All;
Anyone have recommendations for Open Source Linux Video editing software?
All;
Anyone have recommendations for Open Source Linux Video editing software?
Maybe ? OBS : https://obsproject.com/
If you shoot in 8-bit, kdenlive is a very capable editor. It falls short for color grading with higher bit depth video (log or camera raw).
Try Blender
You can use it only for video editing.
Kdenlive is the only one I have tried. I was pretty happy with it.
Will depend on what type of video project you are planning for. Best bet for advice it to check with users in the respective programs support forums. Let them know what your typical project(s) are and what quirks are present in the software, or what features are missing or are incomplete. They will have a much better opinion about what you can accomplish with given software.
I use Shotcut, works well for my needs, not the most intuitive GUI I would say, but I can handle it
Last year during my full migration to Linux, I tried Kdenlive and Blender.
With Kdenlive I found the working color space to be very limited. For example a simple white balance can burn out your highlights and a subsequent exposure reduction can not recover them.
Both applications were very slow during export, we are talking 10x or more compared to resolve.
In the end I bought an expensive resolve studio license. Resolve is a real pain to install and the procedure is different for every distro. They must have a lot of paying Linux users, the free version works fine on windows but lacks essential codecs on Linux apparently for licensing reasons. So I really don’t understand why they don’t support Linux better (outside of RHEL, which the movie industry uses).
But once it is installed, it works well.
In general, I think the large diversity within the Linux ecosystem makes it challenging to provide commercial support services for software packages. In the music production world, one company stated that “Linux is about 1% of our user base, but about a third of our support mail.”
Naturally, I want corporations to improve support, but I can also see why the cost-benefit ratio wouldn’t always make it an easy choice.
I’ve tried most of them and Kdenlive and Shotcut are definitely the best open source options. Personally, I find the interface of shotcut a little better. However, unlike Darktable, which is pretty close in capabilities to commercial software and even exceeds commercial software in many respects, open-source video editing is pretty far behind Davinci Resolve unfortunately.
Hello @JasonTheBirder
I totally agree with everything you wrote
Shotcut user, here ![]()
Btw, for newcomers there is also OpenShot
I just noticed the 4.0 release, too. Probably of interest to this forum, it looks like 4.0 adds several new color capabilities.
For simple splicing/cutting/conversions, I find avidemux to be reliable. The others I have tried appear to be buggy and crashy. Must admit I haven’t tried any of the more “advanced” video editors for quite a while, as I haven’t had any need.
I’m surprised the explosion of new raw editors that can match commercial apps hasn’t spread to the video side.
Well, first, I think that’s an exaggeration. There have been a few Raw editors that are polished and simple and look good…but I think they don’t match the commericial apps nor Darktable. I won’t name names, but lots of them are rapidly developed due to AI, so they appear to be polished at a rapid rate. But underneath they definitely don’t have the last even 10% of refinement to make it to a level where I’d recommend them even if I weren’t anti-AI. I think a LOT of recent AI-assisted software is like that, and they probably ARE good enough for a lot of simple editing…but they can’t match Lightroom for SURE and I don’t even like Lightroom.
When it comes to video, you need to have even more expertise and refinement to make a good video editor. The reason why Davinci is so good is precisely because a lot of the effort put into the tiny details of it. The new wave of explosive coding might make it possible to code some apps that look good on the surface but at least for now, the limitations of lacking real expertise in doing something properly still limits this questionable coding technique.
Funny and ironic fact I found out a whole ago - davinci systems or whatever it was called back then launched the software as a linux only thing.
It was literally just for linux.
I am in the process of moving everything I did on my windows so that I can ditch it forever Instead of having to face it for video editing etc and this fact infuriated me unlike anything. A video editor is on a different scale so I will wait for something to grow into a direct replacement without caveats.
Shotcut, because it simply works. OpenShot crashed too often and anything more advanced is … too much for me.
Btw VKDT is an awesome tool even for video! Especially RAW video or something that you’d use VKDT for color grading and such needs. I can see a future where instead of having one tool like Davinci Resolve, we have a way to make other tools work in conjunction with a tool to manage and send video files to and from other apps .
For anyone willing to test a very new open source software there is also this one:
It looks like it is not (?) AI generated…
Actually it seems at least pretty heavily AI assisted: