I’m looking for a program that can cut video, adjust exposure levels, color correct, stabilize and encode.
I’ve never done anything like this before, so ease of use would be great. But if there’s an established standard program (like Gimp for photos), I’ll learn it. Any suggestions would be helpful.
If it works on your setup, DaVinci resolve. If not, Kdenlive. Those are the only really professional video editing programs available at the moment.
There’s Lightworks, too, although it’s geared toward the editing process. I like it, though, and have been able to make it work for general video editing. The color correction tools are better than Kdenlive and not as good as DaVinci Resolve, but unlike Resolve, it will decode/encode H.264 and AAC. It’s powerful without being quite as overwhelming as Resolve can be for newbies. There’s no advanced setup involved unlike Resolve. The playback is responsive even with 4K footage. Kdenlive is great too, if you don’t need more advanced features or are working with a lot of 4K footage.
In addition to all of the open source options that have been offered, Davinci Resolve runs well on Linux and has all of the above features (and many, many more). It’s also a buy once keep forever situation rather than a subscription since they make their real money on hardware. OSS it isn’t, but it’s incredibly powerful, has an extensive free (as in beer) edition and beats the hell out of paying a monthly fee.
As for DaVinci Resolve, installation can be a bit weird if you don’t happen to run one of the officially supported Distros. Because of that, the easiest way to run it is probably via DistroBox, Michael Horn made a great tutorial about that: https://youtu.be/wmRiZQ9IZfc
Are there distro-specific issues? I’ve always just downloaded the zip and run the installer with no issues.
Personal example: Fedora (38 - 39). Resolve uses libs which depends on some older versions of a lib, which they don’t ship in the installer.
So I had to replace the depending libs so that Resolve can run with Fedoras more recent libs.Good to know. Thanks.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/wmRiZQ9IZfc
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
No Flatpak available?
It wouldn’t be trivial to package such a big app as a flatpak (or snap for that matter) and also maintain it properly, so as long as the original developers don’t do the work I think it is unlikely to happen. But for a tool that I’m going to be using a lot in the future I think it makes sense to invest the time once to install it, even if it’s a bit more complicated.
+1 for kdenlive
I used Sony Vegas/what ever it’s called now for years, moving to kdenlive was pretty painless and I don’t feel like I’m missing any features.
I (very occasionally) use Kdenlive. I think it’s pretty good.
I had the most luck with shotcut. I’ve been meaning to try kdenlive again though but there were a few fx I needed that immediately apparent in shotcut that I could not find quickly in kdenlive.
I suspect kdenlive has it covered but timelines dictated that I not change horses mid race, and I haven’t got back to retry.
Basically, either is good!
Shotcut is great, especially because ffmpeg, GPU acceleration and very easy to learn workflows (although admittedly not so intuitive that you get them right away).
I don’t know about Kdenlive, but I tried Openshot and found it to be much slower and lacking functionality, although it’s even easier to use for the basics.
I actually want to give kdenlive another shot. But since I already figured out the keyframe mechanics in shotcut it was a too tall an order to relearn a new WY to do it in short order (clock was ticking for me to get a video done for a kid’s b-day!)
You could try https://kdenlive.org/ and https://www.openshot.org/
I haven’t done much editing, but they are fairly popular and decent tools. They also come as an AppImage, which means they pretty much ‘just work.’
And https://handbrake.fr/ gets a mention for transcoding.
You ever try KDENLive? It’s pretty good imo
You’ve probably got your answer already, but just wanting to confirm that Kdenlive can do all the things you listed.
Though the editor itself is very easy to use and obvious (if you previously have used premiere etc), you might find the UI for some of the individual effects a bit confusing. There’s tool tips and sometimes help videos and stuff, but you might find yourself dragging a few sliders left and right to find out what they actually do :)
Note that generally speaking, Kdenlive doesn’t currently support graphics-card-accelerated timeline preview very well, so if you’re packing on the effects, you might not get real-time playback in the timeline without “preview rendering”. If you ever used Premiere 20 years ago, it works the same as that.
From memory, Olive has the best “in-timeline” graphics card acceleration - but is otherwise at a much earlier stage of development.
As others have mentioned, some or all of these are also doable in Shotcut, Openshot, Olive.
Also, you might be interested in TJFree Tutorials on YouTube, which has a playlist of Kdenlive tutorials - for older versions, but it’s mostly going to be the same. He also has tutorials in loads of other FOSS creative software. I found he tended to be “clear and efficient” and doesn’t take 5 minutes to give you 1 minute’s information.
Thank you, I’ll keep that in mind if I need to do more.
Currently, I just have a 5 minute clip that needs cutting, stabilizing and some color correction, and Shotcut let me do that without tutorials or manuals.Brilliant - I’ll have to have a look at Shotcut again. It used to be quite “crashy”, but it’s been in solid continual development for a few years now.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I just use KDEnlive.
Ahhh, so that’s why its called Kdenlive
I think everyone calls it kden-live right?
I do
I was both surprised and impressed with Kdenlive.
Kdenlive is preety good now
Something I haven’t seen mentioned is Blender’s built in video editor.
Blender?
Yeah, Blender. This piece of software never ceases to amaze me.
Me waiting for the VSE update: 💀
It’s underrated, but it has so much untouched potential to make it really shine and it is unfortunately still a bit unintuitive to use.
I wonder if it will ever get some love again by the devs, because it’s clear that the focus is 99% on the 3D aspect of things right now and it will most likely be so for a long time to come, for good reasons of course, the advancements there have been astounding and really needed because they’re THE libre 3D animation software, while there are already other established libre video editors out there, so there is less necessity. But I still believe that if Blender was to ever give a refresh to the VSE, it would immediately outclass all the other options
The only one I know of is kdenlive, not sure of it can do all of that but it has always been enough for everything I needed for video editing.
- Kdenlive
- Openshot
- Shotcut
- Pitivi
I’ve used Kdenlive for my personal projects and in a professional setting. It’s easier to install than Divinci Resolve and almost as powerful.
