7 ms·

Kdenlive 24.02 open source video editor released

288 points by jrepinc 3y ago

shmerl 3y ago
Nice editor. I'm not sure how it compares to professional ones, but it was more than enough to make some video compositions when I needed it and it was easy to use and figure out.
unstruktured 3y ago
Big fan of kdenlive. I switched to it after one too many openshot bugs. Admittedly I always want kde apps to be good but in this case it actually is. Openshot was easier to learn though, personally.
xnx 3y ago
Cool to see continued work on this. At various points I've tried ShotCut, OpenShot, and Blender's video editor, but haven't found a clear favorite.
atum47 3y ago
I've been using kdenlive ever since i switch to Linux back in 2016. All my YouTube videos are a combination of simple screen recorder and kdenlive, although i don't put much effort in them
- avinassh 3y ago
  how does it compare with ScreenFlow, which I have seen most people recommend for YouTube / Screencasts. I am a newbie, so I am learning to make videos and edit them.
  - atum47 3y ago
    Never used screen flow so i don't have any comparing parameters
- nickstinemates 3y ago
  Basically same, on Windows too. OBS for recording, kdenlive for editing.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  I always use OBS for screen recording but otherwise the same story :) I always use KDE as my primary desktop and love it. It's amazing. Kdenlive is only one of the many amazing apps they produce. And I'm proud to donate to them monthly.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Same. Most of my videos aren't public, but I use this stack for everything. Linux base, OBS for recording, and Kdenlive for editing. Do you do green screen? I've had a horrible time finding a web camera that doesn't mess up the green screen by auto color correcting. It ends up putting a weird tint on the video that looks awful. Any web cam recommendations that work good with linux/obs?
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      No, I don't record myself directly. I usually use it together with a HDMI capture module to record meetings. My work only allows recording Teams meetings to Microsoft Stream which has really crap quality and we can't download from it so I can't edit them, and we can't install any software like OBS directly on our laptops. Sometimes I need to archive trainings for later use. So I use the HDMI out to record it from another computer. Then I can edit the video to make it more to the point, add some on-screen popups etc. Then I share those on MS Stream (because unfortunately that is the platform we have to use despite it being crap). It's a bit of a workaround but it does the job. The cheap Aliexpress HDMI dongle does the job admirably, it gets really really hot but it survives the day :) But green screen yeah no never tried that, sorry.
gorjusborg 3y ago
I accidentally stumbled onto kdenlive when I needed to crop a video clip years back. It's really good; the developers should be proud.
- PeeMcGee 3y ago
  Likewise, was looking for something with a workflow similar to Sony Vegas and came across Kdenlive. I mostly just needed to perform some simple cuts and fades with multiple audio and video tracks, and was very impressed by its capabilities and how intuitive it felt to use.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    Same. I was a Vegas guy through the late 90s/early 00s, and then got out of the area for a few years. When returning I really just wanted Vegas like from before and tried all kinds of stuff. It was very surprising to me how hard it was to find! Kdenlive is really, really great and is super intuitive to me.
    - PeeMcGee 3y ago
      When I was looking into it I was discussing with someone how Sony's refusal to meet the market led to Vegas being the top 5 most pirated software. I learned that Sony sold it to Magix during a big selloff, who apparently thrived by simply switching to a realistic pricing model and resuming maintenance.
focusedone 3y ago
I use Kdenlive once a week for a quick top/tail edit. Always amazed at how well it runs on low-end hardware. Excited to see how the new version feels under Wayland.
ggambetta 3y ago
[flagged]
- unpopularopp 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - bornfreddy 3y ago
    It's not just that. With kdenlive (awesome software, btw, kudos to developers!) I can be pretty sure it will still be around next time I need it. With proprietary software, who knows? Maybe Adobe will buy them and start charging exorbitant monthly fees. Or they will go out of business, or...
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      Yeah I've been bitten by that before. Invest a ton of time in learning a tool and then they drop the free tier or neuter it. Or drop the whole thing altogether like 123D Design :(
- jdboyd 3y ago
  The free version has this issue "The free version of DaVinci Resolve on Linux does not support h.264 and h.265." Having to transcode to dnxhr is a bummer. I should probably just buy a dongle though.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
tombert 3y ago
Without getting into the philosophy of open source vs proprietary and the like, but just as someone who very occasionally needs to edit video on Linux, how does Kdenlive compare to something like Lightworks or the Blender video editor? On Linux for the last 6 or 7 years, I've used Lightworks just because the free version has been good enough for what I've needed for nearly everything, and for the few times I need higher resolution I have just paid like $20 for one month of "premium". I didn't have any objective criteria for choosing Lightworks, other than "it's been used for 'real' movies!" That said, I'd prefer to keep things open source, so I'd rather move to a FOSS thing like Kdenlive or Blender, if they're comparable (or better!) than Lightworks. Anyone have experience with all three?
- rozap 3y ago
