as buyers and sellers for services rendered. You say developers of free-as-in-libre software can charge for them, but in practice any developer that tries to sell his free-as-in-libre software will be viciously laughed out of the room by everyone else. The F in FOSS in practice stands both for free-as-in-libre and free-as-in-beer. And you don't get to talk about the quality of free beer.
    - Racing0461 3y ago
      Can you guys lemma know when is the year of the linux desktop? I wanna add it to calcurse.
      - Qem 3y ago
        If Micro$oft keeps enshittifying their OS at current rates, I bet a lot of people will get fed up and jump ship to Linux after one or two more windows releases. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
- Zambyte 3y ago
  > The F in FOSS stands for free, so nobody is under any obligation to spend their time so you don't spend yours. This is why I really dislike the term "FOSS". It's both redundant and erroneously misleads people to thinking things like this. Free Software can absolutely be developed under contract, in which case yes, you are entitled to the developers time under the terms of the contract.
belugacat 3y ago
A lot of open source projects suffer from “pet project” syndrome. Some maintainers have very strong opinions about how/what things should be done regardless of actual user demand or feedback, and there’s no one with the power to rebuff them because the product owners deciding what to implement and the engineers doing implementation work are one and same. Commit right makes might. In a (healthy) company, you have PMs and executives who will tell the overly opinionated engineers to STFU and actually implement things that move the needle and solve problems users are facing. This is also why most open source projects have terrible UI/UX and any designer who attempts to help and improve things finds themselves ignored, with no means to actually carry out any decision, and walk away soon after.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  If maintainers are paid to produce a feature, they should produce it regardless. Otherwise they're breaking a contract.
- davidhyde 3y ago
  > “and there’s no one with the power to rebuff them” Except for those that discover the fork button. /s In all seriousness I think that what you mean is that people rarely have the power to fork a project and drag all the users and development expertise over to their version. Especially if they are simply users of the system and not contributors. Users of commercial software can get companies to do stuff for them with their wallets.
- prox 3y ago
  It stems from a bias, developers are power/expert users and their interface behavior is likely matching, which means they are heavily reliant on keyboard shortcuts (Think Blender 1.x and Blender 2.x who leaned heavily and even exclusively on shortcuts) This gives them the idea that their software is very powerful (and probably is) but this creates a cliff to the beginner and intermediate level users. A lot of examples can be found in “About Face: On interaction design” by Alan Cooper.
- oefrha 3y ago
  In fact larger open source GUI projects also tend to suffer from the opposite: with multiple equally powerful maintainers, a good number of contributors, and no one to rally them behind a coherent design, you get a messy bag of poorly documented features spread all over the place. Design by programmer is usually bad enough; design by a loosely-connected web of programmers working almost independently is even worse. Also, a lot of the developers/users are ideologically motivated and heavily invested, when you point out how bad the software is for the average user, instead of reflecting on it they often get defensive.
poulpy123 3y ago
the "je ne sais quoi" is called money

unixhero 3y ago

Can confirm. Used Kdenkive and Pitiwi, and they crashed on me. I lost a lot of work.

dharmab 3y ago

The free version of Resolve is so good. I looked for a reason to pay them- nope, free version did literally everything a non-professional would need. And they even have free downloadable lessons on how to edit - not just use their editor, but edit in general- on the website.

Aerroon 3y ago
Last time I looked at it the free version didn't use your GPU for playback during editing. Has it changed since then?
- dharmab 3y ago
  It depends on the host OS and codec. On Windows if your OEM didn't include the H.265 license with your default installation you have to buy it for $1 from the Windows store (this is a Windows thing, not a Davinci thing). On Linux I think you have to pay for the Pro version which includes the license. I think if you're working with DNxHD files you don't have to worry about this.
- Nihilartikel 3y ago
  I did some semi-serious work in Linux on the free version earlier this year. Performance was pretty good, and I believe that it did use the GPU. The only big annoyance for me was the lack of a h265 codec. I had some FFMPEG shell scripts for the final exports, but it was a pain and I eventually paid for the full version, which I am very happy with considering it is a lifetime license. Some premium features like speech transcription, where you can select a video segment by simply selecting dialog from a text box, were a big time saver too. With my last editing experience being Adobe Premiere in the early 2000s, Resolve was simply amazing.
  - dharmab 3y ago
    Similarly, I use Shutter Encoder as an early stage of my pipeline to convert to less painful codecs.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

vindarel 3y ago

I spent dozens of hours in kdenlive since last year with 1 well-identified crash. The situation might have drastically improved since 2017?

ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
Yes, but users that you have lost because of crashes don't come back if they've found an usable alternative.
prox 3y ago
Same here, kdenlive has been rock solid for me. It was crash prone and even sluggish a few major versions ago.
raudette 3y ago
I have used kdenlive for a dozen videos over the last 5 years - my use case, taking 15 minutes of footage down to 2-3 minutes, syncing video with voice over, building product demos, tutorials. It has been solid, on Windows and Linux. When my youngest was 10, she worked with OpenShot and Kdenlive, and settled on Kdenlive on Windows - probably edited 20 videos of hours of Roblox footage down to 2-3 minute videos, syncing characters activity with music, voice over, etc... It was pretty cool - it worked well for her.

ReleaseCandidat 3y ago

Yes, the samé for me, just that I've used the Pro(?) version of Lightworks before BM released Resolve. But the least stable, unusable piece of (compositing/video) shi^H^H^Hsoftware had been Discreet's (now Autodesk) Combustion, which I got for free with a Quadro graphics card. If the first sentence in the press release is > Discreet's Combustion is a robust 3D compositing package you now what to expect ;) https://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2001/Volume-24-Issue-1-January-2001-/Combustion.aspx https://www.cgw.com/Publications/CGW/2001/Volume-24-Issue-1-...

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
Seriously, you're still complaining about a 22-year-old piece of software? Not victim-blaming here, but it's unfortunate that you didn't experience the other end of the spectrum, the highest-end compositor there was: Shake.

stuaxo 3y ago

I understand why (the complexity in the codecs) but it's certainly frustrating. Anyone building one of these now needs to build it from the start with the knowledge these lower level parts may crash, or maybe Gstreamer itself could provide some crash protection.

thefz 3y ago

Resolve is so good I paid for the full version even if all I do is edit GoPro videos.

LanternLight83 3y ago

Can anyone speak to linux support, free or otherwise?

flaburgan 3y ago

Did you try Shotcut? https://www.shotcut.org/ https://www.shotcut.org/ I had the same bad experience than you with Pitivi, Openshot and KDEnlive. Then I discovered shotcut and I was finally able to work. And it's FLOSS.

chupapimunyenyo 3y ago
I tested many open source video editors and shotcut was the best compared to the rest. It has a lot of (basic) features that are missing in other editors
- culi 3y ago
  How does it compare to Kdenlive? I'm not an editor and also looking into floss video editors now. From what I see the most popular are: 1. Kdenlive 2. Avidemux 3. Openshot 4. Shotcut 5. Olive Video Editor 6. PiTiVi 7. Cinelerra
  - chupapimunyenyo 3y ago
    To be honest it looks like I completely missed Kdenlive. It looks very advanced compared to openshot, from what their website shows. May be worth a try for both of us
  - mxchris2121 3y ago
    The feature I need is syncing 16 audio tracks recorded in mp3 to the embedded (scratch) audio track recorded in the video. Resolve will sync with waveforms and even an LTC track (once I got that to play reliable every time I record). What besides Resolve supports this?
suby 3y ago
I don't edit videos too often, but Shotcut is what I use. I'll be trying out Pitivi because I'm not quite happy with it, it crashes quite a bit.

ho_schi 3y ago

Regarding Pitivi I have to confirm that. I tried it multiple times on a novice-level (just cutting and accelerating). Unreliable and crashing, both on AMD and Intel. The quality of encoded result is also bad, even with H265 and highest quality. And the preview window is always “popping” out and doesn’t went back into the main UI. Is it me or are others more successful with it? I wonder if and how much Gstreamer is responsible for situation. I’m honestly more apt to ffmpeg. MPV and Celluloid work always reliable. Firefox probably had also a reason to prefer ffmpeg. I will try another editor in future, maybe it is not Gstreamer but Pitiv.

imtringued 3y ago
The default settings in pitivi are infuriatingly bad. I had the same problem with the preview window.

0x0203 3y ago

Does Resolve work on non-nvidia GPUs? Last few times I've tried to run Resolve, it claimed to not support my AMD Radeon video cards.

bean-weevil 3y ago

KDEnlive used to be awful about this, but it's a lot better now. I haven't had crashes in ages.