I installed if for my daughter so she could complete her high school film project only after paying for a copy of Sony Vegas (school recommendation) that failed repeatedly to import her clips (mp4). OpenShot imported her clips flawlessly. Editing was also similar enough that she was able to easily figure it out. Multi-line title slides were a bit of challenge for her but she eventually figured it out. She, also wished she could name her cut/clips on the timeline for easy reference but she couldn't find any obvious way to do that. Overall it was a pleasant experience for her.
Feedback is an important part of any successful product. For open source products it's even more challenging because of lack of funds and motivation. Hence I urge the community here to provide constructive criticism and feedback. Remember that the product is free and maintained by a a very small team who may not work on it full time.
I evaluated it for my needs about 6 months ago, but ended up not using it because it didn't address my biggest need: streamlined workflow. The workflow (at the time) was too much mouse oriented and didn't accommodate facilities for doing the same thing over and over again. For example, I often need to do the same video effect again and again and again with just small variations in parameters. OpenShot is just too slow for that. I ended up using Blender because while the UI is weird it is incredibly economical. I never sent this feedback into OpenShot, though, mainly because I figure I'm not their target audience. I figure they are looking to help people who are making relatively small numbers of changes to video and who require ease of discoverability over economical usage. I might be wrong.
I evaluated it against a few other free (beer/speech) ones recently. I've used OpenShot a bit in the past for very clunky short videos and found it decent enough for basic clip editing but I was looking at editing longer clips that would have lots of cuts (i.e. camera was just left recording and there were multiple "takes" in one very long clip).
I dont think OpenShot supported ripple-delete? At least I couldn't work out how to do it anyway. In my limited experience of video editing, ripple delete is up there as one of the core features I'd say (way ahead of any fancy transitions or effects).
I was not familiar with the term "ripple delete", so I looked it up. For anyone else wondering:
> Instead of cutting clips and audio before then moving them around manually while being careful to snap each sequence in the right place, the ripple delete tools will take care of most of the trouble for you.
This [1] blog post describes the state in which the different Libre video editors were in December 2018. It's a great blog to keep track of Libre creative tools out there.
Personally I have edited over 150 tutorials with Kdenlive. By setting many shortcuts the process became fast and intuitive. Except for some releases it worked well. It's great to hear that alternative editors are all improving :)
I switched to OpenShot about 2 months ago after working exclusively in Premier Pro for 3 years. I made the change because the price I paid for Premier simply wasn't justified for my video needs. I had looked at many free editors in the past and never found one that could handle 1) variable framerate, and 2) .MOV with transparency. OpenShot does so with very little trouble. It took me a little while to adjust to the UI and shortcuts, but I'm doing daily videos with minimal editing, and my editing time is comparable to what I experienced with Premier Pro. The only thing I "miss" from Premier is the built-in audio de-noiser... but I was using it as a crutch for poorly captured in-camera auido and have since fixed my audio setup.
My backup option is splitting the audio and running it through Audacity. In fact, this option is better than what Premier Provides for sound control/filtering. The only reason I didn't do this instead of buying new audio gear is my upload schedule. Anything that gets in my way while editing is a step I can't afford to take.
I used Openshot to edit an (originally) 2 hour-long video on my Linux machine [1]. It was not a very complicated edit, but included adding a logo throught the whole video, and trimming some parts of the video. I'm not a great video editor, but I think it could be better. The interface is quite intuitive, but there's a good deal of latency moving around in it, loading photos and other files. In general, it's not as snappy as I expected it to be. I must say though that it was the only reasonable open source editor that I could find, so, I guess that says a bit about the condition of FOSS video editors...
First off, let me assure you that I have a lot of respect for the developers of free software projects like this one, and I hope that it continues to evolve in the future. Still, from a user's perspective, none of the existing open source NLEs have fulfilled my needs, even though my needs are not that exotic.
I'm running a tiny YouTube channel for a few years now and I'm regularly releasing videos on it. I need to edit and render projects in the order of 2 hours or more on a regular basis. This includes simple color grading, cutting, multiple layers of videos and audio, simple effects and transformations (and it must run on Linux).
I have basically tried them all: The MLT-based editors Shotcut, Kdenlive, OpenShot, Flowblade, as well as Blender and Cinelerra. I used Shotcut (which is made by the developer of the MLT framework) for a long time and also contributed at least a little bit, mostly with bug reports and hints where the problem may be in the code. I wanted to like Shotcut, but at the end of the day, all of the solutions were too slow, had too few possibilities to realize what I had in mind, or were too unstable.
After Shotcut even disabled the experimental and unstable feature of GPU-accelerated effects, which really helped to make it usable performance-wise, I finally gave up and tried one of the two commercial, cross-platform NLEs that I'm aware of (DaVinci Resolve). And even though - like I said - I wanted to like the open source alternatives, I have to admit that Resolve is on a whole different level regarding performance and possibilities. (Note that other editors like Kdenlive also support GPU acceleration, but at the end of the day this is a feature of the underlying MLT framework, and it showed that it was about as unstable in Kdenlive as in Shotcut.)
Maybe a NLE is just the kind of application that requires a big(ger) amount of dedicated (and possibly paid) work to really lift it to a level that actually makes it usable in the real world. Especially since the MLT framework is used by so many different editors, which appear to be developed independently, it would be worthwhile to join forces to develop one strong application and the framework itself.
P.S.: If you want to try the free version of Resolve, be aware that features like H.264 support and even audio output using non-Blackmagic-hardware is not available in the free version (not sure about the new beta of version 16), but they work beautifully in the paid version.
