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.
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.
...but it asks for all your identifying information so their sales team can email, phone, snail-mail solicit you to upgrade...until their shit gets hacked and then they are paying out a multi-million dollar privacy settlement/fine :/
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
If the product has to TELL you up front that it has a "beautiful and intuitive user interface", it likely doesn't.
And the Tour page has a screenshot of the application titled "Stunning Elegance", where it does a great job of mostly looking the same as any desktop app developed in the last 10 years -- full of shades of grey, plain, no menus.
As a cherry on top, it is described as "Easy to learn. Exciting to master", which is getting so far out there into marketing land that my spidey senses tell me to stay far away.
i have used it. it is easy to learn. certainly no worse than the alternatives.
i get your criticism. but i see that very often. most projects just don't know how to present their apps in a good way. it seems like we are trying to describe apps in ways that we think non-tech people would expect, but we are failing.
Yes, I get the impression it only runs on Linux? And we're supposed to infer that by the fact that it's "distro-agnostic" and sometimes the word Free is capitalized in the middle of a sentence. Because if you're in the right place, you're already running a Free OS.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Really hard to beat the free version. However, the studio version paid for itself quickly.
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-...
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.
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.
And the Tour page has a screenshot of the application titled "Stunning Elegance", where it does a great job of mostly looking the same as any desktop app developed in the last 10 years -- full of shades of grey, plain, no menus.
As a cherry on top, it is described as "Easy to learn. Exciting to master", which is getting so far out there into marketing land that my spidey senses tell me to stay far away.
i get your criticism. but i see that very often. most projects just don't know how to present their apps in a good way. it seems like we are trying to describe apps in ways that we think non-tech people would expect, but we are failing.
No screenshots, gray on gray, no system requirements page, no easily to find instalation instructions. No mention of which GTk version it needs.
Even if it were justified, it would've still come across as very cocky and cringe-y.
However just by the look of the screenshot, I can see plenty of features in camtasia 6 that are not present in Pitivi.
[1] https://shotcut.org/
Dead Comment
Blender is easy to use if you want to start with basic editing.
https://youtu.be/U4WlgU1I2Jg?si=etEsTOeCnAeKV-wL
A quick packaging for windows and Mac could let non technical folks wanting to edit video easily adopt something like this.
Maybe in the meantime a quick how-to install a virtual machine and edit within.