  I use Kdenlive about once or twice a year to edit/compile racecar footage. The UI has been friendly enough to relearn each time because I use it so infrequently. I've never had any complaints about it, though I'm not doing anything crazy. But it's extremely intuitive and even as a new user it doesn't seem to get in my way, which is just about the highest praise I can give to a piece of interactive software. Unfortunately I can't compare against Lightworks or Blender, because I tried Kdenlive and it worked great, and there was no reason to search for alternatives.
  - DANmode 3y ago
    OT, but: what type of racecars? =D
    - rozap 3y ago
      Lemons! We race a fiat x1/9
- tetris11 3y ago
  Blender video editor is extremely feature rich in terms of the keyframing effects you can do with it, the only problem being: it's slow, and it doesn't always sync audio with video even when you ask it to. With Kdenlive, it's frustrating to add a simple block of text (you can have to create an overlay, and then configure that overlay, and place it roughly where you want), but the final rendering takes only minutes and it's stable enough to work with for larger projects. Can't comment on Lightworks.
thebiglebrewski 3y ago
Congrats - Kdenlive is an amazing program and awesome example of open source software gone right!
hn_acker 3y ago
I've used Shotcut in the past but not Kdenlive. Shotcut doesn't support subtitle files at all, so I'm quite pleased to learn that Kdenlive supports input and output of multiple subtitles files now.
afarviral 3y ago
Kdenlive is great! I just used this recently to create some transitions with transparency. I normally use DaVinci Resolve but I couldn't figure out how to export a video with a straight alpha channel, only premultiplied (it only lets you do this for individual clips, not compound clips or a whole timeline). I think it's fair to say Kdenlive exposes much more power to the user, but I felt that I had a bit of learning to do to understand a few things which have opinionated defaults in programs like Davincei Resolve. For instance, I had to use a composition between two tracks and choose the type of compositing to use between them in order to get transparency exported, whereas in other programs this would default to add or multiply which behaves in a predictable way with less effort (but with less control). In saying that it feels like Kdenlive is an incredible amalgamation of very powerful plugins and parts! I wish it had a bezier curve editor for things like fades or tweaking keyframe animations. After a while I switched to blender (since I used it to create the source footage) but it was a little glitchy, the video somehow getting out of sync with animated opacity and it confused me how you "Render Animation" in blender which is the same option as for rendering your (3D) Scene in blender, and where to find the option to turn off the video editor composition which overrides this as soon as you start adding clips to the video editor. It doesn't really compare as it's just blender, with all it's intricacies, and video editing bolted on to it, whereas Kdenlive is just about video editing. Anyway, great work!
- pteraspidomorph 3y ago
  I subscribe this comment, non-linear interpolation using curves would be extremely useful. Another obvious thing I often miss is the ability to change the length (duration) of static image clips in the project bin (currently? - haven't tried the latest version yet - the only way is to set a length in the settings before importing). It seems like it doesn't matter at first, since it's a static image, but start adding effects and keyframes and any resizing done in the timeline can mess everything up.
  - afarviral 3y ago
    That's another great suggestion, and probably a pretty easy contribution to tackle for someone. I'll make a mental note to look in to it next time I'm on holiday.
2Gkashmiri 3y ago
A few years ago a big complaint against kdenlive was that it would crash all of a sudden, randomly and general instability and generally buggy. Is that the case with say 24.02 or has that thing been improved?
- seabrookmx 3y ago
  I moved to Resolve because of this. It's maddening when you're new to editing and lose an hour's worth of work due to a crash like this. The UI and features were plenty for my use case otherwise.
- pteraspidomorph 3y ago
  The one crash I regularly experienced about a year ago had to do with saving and reusing effect stacks. I'm not sure if that still happens as I stopped using that feature entirely. Far less regularly, I've seen crashes when replacing video files used in the project. I also recommend setting the framerate of a project first thing and then never touching it again.
d416 3y ago
15 years ago I bought a cheap laptop, removed windows to install Ubuntu 6, took it backpacking through Asia for the next 6 months and started editing my travel video on Kdenlive [1] at the tail end of it. It was my first real leap into Linux and Kdenlive was so far ahead of anything else I never looked back. Props to the community for such a solid product and for making me fall in love with open source. [1] https://youtu.be/6ZCL4Jr9qs8?si=QTp9fEpgLwP5REYU https://youtu.be/6ZCL4Jr9qs8?si=QTp9fEpgLwP5REYU
amatecha 3y ago
Kdenlive is awesome. If any contributors read this-- thank you!!
snvzz 3y ago
Dear web developer: Please do not override browser scroll behavior.
mikae1 3y ago
> The initial implementation of the long awaited easing interpolation modes for keyframes has landed. Yes! I'm a professional editor and I've waited years for this. Seems it's not quite there, but they're getting close. At work I have to use Premiere I have to use Premiere and Resolve, but at home I'm on this long quest to open source everything. The lack of easing has held me off from Kdenlive even for home use. Nothing looks more amateurish than those stiff linear animations and transitions.
garyiskidding 3y ago
Been using Kdenlive for a while now and it is really good for all of the basic video editing i need. So far I've been updating it manually. Would anyone know if there is an auto-update feature available within Kdenlive?

