I have been editing my podcast and guides with NLEs on Linux for the past decade. Kdenlive, OpenShot, Olive, Cinelerra, Blender and Pitivi all lack one key feature. Stability. You can lose a staggering amount of work between auto saves.
After a day of playing with the free version of Resolve in 2017 I gave BlackMagic some cash for a license & capture card for audio. The early versions lacked ALSA support.
Editing sessions can last 8 to 10 hours and I can't remember the last time it spite-crashed. Granted, this doesn't prevent me from mindlessly tapping Ctrl+S every few minutes.
The free version of Resolve is so good. I looked for a reason to pay them- nope, free version did literally everything a non-professional would need. And they even have free downloadable lessons on how to edit - not just use their editor, but edit in general- on the website.
I did some semi-serious work in Linux on the free version earlier this year. Performance was pretty good, and I believe that it did use the GPU.
The only big annoyance for me was the lack of a h265 codec. I had some FFMPEG shell scripts for the final exports, but it was a pain and I eventually paid for the full version, which I am very happy with considering it is a lifetime license. Some premium features like speech transcription, where you can select a video segment by simply selecting dialog from a text box, were a big time saver too.
With my last editing experience being Adobe Premiere in the early 2000s, Resolve was simply amazing.
It depends on the host OS and codec. On Windows if your OEM didn't include the H.265 license with your default installation you have to buy it for $1 from the Windows store (this is a Windows thing, not a Davinci thing). On Linux I think you have to pay for the Pro version which includes the license.
I think if you're working with DNxHD files you don't have to worry about this.
...but it asks for all your identifying information so their sales team can email, phone, snail-mail solicit you to upgrade...until their shit gets hacked and then they are paying out a multi-million dollar privacy settlement/fine :/
You can just write whatever in that form. It doesn't get checked. That's why some distros have packages for davinci resolve - they just POST random data to the website. For example
Just use a temporary email from some temporary email generator like https://temp-mail.org/ (use an AdBlock, I'm sure the site is littered with ads, but I wouldn't know cause I use uBlock)
I tested many open source video editors and shotcut was the best compared to the rest. It has a lot of (basic) features that are missing in other editors
To be honest it looks like I completely missed Kdenlive. It looks very advanced compared to openshot, from what their website shows. May be worth a try for both of us
The feature I need is syncing 16 audio tracks recorded in mp3 to the embedded (scratch) audio track recorded in the video. Resolve will sync with waveforms and even an LTC track (once I got that to play reliable every time I record).
> After a day of playing with the free version of Resolve in 2017 I gave BlackMagic some cash for a license & capture card for audio
I see you've came to the same conclusion i did years ago. I look at it not as paying for software, but buying my time back at this point.
Linux "open source"/free professional software seems to lack the Je ne sais quoi needed to make it worthwhile. It works, but the software is in the "uncanny valley" so to speak compared to polished Mac/Windows paid professional software.
A lot of open source projects suffer from “pet project” syndrome. Some maintainers have very strong opinions about how/what things should be done regardless of actual user demand or feedback, and there’s no one with the power to rebuff them because the product owners deciding what to implement and the engineers doing implementation work are one and same. Commit right makes might.
In a (healthy) company, you have PMs and executives who will tell the overly opinionated engineers to STFU and actually implement things that move the needle and solve problems users are facing.
This is also why most open source projects have terrible UI/UX and any designer who attempts to help and improve things finds themselves ignored, with no means to actually carry out any decision, and walk away soon after.
In fact larger open source GUI projects also tend to suffer from the opposite: with multiple equally powerful maintainers, a good number of contributors, and no one to rally them behind a coherent design, you get a messy bag of poorly documented features spread all over the place. Design by programmer is usually bad enough; design by a loosely-connected web of programmers working almost independently is even worse. Also, a lot of the developers/users are ideologically motivated and heavily invested, when you point out how bad the software is for the average user, instead of reflecting on it they often get defensive.
> “and there’s no one with the power to rebuff them”
Except for those that discover the fork button. /s
In all seriousness I think that what you mean is that people rarely have the power to fork a project and drag all the users and development expertise over to their version. Especially if they are simply users of the system and not contributors. Users of commercial software can get companies to do stuff for them with their wallets.
> any designer who attempts to help and improve things finds themselves ignored, with no means to actually carry out any decision, and walk away soon after.
Ah yes, remember how long it took before image thumbnails appeared in the GTK file picker? Finally in 2022, but that was after countless forks and patches submitted that implemented them.
It stems from a bias, developers are power/expert users and their interface behavior is likely matching, which means they are heavily reliant on keyboard shortcuts (Think Blender 1.x and Blender 2.x who leaned heavily and even exclusively on shortcuts)
This gives them the idea that their software is very powerful (and probably is) but this creates a cliff to the beginner and intermediate level users.
A lot of examples can be found in “About Face: On interaction design” by Alan Cooper.
Well, Resolve suffers from the same attitude in places. While a good and usable product, it suffers from many design gaffes that go unaddressed year after year, despite denying users functions that are expected in any similar product.
The render-job UI is pretty shambolic (as is the treacherously inaccurate timeline on the same page), for example. And BMD refuses to add simple functions like "match timeline properties to clip." Instead they have a prompt that offers to match only frame rate, in contrast to just about every other media-editing app I can think of. Fixing that should be easy; and if it isn't, the codebase must be hopelessly inept.
The integrations of Fusion and Fairlight are buggy and exhibit nonsensical and misleading UI behavior. Resolve has a node view... oh wait, now it has two node views, which are not integrated with each other or with the editor. Fixing that should be priority one, which could create a truly excellent hybrid product that some of us have asking for for years.
And now they've ported the thing to the iPad. Really? I realize that from the outside we don't know how engineering people are allocated, but nonetheless it seems absurd to spend resources on that while the desktop product suffers from serious defects that have languished for a long time.
When you buy something, you are exchanging your money to obtain someone else's time. In this case, time that someone else spent to make sure a program works.
The F in FOSS stands for free, so nobody is under any obligation to spend their time so you don't spend yours.
> The F in FOSS stands for free, so nobody is under any obligation to spend their time so you don't spend yours.
Your conclusion generalizes to no-charge software, not to all FOSS. The "free" in FOSS stands for free software, meaning free as in freedom rather than free as in price.
If a program is free software [1] then a user of the program can read the source code, modify it, and distribute (including sell) unmodified and modified versions of the program/code. A user who lacks the program or the code isn't entitled to the freedoms but can get the software from someone else who has it.
Developers of free software can charge for it. One way of making money from free software is charging for access to the developer's server. Another way is charging for more expansive user support. (Alternatives to charging for the software itself include requesting donations and selling physical merchandise.)
I'm fully aware the F in FOSS stands for free-as-in-libre. I'm also aware that FOSS developers by and large refuse the exchange of any and all money both as buyers and sellers for services rendered.
You say developers of free-as-in-libre software can charge for them, but in practice any developer that tries to sell his free-as-in-libre software will be viciously laughed out of the room by everyone else.
The F in FOSS in practice stands both for free-as-in-libre and free-as-in-beer. And you don't get to talk about the quality of free beer.
I don't think it's unreasonable to demand that products and tools don't spontaneously combust frequently, so long as that demand is based on warranties and other such professional/commercial guarantees.
FOSS's primary problem is that the goal is the tool itself, rather than what is done with the tools: Commercial software exist to let the end user achieve something, which in turn generates profit for the commercial developers. FOSS exist to let the FOSS developers achieve their dreams, end users be damned.
A video editor crashing every hour is a problem for the end user, but if the FOSS developer doesn't care then that's that.
This is why Photoshop will continue to surpass GIMP, and why exceptional FOSS like Blender succeed where other FOSS do not.
If Micro$oft keeps enshittifying their OS at current rates, I bet a lot of people will get fed up and jump ship to Linux after one or two more windows releases.
Windows 11, for all its faults, enables me to do the things I want to do on a computer. Likewise Android, and to a lesser degree even iOS and MacOS I admit.
