Kdenlive hits the perfect sweet spot for me. It's much more capable than basic editors like iMovie, but doesn't have the overwhelming learning curve (or steep hardware requirements) of DaVinci Resolve.
Like others have mentioned, pairing it with OBS for screen recording and Audacity for audio makes for an incredibly powerful, 100% FOSS media creation stack. It's amazing to see how far open-source video editing has come.
Same. They really thread that needle well IMHO. I choose to use Kdenlive over paid options, not because I have to, but because I want to. It's quality software, and it being free (in both aspects) is a dream come true.
kdenlive to me is like gimp. I launch it everytime I want to do something quickly, without really thinking about what tool to use.
With Davinci Resolve I have to intentionally plan on making a video to be willing to use it, because it's much heavier, doesn't support the audio in most of the source videos I am using, so I have to convert that first, and does a lot more than what I usually need.
That is the onboard recording feature of the Meta Quest, it does have a way to change the video codec but the audio codec is fixed.
I'd also argue that most off the shelf stuff that records videos in any form uses AAC as a default simply because it's ubiquitous and thus has great cross compatibility.
It's mostly for youtube shorts that don't get a ton of views in the first place, so I am going for a quick and easy fix that keeps the file size mostly the same.
But you are of course right, if I would go for a professional setup I would not recompress it
I am so embarrassed I have never tried it. I am extremely bursty with video so I just grabbed obs and openshot and use those. I always presumed it wouldn't be enough because it was 'just part of the kde suite'. I will try to remember to spin it up next project.
Be careful with any serious project, this software most certainly will crash and destroy your work. It crashes since many years and developers do not seem to care or are not able to understand how important stability for media creation software really is. Especially small and independent artists should absolutely avoid any software that introduces additional risk of project failure as one such crash scenario at an advanced project state has a high potential of total destruction.
Choose wisely! Resolve is available for very little money and not only a much safer choice, but you will also learn to use an industry standard tool and might be able to monetise that skill one day.
Kdenlive is a hobbiest project and is probably still ok for occasionally splitting a downloaded YouTube video or converting your OBS recordings, but never should you remotely think about using it for a project where you need to rely on your tools.
The developers are not warning you enough, instead still trying to market this software as kind of a serious competitor to pro software, so I do that as a service for the aspiring video editor, taking your downvotes proudly as the price honest people have to pay.
For what it's worth, while I haven't found kdenlive (or shotcut, based on the same underlying toolkit) to be 100% stable, I've had significantly fewer lost-work incidents with kdenlive than I did with Premiere Pro. The frustration of Premiere's instability was the main thing that drove me to open-source software.
I've never used Resolve primarily so I don't have a good feeling of how they compare, but I have experienced a couple of unexpected, mid-work crashes in Resolve as well. I believe these were tied to my working on a machine with an Intel iGPU, which at least at the time seemed to be... discouraged, I'll say, by the Resolve community due to known stability issues. Possibly the root of evil with Premiere as well, but again, doesn't seem to be a major problem for kdenlive.
What I will say is that I personally prefer Shotcut to kdenlive. Both are basically graphical frontends to MLT, the actual media toolkit/editor (driven by XML files). Shotcut has a simpler, more user-friendly UI than kdenlive and also seems to be a bit more stable/performant. kdenlive is more featureful. I think most people should try both because it probably depends on your workflow which is more convenient.
Resolve/Resolve Studio and FCPX have significant presences as well.
I’d say its closest “competitors” are really Resolve and iMovie (much more robust than iMovie but same market more or less) since anyone who’s doing this professionally is going to pay for Avid/Premiere/Resolve Studio/maybe FCPX and not use kdenlive. Resolve is more geared towards casual use and hobbyists, while still being powerful in its own right (and free, of course).
Premiere is a (finicky) subscription based professional tool. kdenlive will never be a replacement for that and doesn’t strike me as an attempt at one.
Premiere is in the unique position of being the oldest video editing suite on the market - the first version was released in 1991! Much as with Photoshop, this sort of automatically makes it the gold standard.
It used to be the "gold standard" but a while ago just about everything else ate its lunch.
Resolve has an amazing free-as-in-beer version and the fully paid for one is currently £225 - and that's it, you've bought it, no subscription. Adobe biffed that one.
For VFX you've got a separate app, Adobe After Effects, which was absolutely amazing, but Resolve uses a node-based VFX chain rather than AE's Photoshop-like layers. Now okay, if you're used to AE and layers then nodes are a steepish learning curve - but if you're already using Blender or Unreal Engine (and lots of VFX folk are) then it's a nice simple jump.
Resolve's training material is way better than Premiere's, too.
You alluded to this but it’s worth expanding this point a bit: Adobe wants you to pay for premiere, Lightroom, audition, after effects, etc. all separately too. One $300 USD purchase and you have resolve studio (premiere), fairlight (audition but admittedly not as feature rich/stable), fusion (after effects), and now photo (Lightroom, new though so probably not at its level yet), all in one software package. Plus BMD’s industry standard color tools.
