are shotcut and kdenlive any good video editors? just curious
i thought this question could fit here as this is a community about open source software after all, anyways… i was gonna do editing for the first time and wanted to use something that’s free and open source, i was considering either shotcut or kdenlive but i wanted to at least hear the community’s opinion about it, i’ll be waiting for the replies. thanks
I use Shotcut for work, although we have a Premier Pro subscription. It’s perfect for my needs. We cut simple edits with no effects. I just occasionally need to be able to adjust volume and change video size / aspect ratio. Shotcut is perfect for my needs.
I’ve used both of them for many years and generally they’re both quite nice. For some reason kdenlive is my go-to, probably it has a few features that I use regularly, but I would recommend either of them.
I know you’re specifically asking about FOSS, which DaVinci Resolve isn’t, but it does have a fully free version that lets you export full projects up to 4k. DaVinci is a professional tool used by big productions as well as single operators like myself, that gives you a whole post-production pipeline in one single environnement separated into tabs, the learning curve was pretty good for me but I had previous experience.
Shotcut is great if you never dived into video editing before, simply because it’s great for quick and simple video editing, it’s also fairly intuitive. But it can fall flat when you have specific (or more advanced) needs, like adding subtitles or specific effects, it’s doable, features are not fully the problem here…just that it can be a needless pain to use in such instances.
Kdenlive on the other hand is more complete but less intuitive, yet if you want something a bit more advanced it will do the job more than nicely.
So it widely depends on your needs and how far you want to delve into video editing.
I’d say if you wanna go crazy go for Kdenlive, if you want something simple go for Shotcut. If you want to start simple and go crazy later go for both.
They are both more than decent editing softwares, but Kdenlive is surely the best of the two, if not one of the best out there.
Because the world of software is a mile wide and a foot deep. By the time they tested out both of these and the litany of other “video editing” programs they could have posted this and gotten an answer.
Searching online just gets blog results, junk downloads, and reddit threads
For your first time, either is definitely good enough. They’re both pretty full featured, and they both follow “normal” editing conventions - so if you want/need to use a different program in future, you already know how to use 90% of it, you’re just looking for where the buttons are. It’s all very transferable learning.
As mentioned by another reply, there’s currently a lack of hardware acceleration for timeline playback in Kdenlive which means if you’re really stacking the effects up, you won’t be able to play back in the timeline at full frame rate until you pre-render. It won’t make any difference in simple edits.
I’d add it’s usefull to know that in case of poor performance you can still lower the preview resolution or use something called proxies, to continue editing, not always ideal but it does the job. Performance also depends on your hardware, even without hardware acceleration, so the more horse power the crazier you can go with effects. Kdenlive also greatly improved (in my experience at least) regarding performances, even though hardware acceleration would still be a must.
Chiming in that editing with proxies, while potentially cumbersome, is pretty standard. Feature films and TV shows are often edited in 720p for that exact reason. ProRes or h.264, depending on your needs and capabilities. Final renders are just a matter of turning the proxies off.
I dabbled in kdenlive for half a day while looking for something my nephew could use for a school project. Didn’t realize the lack of hardware acceleration until this thread. Still, it’s a great piece of software and I’m looking forward to watching it develop further
Kdenlive is absolutely better than many other paid closed software video editors in all fields, speed, usability and ease of use
Got tricked into buying a license of pinnacle video editor 24 from humble bundle for $1 and I felt scammed. Slow, unresponsive, limited. Kdenlive beats it in every single compartment. Can clearly see that pinnacle video editor is just a cash cow for KKR and they’re just doing the bare minimum to maximize their revenue.
Last time I tried shotcut instead it felt incomplete
yeaaaahhh i’ve used something like vegas pro and it would crash constantly and i just had enough and was considering switching to a different editor, i looked at some alternatives and found 2 options and they both look interesting, hence why i made this post cause i was looking for opinions on both of them, i might just use kdenlive
Personally I think Kdenlive has the most user-friendly interface of any video- editor (pay software included) so I think it’s ideal for a newcomer. It’s also fairly light on system resource comparatively.
A few years ago, it used to have a reputation for being a bit buggy but seems to be very stable in my experience these days.
The main problem would be the lack of guides/tutorials, though there are a few on YouTube.
To my knowledge Kdenlive is generally regarded as one of the best video editors. Iirc one of the few things said to be holding it back from being the best on Linux was bad/no hardware accelleration or something like that.
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