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I saw this post hours after I finished a task where this would have come in handy. I had a bunch of HQ video clips from a professional Sony video camera that I
by darkflame91 3y ago
I saw this post hours after I finished a task where this would have come in handy. I had a bunch of HQ video clips from a professional Sony video camera that I needed to string together, with short simple fade transitions. The last time I did this(few years ago), I was using a Mac, and iMovie did the job well. This time, I was on a Windows NUC, and figured Windows MovieMaker should do the trick. Nope.
- Opening Movie Maker redirects to the Photos app, with a note that Microsoft Clipchamp has this functionality now and Movie Maker is deprecated.
- Install Clipchamp and see that its hilariously bad at batch-adding clips to the timeline. Adding 300 clips, one at a time, is a dealbreaker.
- Look up reviews for free 3rd party apps to do this on Windows. Find everyone recommending DaVinci Resolve. Fine. Install Resolve. Looks great. Import my clips, and get only audio. A quick Google search tells me that Resolve free version doesn't support importing 10-bit video. Welp.
- Let's try FOSS then. Shotcut is supposedly better than Openshot. Install Shotcut. Import all clips, add to timeline and export. Takes a few hours to export, displays a Success message and gives me the first few seconds of video, followed by a couple of hours of just audio.
- F** it, let's try Openshot. Hesitant because I've heard a lot of crashing happens, but what do I have to lose. Install. Import clips. Add to timeline. Let's me add transitions. Export takes a few hours. Gives me flawless output file.
Moral of the story: For occasional amateur video editing, Openshot is great.
- sergiomattei 3y agoClipchamp is terrible software. I can’t believe it made to production.
- extraduder_ire 3y agoI think partway through that frustration I'd learn what arguments I need to put into ffmpeg to do that. I may be biased because I've used it for limited editing already though.
- haunter 3y agoFor simple tasks like this I use Avidemux
- creesch 3y agoGreat that you got it to work. Just to make the list with potential tools a bit more complete: - Kdenlive is also a fairly capable video editor. https://kdenlive.org/en/ https://kdenlive.org/en/ - From what I have heard the Blender video editor for many people is a go to tool as well. In this case it likely would have been overkill, but figured it is worth mentioning.
- yesimahuman 3y agoI used kdenlive recently and it worked very well! Clipchamp charges for 4K export which seriously annoys me given we all know that’s just arbitrary, but kdenlive handled it just fine and was actually faster to use anyways
- darkflame91 3y agoI completely missed looking up Kdenlive because I (rather stupidly, in hindsight) assumed KDE implied for Linux only. I'll keep it in mind for the next time. And yes, Blender would have been overkill, but I might've gone that route if Openshot didn't work out.
- sho_hn 3y agoKDE actually has a lot of software on Windows (and is about to even put them on the MS/Windows store, if it hasn't already), in particular when it comes to content creation and document stuff - Krita, Okular, Kate, to name a few. And Kdenlive, of course.
- diggan 3y ago> - From what I have heard the Blender video editor for many people is a go to tool as well. In this case it likely would have been overkill, but figured it is worth mentioning. Blender is great as well if you happen to be a programmer, as everything is also callable as Python functions. The "built-in docs" in form of hovering over buttons and seeing what the equivalent Python code would be, makes it super easy to script together one-off scripts for doing things like "Add 300 video clips with a 100ms fade-in-out between all of them".
- jimmiles 3y agoVideo editor here. Try Shutter Encoder. https://www.shutterencoder.com/en/ https://www.shutterencoder.com/en/
- btreecat 3y agoKdenlive has been my best FOSS NLE experience
- CaptainFever 3y agoBlender is a great video editor as well.
- MilStdJunkie 3y agoI was looking for this comment. Hard agree. Every time I need some casual compositing tasks, or some transitions, Blender's never done me dirty. Every time I pull my head out of the ground and go hunting for another FOSS compositor, I always end up shrugging, "whelp, nothing really all that better than Blender, and I know Blender, soooooo . . " EDIT also, since last I used it, the Blender Compositor has gotten a lot better. Dang.
- Intralexical 3y agoEhh. The VSE's always been the weakest part of Blender IMO. Not even multithreaded, and IIRC there's some ways it can't integrate with the compositor (requiring intermediate renders), plus time bugs during preview with some types of OGG and MP4 videos. …Still good, but a noticeably frustrating experience compared to a lot of other Blender features. > EDIT also, since last I used it, the Blender Compositor has gotten a lot better. Dang. The compositor's always been great. What's changed? It looks pretty much the same as it always did even around the 2.4X days?
- MilStdJunkie 3y agoSpeaking respectfully, does anything look the same as the 2.4 days? That was before the giant UI flush, when they decided, "screw it, make it look like Maya" (I was pretty hostile at first, especially since half my Python scripts stopped working, but I eventually got used to it. I keep an old EXE for the old scripts I really need, but with geo nodes I'm hitting those less and less).
- Intralexical 3y agoThe aesthetic changes are mostly just theming, really. For a long time they even kept shipping a 2.4X-style theme IIRC— It looked old enough to prevent my old high school teacher from getting scared, in maybe the late 2.6X days. Looks like there's still a default "XSI" theme that gets pretty close to that. And up until pretty late you could still make the properties panel horizontal instead of vertical with a RMB menu option (which I can't seem to find in the latest versions), though the layout didn't really work too well in that mode.
- pjc50 3y agoAlso to consider: CapCut. Although I don't know if it handles 10 bit.
- qingcharles 3y agoIt seems to handle whatever junk I throw at it in whatever format it comes in. I guess because it is used to remix all kinds of junk video files that people find around the Net.
- xela79 3y agoI would say for amateur video editing, that DaVinci Resolve free edition is ideal candidate, you can go quite in-depth, or just drag & drop and add some transitions; previously I used imovie on mac too (even build a hackintosh first and bought imovie license $12) but it does not add that small extra that was needed. once I started working with DaVinci.. game changer, from start to finish, with some advanced motion tracking, title overlays, in less than a few hours. Upside is also that there are plenty of tutorials available for DaVinci, from beginner to advanced https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/edit https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/edi...
- darkflame91 3y agoI did mention in my original comment that the free version of Resolve refused to import my 10-bit video clips. I was fine with exporting 8-bit.
- eth0up 3y agoNot great for vertical cellphone video (1080x1920). The video will import horizontally and any efforts to set it vertically will either fail, or the exported (vertical 1080x1920) version is horrid. For simple horizontal edits, it can be quite convenient. But they really need to fix a bug or two, especially considering the amount of footage by phones out there.
- smolder 3y agoAgreed. The first time I used Openshot it was a buggy mess that ignored my output settings when rendering... Within a year or two of that, I gave it another shot, and the glaring issues were fixed. It just did what I needed with no problems.
- M911T 3y agoI use pitivi for very basic stuff.