The cost of an Adobe subscription just makes no sense to me anymore unless you’re a photographer or graphic designer primarily as BMD hasn’t replaced that pipeline (yet). For video and vfx work fusion is great. Anything more advanced in the animation/effects world and you’re leaving NLE’s entirely anyway.
Also let’s talk about Adobe cloud manager…
Edit: it would be ~$60/mo for the above in creative cloud. $720 a year.
Shotcut to me is what Windows Movie Maker should have become. A handful of useful tools, a simple layout, just enough to get the job done, and a good bit of depth if you really want to get your feet wet with video editing.
> Especially small and independent artists should absolutely avoid any software that introduces additional risk of project failure as one such crash scenario at an advanced project state has a high potential of total destruction.
I can't really comment on kdenlive, but this sounds kind of overly dramatic to me. I mean, I hope you save and take regular snapshots/backups in case your disk, RAM or just human error destroys anything substantial.
There's already a lot of replies to this comment so it clearly hit a nerve with a lot of people!
All I'll add is that if this was 5 years ago, I'd completely agree with you as I've had my timeline completely screw up before, or other unusual behaviours that ended up causing a project reset. And I'm not the only one[1], I remember this video when it came out.
But while I'm not a regular YouTuber or videomaker, I still use Kdenlive about once a month and anecdotally it hasn't done this in at least 4 years. However, having software that you spend so much time working with ruin a project is legitimately traumatising, so I understand your strong feelings.
You are talking about a problem that is 8 years old and there was a whole timeline refactoring to fix such issues. It is worth to give it another test...
We are in agreement - I was coming from a place of understanding as to why the PC felt that way, but going on to say that Kdenlive hasn't had this issue in at least 4 years in my experience.
Are you on some point-release distro that never pulls in the latest frameworks? I know I've noticed a big uplift in stability by using a rolling release base, or Flatpak if stuck on "stable".
Yes, it's complex software that has to interact very closely with the hardware and it's written in C++.
Those aren't excuses, but they are explanations. The competition from Adobe crashes a lot, too. It's not necessarily a competence or money thing.
Also, the windows taskbar in windows 11 crashes a couple times a day for me. And Microsoft is one of the biggest tech companies in the world. And, I'm assuming, very talented engineers worked on that taskbar.
I don't think they vibecode the core of windows though. From what I heard particularly (from osdev community) the core of windows is really good and well structured.
“Vista bad” comments on a forum supposedly frequented mostly by IT people is just plain ridiculous. If you think “Vista bad, 7 good” then you clearly need to reevaluate your understanding of computer technology.
You make it sound like the same bugs have been there for 25 years. That again isn't fair given that many, many, many new features have been added to the project since its inception in 2002. They are also somewhat at the mercy of the MLT framework that they depend on for a lot of the heavy lifting.
And they do fix crash bugs. All the time. You can see that in the announcements they put out after each release. I think the general perception is that it is indeed becoming more robust as time goes on as new developers have come on board to help. The project is gaining momentum that it hadn't really had before.
KDE stuff is prone to fixing bugs in both the supporting libraries and software substantially after the versions that end up in stable distros eg n.0 sucks but n.4 ends up substantially improving the prior issues.
I would suggest a self contained version on stable distros or running on a rolling release whichever is practical.left to take advantage of said improvements.
I would also suggest that performance under Windows may be less tested. I personally wouldn't use it there.
I agree that this software is not ready for wide adoption in industry. Crashes are 5-10 times more common than premiere, FCP, avid, or resolve. I use it to make short instructional videos with V/O, which it is a godsend for- a massive improvement over the NLE options that existed before kdenlive. It is capable but stability is a major issue.
Also, what many of the computer programmer people here downvoting will not understand is that interrupting creative flow with crashes is not an acceptable cost of doing business.
Film industry people who work 50 hour weeks editing video give negative fucks about what OS it's on or whether they can open a python console. They do not see submitting bug reports on github as a stimulating intellectual exercise. They need it to work without a crash for 50 hours a week, and that's why their workplaces take the $1000/seat/year hit. Same reason you see auto mechanics spending $200 for one snap on wrench instead of a whole harbor freight set.
> Also, what many of the computer programmer people here downvoting will not understand is that interrupting creative flow with crashes is not an acceptable cost of doing business.
I had avid and resolve doing the same... I guess we just die instead of working with a proper pipe or telling the tool to also save an XML for emergencies. You will have failures like that with every tool especially in editing and VFX.
Everything you're saying is right, but people hate hearing that an open source project is poorly made in a thread about it. Most of the people who get upset by what you're saying have probably never used it. It is very unstable and should not be relied on.
Were you using the AppImage / Flatpak of it? Backwards policies of Linux distros that allow them to randomly change the dependencies of kdenlive made it unstable since they were using bad versions of dependencies with it.
So my son and I have used Kdenlive quite a bit and we've never had it crash. That's why I was asking for specifics: it would be interesting to know what circumstances lead to crashes, even if it's just a hunch.
You're getting downvoted but just yesterday it got in a weird state, crashed, and corrupted recent backup saves and I had to do a bunch of work all over again. I still enjoy using it but this scenario on a pretty basic project would be unacceptable in a professional setting.
