I've used pretty much all amateur video-making software for Windows and some for Mac, Screenflow, FinalCut Pro, etc.
The best by far is FinalCut Pro (Mac-only), because it automatically creates proxy files and allows you to edit everything in real time with no lag, even when adding complicated effects.
The situation on Linux is dismal. The only good one is https://kdenlive.org/. It's actually I'd say at par to FinalCut in terms of performance, although the UI could use some clean up. It's the one I use because the other ones would either keep crashing, or be impossibly slow.
I wonder why (really, have no idea)?
It's proprietary and the free as in beer version is limited to 720p mp4 ("YouTube") export, which was sufficient for my use case.
The tool started to work on color, but it looks like they've made a decent editor also.
The content was super important stuff - early footage of many areas of the world not otherwise filmed - and was destined for Wikimedia Commons.
It was the worst experience I've ever had with commercial software since Windows 'corrected' an NTFS volume in ~2005 and nixxed the lot. From memory it was something to do with the input codec (beyond my control as lossless was a requirement), the output codec, and the aspect ratio. The software just couldn't cut the stuff. I was left to go back to ffmpeg and VLC. I will never again waste time learning a commercial UI.
It shines with large video asset databases, and once you get a few weeks of muscle memory behind it (or a few months if you're coming from FCP or FCPX), it's a fast tool when making lots of simple cuts. It has a well-earned reputation for cutting stuff like drama and comedy, where effects and pre-rendered sequences take a back seat to well-timed cuts between takes and fast iterative editing feedback. The node-based compositor is... unique, but I'm not sure I'm qualified to say it's an objectively easier or better workflow than AE — YMMV.
It's also capable of doing other things like handling basic A/V effects and compositing, but not as well as other NLEs or compositors. Its best output formats are behind a licensing wall, though they're still far cheaper than Adobe, Apple, or Avid, and you can do almost all your actual cutting with the free version. While it's more stable than some FOSS NLEs, it's still shakier than Avid or Premiere on well-supported hardware, with the distinct advantage that it's got native Linux support.
The weirdest part, though, was that it was supposed to have been open-sourced after EditShare acquired it, then they didn't, and they've been saying "it'll be open sourced when it's ready" for almost 4 years now.[1]
[1] https://www.lwks.com/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&c...
Shotcut wouldn't keep working with XFCE4 Xubuntu 16.04 for me. If I applied any heavier effect it would freeze, then crash.
With even cell phones shooting 4k I would think this would be a standard feature. It's not super complex.
The only tool in Linux that's really decent at editing video isn't even a video editing tool. It's Blender.
For the past few years I've just used Resolve in Windows. I'd be excited to try Shortcut and see if it handled better.
Video editing is a though medium though, even if you're just calling ffmpeg a lot. It's worth watching the Vimeo talk and video encoding and how a lot of cameras and cellphone encoders are so crappy they can change framerates on every frame.
For example with Camtasia, you can click 1 button and have your desktop + audio + optional webcam all being recorded to your video project, and then you can hop in and edit it with a bunch of great tools and presets. This includes complex animations and tooltips with doing nothing more than dragging around a few sliders.
Basically you can get up and going with an excellent work flow as 1 single person who isn't a video editing god.
Where does Shotcut stand compared to that?
At this point price isn't an issue for people in a position to create videos. It's all about how fast it is to go from an empty folder to a high production quality video.
Camtasia is one of the only reasons why I run Windows so if your project can solve all of those problems, that would be an incredible feat since Camtasia seems to have no intent on supporting anything but Mac / Windows.
Also if it helps gauge the comparison I have tried kdenlive about 6 months ago and compared to Camtasia I would rate kdenlive a 0.001 and Camtasia a 9.5 on the sole task of "quickly create a nice looking screencast".
There's an awful lot of people who want to break into Youtube with no money.
There's also a small but well-represented on HN market of people who want to have an OSS/Free Software only workflow.
This is after having recorded about 50 hours of real-time video over a few years. There's just so many things you absolutely need to be happy and productive when recording -- especially if you plan to do this for a living.
Using a bad video editor (and I'm not saying Shotcut is bad because I haven't installed it yet) is just a really draining and time wasting experience.
It takes me around 70 minutes of real life time to produce 10 minutes of video after years of work flow optimizations and using what I think is one of the best tools available to make screencasts. Almost all of that time is spent editing in Camtasia (stopping and starting the recording, correcting mistakes, adding post-production effects, etc.).
I would love to switch to an open source tool (for many reasons) but the reality of the situation is, I wouldn't switch unless it was remarkable because it's such an important tool if you're livelihood depends on making videos.
Shotcut and Kdenlive are fundamentally video editors, which happen to be able to do screen recording. Camtasia is specifically a screen recorder.
Look at a couple of Youtube videos on Camtasia 9. It is a full fledged editor (and also does audio / video recording too). That's the winning property of it.
You just click a button to start recording, deliver your video content, press stop and then you can immediately start editing your content. Then you export and you're done.
With something like premiere you would have to record your audio and / or video with a different tool and spend a lot of time importing. I also found premier's UI to be crazy complex (in a very non-intuitive way). I haven't tried movie maker.
Camtasia's editing effects are just enough to make really nice screencast style videos without being overwhelming. I've gotten hundreds of positive reviews on my tech courses that were related to the production quality of the videos.
For example, the video on this course page[0] was made fully with Camtasia 9. All of the animations and even the slides / tooltips.