288 points by jrepinc 3y ago

Nice editor. I'm not sure how it compares to professional ones, but it was more than enough to make some video compositions when I needed it and it was easy to use and figure out.

unstruktured 3y ago

Big fan of kdenlive. I switched to it after one too many openshot bugs. Admittedly I always want kde apps to be good but in this case it actually is. Openshot was easier to learn though, personally.

xnx 3y ago

Cool to see continued work on this. At various points I've tried ShotCut, OpenShot, and Blender's video editor, but haven't found a clear favorite.

atum47 3y ago

I've been using kdenlive ever since i switch to Linux back in 2016. All my YouTube videos are a combination of simple screen recorder and kdenlive, although i don't put much effort in them

avinassh 3y ago
how does it compare with ScreenFlow, which I have seen most people recommend for YouTube / Screencasts. I am a newbie, so I am learning to make videos and edit them.
- atum47 3y ago
  Never used screen flow so i don't have any comparing parameters
nickstinemates 3y ago
Basically same, on Windows too. OBS for recording, kdenlive for editing.
wkat4242 3y ago
I always use OBS for screen recording but otherwise the same story :) I always use KDE as my primary desktop and love it. It's amazing. Kdenlive is only one of the many amazing apps they produce. And I'm proud to donate to them monthly.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Same. Most of my videos aren't public, but I use this stack for everything. Linux base, OBS for recording, and Kdenlive for editing. Do you do green screen? I've had a horrible time finding a web camera that doesn't mess up the green screen by auto color correcting. It ends up putting a weird tint on the video that looks awful. Any web cam recommendations that work good with linux/obs?
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    No, I don't record myself directly. I usually use it together with a HDMI capture module to record meetings. My work only allows recording Teams meetings to Microsoft Stream which has really crap quality and we can't download from it so I can't edit them, and we can't install any software like OBS directly on our laptops. Sometimes I need to archive trainings for later use. So I use the HDMI out to record it from another computer. Then I can edit the video to make it more to the point, add some on-screen popups etc. Then I share those on MS Stream (because unfortunately that is the platform we have to use despite it being crap). It's a bit of a workaround but it does the job. The cheap Aliexpress HDMI dongle does the job admirably, it gets really really hot but it survives the day :) But green screen yeah no never tried that, sorry.

gorjusborg 3y ago

I accidentally stumbled onto kdenlive when I needed to crop a video clip years back. It's really good; the developers should be proud.

