this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 63 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If it works on your setup, DaVinci resolve. If not, Kdenlive. Those are the only really professional video editing programs available at the moment.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Are there distro-specific issues? I've always just downloaded the zip and run the installer with no issues.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 9 months ago

I (very occasionally) use Kdenlive. I think it's pretty good.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago

You ever try KDENLive? It's pretty good imo

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago

I was both surprised and impressed with Kdenlive.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Something I haven't seen mentioned is Blender's built in video editor.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

Yeah, Blender. This piece of software never ceases to amaze me.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 9 months ago

Kdenlive is preety good now

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

Kdenlive is great, I've been editing a lot of my videos on there and some shorts on YouTube. It's got a pretty unappealing UI but one you get to know and figure out where everything is you can get some content out :)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago

Nobody mentioned Olive yet, that one is very good, though I'm always concerned about the continuation of its development.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Kdenlive or Shotcut, or if you want something more powerful but not open source, Davinci resolve.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Thanks. I tried both, and Shotcut was the one where I actually understood how to import, edit and export a video without consulting the manual, so I'm going with that.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

I've found Shotcut to be more stable than Kdenlive. Tho I haven't tried the latest kdenlive yet. Both have glaxnimate support so motion graphics is possible with both.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

Kdenlive's pretty good.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Am I the only one who kind of likes the video editing profile Blender has?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

TIL Blender has video editing

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

blender is almost like the emacs of multimedia software, it's got 3d modeling and rendering, 3d animation, grease paint (2d animation), non-linear video editing, and probably other features i haven't heard of.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

I used shotcut a lot and it's fantastic.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago

+1 kdenlive. However, I can see why it's no sufficient solution for everyone

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Openshot for me. It's very lightweight and hassle-free.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

For sure try out olive You can't do automatic stabilization but manual works fine, However I will always use gyroflow whenever possible anyways. If needed you can easily script motion tracking data from 3rd party sources.

but it is properly color managed throughout the entire editor so doing color correction works properly and accurately. the node system is really powerful despite it's early nature, and as far as I know olive is the only FOSS editor with proper OCIO integration, which means you get industry standard color management tooling including things like ACES support. You also have OTIO support for importing and exporting editorial cutting information.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (3 children)
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

If you're familiar with blender, it works pretty well but renders slow

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Pitivi is really nice

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Kdenlive is what I used a while back when I was editing a video. You also can do it with ffmpeg from the command line if your a real chad

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

For whatever reason, many of the editors mentioned here never worked for me ... like OpenShot, ShotCut or PiTiVi were really unstable the last time I tried (might be a distro or DE thing). Also I found it hard to cut precisely when they worked. Lightworks, Da Vinci, Cinelerra, I had a hard time getting them to run. Maybe that changed in the meantime.

I ultimately stuck with Kdenlive, which is stable enough and allows for reasonably precise cutting.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

If you want a very simple editor, try avidemux.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Pitivi I use. Like feature lacking Adobe Premiere it is.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Why talk like this do you?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

A lot to learn you have, Padawan.

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