That whale animation and text dropping effect took around 5 minutes to make from scratch once I figured out what I wanted to do. All I had to do was pick some things from a few drop down boxes and drag 2 or 3 sliders around.
May I suggest working on your logo and loosing the AdSense ads on your page? Unfortunately, AdSense ads are borderline malware these days. I got one for MacKeeper and another for a fishy VPN.
As for me, I edit a lot more videos, and I spend a quite of time on doing it. I've tried to work with a lot of different FOSS video editors, except Blender, and my conclusion was always the same -- it's usable, but a little rough on the edge, and has just enough minor bugs or quirks to be irritating and sometimes frustrating. I'm not talking about just crashes, since that happens on all video editors even on Premiere Pro.
Video editing is somewhat similar to coding, as it requires a lot of concentration, intensity, and creativity... There's nothing more frustrating than having the software/tools that gets in your way and block your flow and progress. Also time is money in video production house, often with tight deadlines. Some wedding videographers are offering same-day edits, which sounds insane to me, since video editing takes a lot of time. As for me, it takes about 7 hours to edit 1 hour video.
Currently I'm using Davinci Resolve 14 (on both Mac and Windows but haven't used on Linux yet). So far, it has worked surprisingly well. I really like the built-in audio editing and coloring tools. All this is free, with exception of some features for pro/studio version.
Some have complained the lack of h264/265 import on Linux version of Davinci Resolve, but you can always transcode to "pseudo-lossless" codec such as DNxHR/DNxHD (or ProRes if on Mac) using ffmpeg first. This step is usually automated using script to convert raw footage. Most pro workflow also involves this extra step, because editing on h264 source is really painfully slow and inefficient.
As a side note, the last time I checked, in LA/Hollywood, Avid was still the king of editor, but it may be changing. Anywhere except Hollywood, Premiere Pro CC is definitely the most popular editor, especially when it's used in conjunction with After Effects. However, I didn't need AE and I didn't like subscription-based payment model. Avid Composer First is free version of Avid, but it can't output 4k, and Avid UI is horrible.
> Davinci Resolve, but you can always transcode to "pseudo-lossless"
> codec such as DNxHR/DNxHD (or ProRes if on Mac) using ffmpeg first. This
> step is usually automated using script to convert raw footage. Most pro
> workflow also involves this extra step, because editing on h264 source is
> really painfully slow and inefficient.
The preferred workflow would be import h264, edit using proxies, then render the result from the original files. A pro workflow shouldn't involve a gratuitous transcoding step. Mind you a real pro workflow wouldn't involve ingesting h264 files at all.
But it might be true that I should just get over myself and transcode the files before editing.
It is better than iMovie in this regard because it doesn't require copying the giant file into some "project" directory like iMovie seems to.
This is my biggest gripe with iMovie. You need to have double the space just to start editing.
I guess their idea was to allow users to move their video files around and delete them at will without being able to mess up the iMovie project.
However, iMovie has great screen transitions. Is there any other free or open source program that compares in that regard?
Its simple, functional, and does exactly what I need to do: cut, arrange, and splice clips and audio and export video.
I'm not going to say its the best, I'd really like to have the ability to dub in app instead of running audacity in the background, and I find its ability to put titles and text kinda wonky.
But its a simple tool that does exactly what I need to do and is Open Source.
At the moment, it is pretty unclear of the exact install process!
If you're on Ubuntu or similar, then once you're running it you can right click on the Icon and choose "Lock to launcher"
Anybody got a link to a comparison between this and iMovie? "Shortcut" seems to be quite ungoogleable.
Works well for the mp4 streams from my helmet camera, reliable key frames etc. For video that's been more highly compressed you'll need to compromise on the cut points if you want to avoid reencoding. And the cuts are abrupt, no fades or transitions.
The aged virtualdub does this as long as the container is avi (the codec could be avc/h.264 etc). I used avidemux to convert mp4 to avi without reencoding (just change the container format), then use virtualdub to trim it.
Actually I just write time stamps in a text file then use a groovy script to generate a script can be read by virtualdub, run virtualdub with the script to do the trimming.
It has worked for me for many years.
Not free but cheap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression_picture_type...
If you need more resolution, you can apply more tricks, recompose i-frames from the same data, etc.
Kdenlive is another foss editor based on MLT, like Shotcut.
It's a shame that interop with Shotcut isn't great, even though both save their projects as MLT XML. I think there's just one property that you need to add to a Kdenlive XML to make it readable by Shotcut (something like shotcut="1"). That said, I think Shotcut makes much cleaner XMLs.
Tried Davinci Resolve as well. I generally like it, but find it less intuitive to use than Kdenlive (surprisingly, given one is commercial and the other is open source).
One thing I'm working on in my spare time is a MLT <-> FCPXML converter. I collaborate with people who use Final Cut Pro or Premiere, so it will be necessary to exchange projects both ways. I'm surprised that none of the open source video editors support this natively :(
Initially Davinci Resolve was born a color grading tool, not a non-linear editor (that's why there a whole tab dedicated to color). The NLE capabilities were added after it was bought by Black Magic Design. That may explain this lack of intuitiveness.
I'm looking for a timeline editor in javascript which allows me to build an object to pass to ffmpeg to inject content at certain intervals.
Much like what gifs.com [0] does.
I have found this [1]: but it's not really what I am looking for.
If anyone has come across something similar, let me know. Thanks
