The landscape was bonkers. After trying lots of free, freemium, and paid trials I finally landed on Kdenlive. At the time I got the sense that it had just recently, within the past couple(max) years, gotten much better and much more usable than a lot of the internet had caught on to. I'd liken it to the Blender 2.5 release. It was perfectly usable on my system for editing 4k video with my basic needs.
Haven't used it over the past couple years but it's nice to see that they have been pushing it forward even harder. Even based on my 2-3 year old experience with it I'd encourage anyone looking for basic, but comprehensive, video editing needs to give it a go.
Edit: I'm not saying it's limited to basic editing. I just mean that it's perfectly adequate and usable without being overwhelming and "unfriendly". Watch a Youtube Kdenlive 101 intro vid and you're good to go.
I managed to track down a few of them while evaluating Claude Code a while back (mostly certain actions doing O(n) scans over all clips every mouse event needing debouncing), and got it mostly back down to tolerable levels again, but have been holding onto them because unsolicited drive by AI PRs are very annoying from a code project maintenance perspective, as the changes are almost certainly poorly factored.
Was half considering creating a Kdenvibe fork, but that would also be in bad taste. So right now I don't know what to do with the diff.
1. A way to play back videos at 2x speed while editing in an intuitive way (DaVinci Resolve does this perfectly).
TBH I'm not sure how this isn't a feature since it's straight up a 2x time saver for anyone editing a video since playing back a 10 minute at 2x is only 5 minutes of real life time.
With Resolve I can actively edit / cut / etc. my videos at 2x speed playback but the exported video comes out as 1x. In other words, this isn't a request to adjust the clip speed, it's 100% limited to playback in the editor. Also audio playback is perfect, it sounds exactly like a YouTube video being played at 2x.
With Kdenlive live you have to adjust the playback speed after every time you make a cut (stopping the video) which is very not user friendly and I don't know what algorithm they are using but the audio sounds really poor at 2x. It seems to skip every other frame of audio so it sounds like it's constantly dropping out and not smooth.
2. A revamped title creator so creating titles is as fast and easy as Camtasia.
I put time and effort to get around the dated and unintuitive UI/UX, but it is too convoluted to do even some basic stuff. and the repeated crashes are too much of a pain to be ready for everyday use.
I tried alternatives such as openshot and shotcut, but they too have a lot of room for improvement. it seems there always a flaw of some kind and a lack of usability for this kind of software.
not taking anything for the time, efforts ad good will the devs put into these software, and many thanks to them for everything. but commercial software benefits from the years of having team of full time employees giving them a serious edge on opensource software for video editing.
I'm using it together with OBS to post short demo videos of my side project. I could use Loom I guess, but I prefer to keep my tech stack FOSS when I can.
Creating "non standard" video resolutions is a bit of a pain though. But I've solved that with an ffmpeg oneliner.
I'd love to know more what actually went down there, is there plans about sharing of code or something similar, considering the two applications serve similar use cases when it comes to video editing?
Damn shame.
Kudos for keeping improving Kdelive.
i just was a bit shocked to find out Resolve didn't support h.264 on their free tier on Linux, and i don't want to re-encode all my footage to AV1
Davinci Resolve
* CorridorKey plugin (cutting edge green/blue screen "AI" masking)
* Blender EXR workflows
* Paid (unless buying a really expensive camera)
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
https://github.com/alexandremendoncaalvaro/CorridorKey-Runti...
Cinelerra GG
* less popular, but had GPU cluster acceleration at one point
* FOSS
https://download.cinelerra-gg.org/?path=%2Fimages
Shotcut
* simple to learn
* compatible with most platforms, but slow
* FOSS
What's the story with KDE?
How is KDE doing with respect to QT, given that QT is commercial (with LGPL licensing) and has passed through several ownership changes?
Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes?
How are they doing with respect to the GTK/Gnome folks? (Did Gnome ever get over their issues? I tuned out around the time of Gnome 3 and the headaches everyone was having with Ubuntu vs. Gnome with respect to the desktop compositor.)
Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? (This is not a moral question! No religious fights. I'm seriously curious.)
Which distro(s) have the best KDE? I've been stuck on Mac for a bit and want to dive in again soon.