PeeMcGee 3y ago
Likewise, was looking for something with a workflow similar to Sony Vegas and came across Kdenlive. I mostly just needed to perform some simple cuts and fades with multiple audio and video tracks, and was very impressed by its capabilities and how intuitive it felt to use.
- freedomben 3y ago
  Same. I was a Vegas guy through the late 90s/early 00s, and then got out of the area for a few years. When returning I really just wanted Vegas like from before and tried all kinds of stuff. It was very surprising to me how hard it was to find! Kdenlive is really, really great and is super intuitive to me.
  - PeeMcGee 3y ago
    When I was looking into it I was discussing with someone how Sony's refusal to meet the market led to Vegas being the top 5 most pirated software. I learned that Sony sold it to Magix during a big selloff, who apparently thrived by simply switching to a realistic pricing model and resuming maintenance.

focusedone 3y ago

I use Kdenlive once a week for a quick top/tail edit. Always amazed at how well it runs on low-end hardware. Excited to see how the new version feels under Wayland.

ggambetta 3y ago

[flagged]

unpopularopp 3y ago
[flagged]
- bornfreddy 3y ago
  It's not just that. With kdenlive (awesome software, btw, kudos to developers!) I can be pretty sure it will still be around next time I need it. With proprietary software, who knows? Maybe Adobe will buy them and start charging exorbitant monthly fees. Or they will go out of business, or...
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Yeah I've been bitten by that before. Invest a ton of time in learning a tool and then they drop the free tier or neuter it. Or drop the whole thing altogether like 123D Design :(
jdboyd 3y ago
The free version has this issue "The free version of DaVinci Resolve on Linux does not support h.264 and h.265." Having to transcode to dnxhr is a bummer. I should probably just buy a dongle though.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

tombert 3y ago

Without getting into the philosophy of open source vs proprietary and the like, but just as someone who very occasionally needs to edit video on Linux, how does Kdenlive compare to something like Lightworks or the Blender video editor? On Linux for the last 6 or 7 years, I've used Lightworks just because the free version has been good enough for what I've needed for nearly everything, and for the few times I need higher resolution I have just paid like $20 for one month of "premium". I didn't have any objective criteria for choosing Lightworks, other than "it's been used for 'real' movies!" That said, I'd prefer to keep things open source, so I'd rather move to a FOSS thing like Kdenlive or Blender, if they're comparable (or better!) than Lightworks. Anyone have experience with all three?

rozap 3y ago
I use Kdenlive about once or twice a year to edit/compile racecar footage. The UI has been friendly enough to relearn each time because I use it so infrequently. I've never had any complaints about it, though I'm not doing anything crazy. But it's extremely intuitive and even as a new user it doesn't seem to get in my way, which is just about the highest praise I can give to a piece of interactive software. Unfortunately I can't compare against Lightworks or Blender, because I tried Kdenlive and it worked great, and there was no reason to search for alternatives.
- DANmode 3y ago
  OT, but: what type of racecars? =D
  - rozap 3y ago
    Lemons! We race a fiat x1/9
tetris11 3y ago
Blender video editor is extremely feature rich in terms of the keyframing effects you can do with it, the only problem being: it's slow, and it doesn't always sync audio with video even when you ask it to. With Kdenlive, it's frustrating to add a simple block of text (you can have to create an overlay, and then configure that overlay, and place it roughly where you want), but the final rendering takes only minutes and it's stable enough to work with for larger projects. Can't comment on Lightworks.

thebiglebrewski 3y ago

Congrats - Kdenlive is an amazing program and awesome example of open source software gone right!

