

However, even with such a simple project, none of the three FOSS tools were easy to use, and all were barriers to my efficiency and creativity. My conclusion was that OpenShot was too basic for even such a small project, KdenLive was usable but lacked some tools which made editing somewhat burdensome, and ShotCut was the winner with its toolset and UI, although it crashed the most out of the three. I also watched some tutorial videos on each of the video editors. I recently edited a small project, a 15 second video with multiple video and audio tracks, some basic white balance and color correction, and minor animations, on OpenShot, ShotCut, and KdenLive, in order to figure out which one was more appropriate for me.
Openshot org free#
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. 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. 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. (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.) 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. 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.Īfter 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). 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 have basically tried them all: The MLT-based editors Shotcut, Kdenlive, OpenShot, Flowblade, as well as Blender and Cinelerra.

This includes simple color grading, cutting, multiple layers of videos and audio, simple effects and transformations (and it must run on Linux). I need to edit and render projects in the order of 2 hours or more on a regular basis. I'm running a tiny YouTube channel for a few years now and I'm regularly releasing videos on it. 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.
Openshot org software#
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.