I used Shotcut to get me through my film certificate (video essay class, short film class, etc.) and it was difficult to work with. Random freezes and crashes left me very frustrated.
I switched to Flowblade [1] and it was so much better for my needs. I could do basic color correction without crashes and editing audio is much more powerful. All in all a better program (for my simple needs).
I also really wanted to use a open source editor, but ended up in Resolve. In Windows even, which has shocked my friends. I spent probably around 4 hours trying to get Resolve working on Linux, several times, and just wanted to edit goddam videos.
Davinci Resolve is some next level stuff. Yes, I can do editing in some of the others (tried shotcut and kdenlive to edit a full video with). Resolve is just so much more advanced and capable, while also being easy to use for simple cases.
I tried Lightworks first, but really didn't like the "rent" model at $25/mo. Resolve free level has worked fine so far, and their paid version is quite reasonable at $300. Lightworks was good, but Resolve is great.
I've used Shotcut for a 5-min film montage, about 10 h of work (with a part in learning to use the tool and some in cleaning/hiding noise I've made while filming (don't drink and film!)). During that time I've had a handful of crashes, which were horribly annoying as they were totally random and without any kind of recovery possibilities. For the rest it worked great and I didn't had any difficulty, except for choosing the rendering options: there are too many of them and I'm not a video specialist, here a handful of default (native, web, mobile…) would have been good, like other video editor have (I think Windows Movie Maker has them, for example).
Same here. Tried all the free stuff and struggled along for years. Then bought Lightworks and it's like night and day how much more effectively I can edit videos.
I'm an ardent Linux user, and I like openshot, but I struggle to love it.
The basic problem is stability and certain aspects of the UI. You can just about do everything you need to, but if they make it a bit more user friendly, they'd win over many more users.
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I dont think OpenShot supported ripple-delete? At least I couldn't work out how to do it anyway. In my limited experience of video editing, ripple delete is up there as one of the core features I'd say (way ahead of any fancy transitions or effects).
> Instead of cutting clips and audio before then moving them around manually while being careful to snap each sequence in the right place, the ripple delete tools will take care of most of the trouble for you.
https://fstoppers.com/education/edit-your-videos-faster-ever...
Personally I have edited over 150 tutorials with Kdenlive. By setting many shortcuts the process became fast and intuitive. Except for some releases it worked well. It's great to hear that alternative editors are all improving :)
[1] http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/the-quest-for-susta...
I highly recommend using the flatpaks if available. There's enough moving dependencies that it is complicated without the flatpak.
Or you can use this one via lv2:
https://github.com/lucianodato/speech-denoiser
https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#lv2
Everything can go right on a shoot and for whatever reason the audio comes out bad. It’s nice to have a backup option for when you really need it.
[1] https://youtu.be/mvIHoeZKn2U
I'm running a tiny YouTube channel for a few years now and I'm regularly releasing videos on it. I need to edit and render projects in the order of 2 hours or more on a regular basis. This includes simple color grading, cutting, multiple layers of videos and audio, simple effects and transformations (and it must run on Linux).
I have basically tried them all: The MLT-based editors Shotcut, Kdenlive, OpenShot, Flowblade, as well as Blender and Cinelerra. I used Shotcut (which is made by the developer of the MLT framework) for a long time and also contributed at least a little bit, mostly with bug reports and hints where the problem may be in the code. I wanted to like Shotcut, but at the end of the day, all of the solutions were too slow, had too few possibilities to realize what I had in mind, or were too unstable.
After Shotcut even disabled the experimental and unstable feature of GPU-accelerated effects, which really helped to make it usable performance-wise, I finally gave up and tried one of the two commercial, cross-platform NLEs that I'm aware of (DaVinci Resolve). And even though - like I said - I wanted to like the open source alternatives, I have to admit that Resolve is on a whole different level regarding performance and possibilities. (Note that other editors like Kdenlive also support GPU acceleration, but at the end of the day this is a feature of the underlying MLT framework, and it showed that it was about as unstable in Kdenlive as in Shotcut.)
Maybe a NLE is just the kind of application that requires a big(ger) amount of dedicated (and possibly paid) work to really lift it to a level that actually makes it usable in the real world. Especially since the MLT framework is used by so many different editors, which appear to be developed independently, it would be worthwhile to join forces to develop one strong application and the framework itself.
P.S.: If you want to try the free version of Resolve, be aware that features like H.264 support and even audio output using non-Blackmagic-hardware is not available in the free version (not sure about the new beta of version 16), but they work beautifully in the paid version.
I switched to Flowblade [1] and it was so much better for my needs. I could do basic color correction without crashes and editing audio is much more powerful. All in all a better program (for my simple needs).
[1] https://jliljebl.github.io/flowblade/
Davinci Resolve is some next level stuff. Yes, I can do editing in some of the others (tried shotcut and kdenlive to edit a full video with). Resolve is just so much more advanced and capable, while also being easy to use for simple cases.
I tried Lightworks first, but really didn't like the "rent" model at $25/mo. Resolve free level has worked fine so far, and their paid version is quite reasonable at $300. Lightworks was good, but Resolve is great.
I remember downloading it 9 years ago, but the project seems dead. [2]
Being based on the massively popular VLC Media Player, it seemed like a really promising open source video editor.
[1] https://www.videolan.org/vlmc/
[2] https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlmc
The basic problem is stability and certain aspects of the UI. You can just about do everything you need to, but if they make it a bit more user friendly, they'd win over many more users.