hn_acker 3y ago

I've used Shotcut in the past but not Kdenlive. Shotcut doesn't support subtitle files at all, so I'm quite pleased to learn that Kdenlive supports input and output of multiple subtitles files now.

afarviral 3y ago

Kdenlive is great! I just used this recently to create some transitions with transparency. I normally use DaVinci Resolve but I couldn't figure out how to export a video with a straight alpha channel, only premultiplied (it only lets you do this for individual clips, not compound clips or a whole timeline). I think it's fair to say Kdenlive exposes much more power to the user, but I felt that I had a bit of learning to do to understand a few things which have opinionated defaults in programs like Davincei Resolve. For instance, I had to use a composition between two tracks and choose the type of compositing to use between them in order to get transparency exported, whereas in other programs this would default to add or multiply which behaves in a predictable way with less effort (but with less control). In saying that it feels like Kdenlive is an incredible amalgamation of very powerful plugins and parts! I wish it had a bezier curve editor for things like fades or tweaking keyframe animations. After a while I switched to blender (since I used it to create the source footage) but it was a little glitchy, the video somehow getting out of sync with animated opacity and it confused me how you "Render Animation" in blender which is the same option as for rendering your (3D) Scene in blender, and where to find the option to turn off the video editor composition which overrides this as soon as you start adding clips to the video editor. It doesn't really compare as it's just blender, with all it's intricacies, and video editing bolted on to it, whereas Kdenlive is just about video editing. Anyway, great work!

pteraspidomorph 3y ago
I subscribe this comment, non-linear interpolation using curves would be extremely useful. Another obvious thing I often miss is the ability to change the length (duration) of static image clips in the project bin (currently? - haven't tried the latest version yet - the only way is to set a length in the settings before importing). It seems like it doesn't matter at first, since it's a static image, but start adding effects and keyframes and any resizing done in the timeline can mess everything up.
- afarviral 3y ago
  That's another great suggestion, and probably a pretty easy contribution to tackle for someone. I'll make a mental note to look in to it next time I'm on holiday.

2Gkashmiri 3y ago

A few years ago a big complaint against kdenlive was that it would crash all of a sudden, randomly and general instability and generally buggy. Is that the case with say 24.02 or has that thing been improved?

seabrookmx 3y ago
I moved to Resolve because of this. It's maddening when you're new to editing and lose an hour's worth of work due to a crash like this. The UI and features were plenty for my use case otherwise.
pteraspidomorph 3y ago
The one crash I regularly experienced about a year ago had to do with saving and reusing effect stacks. I'm not sure if that still happens as I stopped using that feature entirely. Far less regularly, I've seen crashes when replacing video files used in the project. I also recommend setting the framerate of a project first thing and then never touching it again.

d416 3y ago

15 years ago I bought a cheap laptop, removed windows to install Ubuntu 6, took it backpacking through Asia for the next 6 months and started editing my travel video on Kdenlive [1] at the tail end of it. It was my first real leap into Linux and Kdenlive was so far ahead of anything else I never looked back. Props to the community for such a solid product and for making me fall in love with open source. [1] https://youtu.be/6ZCL4Jr9qs8?si=QTp9fEpgLwP5REYU https://youtu.be/6ZCL4Jr9qs8?si=QTp9fEpgLwP5REYU

amatecha 3y ago

Kdenlive is awesome. If any contributors read this-- thank you!!

snvzz 3y ago

Dear web developer: Please do not override browser scroll behavior.

mikae1 3y ago

> The initial implementation of the long awaited easing interpolation modes for keyframes has landed. Yes! I'm a professional editor and I've waited years for this. Seems it's not quite there, but they're getting close. At work I have to use Premiere I have to use Premiere and Resolve, but at home I'm on this long quest to open source everything. The lack of easing has held me off from Kdenlive even for home use. Nothing looks more amateurish than those stiff linear animations and transitions.

garyiskidding 3y ago

Been using Kdenlive for a while now and it is really good for all of the basic video editing i need. So far I've been updating it manually. Would anyone know if there is an auto-update feature available within Kdenlive?