Linux however demands me to do the computer, it doesn't enable me to do anything because I'm too busy doing computer bullshit. This isn't necessarily surprising, since the goal of Linux (more accurately FOSS) is to use FOSS and isn't concerned about what I need/want to do.
So no, most people (or at least myself) will not move from Windows to Linux. I use computers to do things, not preach the holy scriptures of FOSS.
It’s getting better, and with more people working with browser based tools the underlying OS is becoming less relevant. That said, the Gnome folks do seem user hostile. And I get that most Linux distro users like to tweak their config (part of the joy of their experience), it does lead to choice paralysis for a lot of folks. Add that hardware support can still be hit and miss (I concede that it has improved massively), it’s still not the computing panacea that the more enthusiastic and vocal proponents would have you believe. Likewise, neither are macOS or Windows panaceas, nor are they as repugnantly shit as those same folk would like to tell you either.
>Linux's interface is still archaic compared to windows 7 unfortunately.
I'm amused that I find myself preferring Windows 11 Explorer with its bloody worthless context menu and taskbar to anything FOSS has to offer.
GNOME? It's sincerely cancer. KDE? No software actually uses it. xfce/LXDE/et al.? Look, I'm not going to use a GUI that demands I go CLI some plain text files to change settings.
> The F in FOSS stands for free, so nobody is under any obligation to spend their time so you don't spend yours.
This is why I really dislike the term "FOSS". It's both redundant and erroneously misleads people to thinking things like this. Free Software can absolutely be developed under contract, in which case yes, you are entitled to the developers time under the terms of the contract.
I have used kdenlive for a dozen videos over the last 5 years - my use case, taking 15 minutes of footage down to 2-3 minutes, syncing video with voice over, building product demos, tutorials. It has been solid, on Windows and Linux.
When my youngest was 10, she worked with OpenShot and Kdenlive, and settled on Kdenlive on Windows - probably edited 20 videos of hours of Roblox footage down to 2-3 minute videos, syncing characters activity with music, voice over, etc... It was pretty cool - it worked well for her.
Regarding Pitivi I have to confirm that. I tried it multiple times on a novice-level (just cutting and accelerating). Unreliable and crashing, both on AMD and Intel. The quality of encoded result is also bad, even with H265 and highest quality. And the preview window is always “popping” out and doesn’t went back into the main UI. Is it me or are others more successful with it?
I wonder if and how much Gstreamer is responsible for situation.
I’m honestly more apt to ffmpeg. MPV and Celluloid work always reliable. Firefox probably had also a reason to prefer ffmpeg. I will try another editor in future, maybe it is not Gstreamer but Pitiv.
Yes, the samé for me, just that I've used the Pro(?) version of Lightworks before BM released Resolve.
But the least stable, unusable piece of (compositing/video) shi^H^H^Hsoftware had been Discreet's (now Autodesk) Combustion, which I got for free with a Quadro graphics card.
If the first sentence in the press release is
> Discreet's Combustion is a robust 3D compositing package
I understand why (the complexity in the codecs) but it's certainly frustrating.
Anyone building one of these now needs to build it from the start with the knowledge these lower level parts may crash, or maybe Gstreamer itself could provide some crash protection.
If the product has to TELL you up front that it has a "beautiful and intuitive user interface", it likely doesn't.
And the Tour page has a screenshot of the application titled "Stunning Elegance", where it does a great job of mostly looking the same as any desktop app developed in the last 10 years -- full of shades of grey, plain, no menus.
As a cherry on top, it is described as "Easy to learn. Exciting to master", which is getting so far out there into marketing land that my spidey senses tell me to stay far away.
i have used it. it is easy to learn. certainly no worse than the alternatives.
i get your criticism. but i see that very often. most projects just don't know how to present their apps in a good way. it seems like we are trying to describe apps in ways that we think non-tech people would expect, but we are failing.
Yes, I get the impression it only runs on Linux? And we're supposed to infer that by the fact that it's "distro-agnostic" and sometimes the word Free is capitalized in the middle of a sentence. Because if you're in the right place, you're already running a Free OS.
