kdenlive: https://kdenlive.org/
my music: https://unicornmasquerade.bandcamp.com/
my photography: / breadonpenguins
kdenlive manual (read it, it shows you how to do literally everything): https://docs.kdenlive.org/en/index.html
kdenlive donation page: https://kdenlive.org/fund/
my shortcuts file: https://github.com/BreadOnPenguins/dots/
@VeronicaExplains made a great video that covers kdenlive, too! • I make all my videos using Linux. Here’s how.
all footage incl. pixel animations is mine.
my wallpaper is a painting by Alois Arnegger ‘winter mountain landscape in evening light’.
I’ve used a fair share of video editors over the years. Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere, DaVinci Resolve and KDENlive.
Even in Linux Resolve is the better editor and works with my workflow. However the hardware requirements is large, and the use of ffmpeg to convert mp4 aac to a useable format is annoying on Linux, but nothing a batch script can’t help with.
KDENlive feel like an in between step of Windows Movie maker, and. Vegas. It has the functionality of a more advanced video editors, but its UI makes it feel as restrictive as Movie Maker.
There is a strong app here, it just needs polish like Audacity is getting. Hoping it gets better, since actual competition in Linux is a win for everyone.
I like the workflow of kdenlive but I very consistently have export failure or memory leaks. It’s frustrating.
so I’ve used it a few times, but it absolutely chokes on 4K footage on my rig. I think maybe the lack of hardware acceleration for pre rendering?
I have a big project coming up and I’m considering downscaling all the source files, editing, and then slipping in the real files when I’m done. Is that a thing people do?
This is literally how all professional editors work, the lower res is called the offline edit, then you swap the high res back in for ‘onlining’ and export.
Yeh, either proxy editing (where it’s low res versions until export).
Or you could try a more suitable intermediary codec.
I presume you are editing h.264 or something else with “temporal compression”. Essentially there are a few full frames every second, and the other frames are stored as changes. Massively reduces file size, but makes random access expensive as hell.Something like ProRes, DNxHD… I’m sure there are more. They store every frame, so decoding doesn’t require loading the last full frame and applying the changes to the current frame.
You will end up with massive files (compared to h.264 etc), but they should run a lot better for editing.
And they are lossless, so you convert source footage then just work away.Really high res projects will combine both of these. Proxy editing with intermediary codecs
I recently switched to Linux and was disappointed to find that Resolve is next to useless unless you buy studio and have the right graphics card. I’ve been using Kdenlive and it’s fairly easy to understand. I do still miss the bin based layout of Resolve, but I’ve yet to find a feature I used that is missing on Kdenlive. It’s just harder to find sometimes.
Crack is very easy on linux, like two terminal commands after downloading officially
I came from Sony Vegas to kdenlive. I am absolutely thrilled to have broken away from Windows and joined the Linux bandwagon but I’m not going to pretend kdenlive is a better video editor. It’s the best I’ve found and good enough for my use case but I miss Sony’s UI. I could say the same about GIMP vs Photoshop.
All that said, it’s still totally worth the switch and I have zero regrets. I’d rather relearn some things than bend over for the corporations that seek to exploit us.
It isn’t open source, but DaVinci Resolve is available for Linux. With limited features if you don’t pay. Might be overkill for what you do, and I understand it can be finicky to get it working (needs nvidia, poor support for AMD, very limited format support unless you get the paied version, …).
I don’t really do video stuff, but I did play around with it a few years ago, and it seemed very comprehensive.
Yeah that was the first one I tried. I was very excited about it too. But it would not run on my hardware.
For GIMP there is a “Photoshop UI” plugin if you still have lingering muscle memory. Perhaps something similar can be made for kdenlive?
Photopea is a good alternative to Photoshop when you need automatic subject selecting and other powerful features. They have a very similar UI, but it’s not FOSS and they want you to see ads or pay to use features repeatedly. Nonetheless, it is the best I have found for my use cases.
If it requires an internet connection just to use, that’s a no-go. Thanks for a suggestion though.
I used kdenlive for an end of semester project last year. While I was under a lot of stress, none of that came from the software.
No idea how I should be pronouncing it though… K-den-live? Kde-n-live?
No idea how I should be pronouncing it though… K-den-live? Kde-n-live?
Yes, that’s how it’s pronounced
K-dean-liv
I tried using other alternatives like OpenShot but KDEnlive seemed much easier to work with. I also use Handbrake to convert videos to different formats when needed.
I find shutter encoder easier than handbrake
Had this experience too. Played around with Shotcut and OpenShot, really wanted them to be better just because the name ‘Kdenlive’ is annoying. But alas, the latter seemed easier to work with.
Davinci Resolve is also free and supports Linux. Maybe the best non-adobe video editor I’ve ever used. I do use kdenlive for smaller jobs but davinci is on another level entirely.
Davinci Resolve is also free and supports Linux.
Isn’t that proprietary software, as in, if there’s something that doesn’t work you’ll have to send them a bug report and hope they’ll eventually fix it, but they’ll never give you the source code so that you could fix it yourself?
Don’t you need the payed version for certain codec support? iirc
AFAIK even the paid version doesn’t have much in the name of codec support. But it’s trivial to use ffmpeg to convert file formats
I wasn’t aware. Which ones?
I know 10bit footage is only supported by the paid edition IIRC
This has gotten me when using my A7III.