Centos is the only officially supported distro, but it works just as well on any other. In some cases, you may need to install some extra dependencies, but not much
i found pitivi quite stable when i used it a few years ago. i used it quite a while for various projects. i mostly had AMD and before that intel CPUs with onboard graphics and i always avoided nvidia though.
Hello everybody, a Pitivi maintainer here. Some random thoughts, while I might have the attention..
I think when one considers a foss video editor, they might look into advanced features they need, if any, on how the app looks/integrates with everything, and not the last on how sustaining is the development. The needed features and look are personal and are what they are, so let me comment on sustainability of the "competing" video editors:
- Shotcut's dev said a few years ago in an interview that he gets enough money out of the ads on the website.
- Openshot's Jonathan, last I checked in the corona time on the website was also getting a few thousand USD per month, from donations.
- KdenLive last I checked a few years ago had a nice active team(!). I'm sure if you manage to submit a proper crash report they'll fix it. :)
- Olive's dev is very ambitious, good luck to him!
- Blender's integrated video editor looks solid!
- Pitivi's team shifted focus on GStreamer or away, but we always gathered ourselves to mentor each year 2-3 GSoC students. Most of the development for a good number of years has actually been done by GSoC students. A significant effort went into making their job easier, code reviews(!), merging, infra, maintenance. Two years in a row, groups of students from UNL Nebraska worked on awesome small features and enhancements. Behind the scenes, Igalia and other GStreamer contributors are doing heavy work on GStreamer. Thanks to all, you're awesome! :)
Now Pitivi.. like some of the others, has it's place. It's the only video editor based on GStreamer. GStreamer is here to stay, and so is Pitivi―at least until another video editor based on GStreamer and written in Rust (read "stable") pops up, you never know.
Pitivi is the only video editor built on GTK, we get quite some help from the community with the GitLab issue tracker and the website infra. We're not GNOME but yes we are close. We spent two individual GSoC internships to port Pitivi to GTK 4, but we're not there yet. Blame it on us. It'll get there at some point, but I don't think we'll do a third internship, so I think we'll most likely skip GSoC next year altogether.
"Beautiful" is not measurable, so if we say that "it's beautiful", it's not an absolute truth. You don't like it -> see "competition" above. Let me mention we did stay away from context menus. :)
"Marketing" will be needed when we want to do a(nother) fundraiser, but we're not there yet. The only marketing we might want to do is to developers and people who might be interested in joining and investing in the community. Maybe you have tips about that! Also regarding marketing, we don't have yet packages for Windows and Mac. I think all the others do.
"Stability" is lacking in video editors because none are written in Rust.
Cheers and have fun editing with your favorite video editor! I'll come back to check the replies next Monday.
> "Stability" is lacking in video editors because none are written in Rust.
And yet, somehow, all the pro editors manage to be fairly stable despite being written in C++ (or maybe obj-c in the case of final cut pro and iMovie)
Maybe you should do some introspection as to why that is, instead of blaming the language used.
PS: blender's NLE is possibly the most stable of the open-source ones and it's written in C. Maybe that's a hint? Maybe the answer is good leadership and high quality contributors?
Pitivi is great for most things most editors want to do and that too with the comfort of an application that looks native to the GNOME desktop environment.
Sad to see that Pitivi won't get into GSoC'24 but I completely understand the concerns as well.
Have always advocated for Pitivi's development in my peer groups, and will continue to do so :)
i have used both for one project or another. but it has been a while. my main reason for trying different video editors was that some were not able to create videos from single jpg frames for a stop motion animation. but apart from that the editing of video streams worked well enough in both.
I just used Pitivi recently to cut something and quite liked its straightforwardness.
The only thing I don't like is the lack of preview monitor so I can work with raw clips before bringing them into the timeline but for quick cuts, it's a great tool.
After a day of playing with the free version of Resolve in 2017 I gave BlackMagic some cash for a license & capture card for audio. The early versions lacked ALSA support.
Editing sessions can last 8 to 10 hours and I can't remember the last time it spite-crashed. Granted, this doesn't prevent me from mindlessly tapping Ctrl+S every few minutes.