Linux Needs a Better Video Editor - Kdenlive Isn't It

I want to not use windows. But video editing is a reason I have windows. Most of the time I am in linux.
My better option - Vegas Movie Studio. Although last I tried, could not get it to run in linux.

I've been trying very hard to pick out a replacement editor for Premiere. Both times I tried Kdenlive out, it crashed, even with the "stable" appimage version. That's not a good sign if Kdenlive is the best FOSS editor Linux has to tout.

I've run against most of the problems and frustrations with Kdenlive you did. Now I feel not alone. Thanks! 😆
I still use Blender for video editing, because it is S.T.A.B.L.E., but not very flexible and easy to use for that task.
Strangely enough I also experienced nonworking Resolve on all my Linux computers. My several attempts to make it work ended futile. 🤷‍♂

A video editor that goes in the direction of Final Cut Pro or Magix Video Studio would be perfect. The Linux editors like Olive, Kdenlive or Shotcut aren't bad, but imo they are not intuitive enough and are always missing some little features. Davinci Resolve is good, but too complicated. I don't want to invest hours in learning a new video editing program, if I only need basic options for video editing.

I just edited together a short film in ShotCut and it worked pretty well. I can't really compare it with other video editors since this is the first major piece of editing that I've done, but I was able to get the hang of it pretty quickly and I'm happy with the results.

It could be Cinellera

Premiere Pro is also not free of bugs. I had a video editing experience with it a few years ago (doing cuts, hardcoding subs, adding png slides and clip transitions) and to me it was a nightmare how laggy PP was.

I disagree with this tbh... but okay...

Davinci Resolve?

Kdenlive - Doesn't Work Properly Because, it Uses FFmpeg to Modify the Video Stream.
Sony / TCL, doesn't Want Others to Know How Their Televisions and Video Camera's Work.
So, they've Put Bugs in FFmpeg. The Reason SUSE / KDE is Working on OBS Studio (Webcam).
Kdenlive and OBS Studio is the OpenSUSE / KDE(Qt) / Sun Microsystems Guys.
The Same as The BEA Weblogic Guys.
Need to Give Them the iPhone (iOS Kernel) for Kdenlive and OBS Studio.

How about using capcut and lumafusion. Give them a try

+1 sub

Dare you to make a video, editing a video using kdenlive.

Any response from kdenlive?

The desktop must have a completely different version of Openshot than the laptop, this does not help with editing.

I have not found anything on Linux as easy to use as the old Windows Movie Maker or W10 Photos, or the video editing on an iPhone. The Linux programs suck so bad for a beginner user like me. And those that suck less go missing from Synaptic & probably come back when some bizarre problem with libraries is solved. Lossless Cut worked well for me & then that got deprecated from Xubuntu or Mint I can't remember which now. Microsoft and Apple understand that 95% of people just want a simple intuitive video editor & provide it! End of rant.

Dude, you're a heart attack in the making. You truly need to lose weight, or i fear, it's curtains for you, soon. I say this with love, as others wouldn't.

There are two styles of Kdenlive both recent versions in the software center . The style you are using dose look cool although we have experienced similar issues with the end crash but in our case the video still existed and we made a video on the topic . You could try the other style of Kdenlive and if you do there maybe some things it can not do that yours can we are not sure . Just to point out we use snaps and not flat packs not that should make a difference . One other thing if you look at your updates you should be able to control them and select not to update Kdenlive either through the software updater or the software center .

"all I can do is sit here and bitch about it"xD ahahahah
I kinda think in record all your stuff on your linux machine and then transfer those videos(files) to a windows machine and use a propper not buggy software like adobe premiere pro.
I don't know how efficient this approach would it be, but heck that definitively would solve the issue, it's the thing that came across, 'cause I want to make a programming tutorial video with theory of computation and me coding along (I mean with a lot of editing [so far no effects, that hopefully came later]) but setting up a mic in linux and edit seems to be a non trivial thing in linux, but if there is something that I like is the whole evolution of the gnu-linux in the past decade. maybe we just need to be using the software in order to the developers take actions, like this past years

Davinci Resolve is better in my opinion than Premiere. And I've been using the adobe app for over a decade. I switched a few years ago, don't miss a thing. The workflow is better, the motion graphics capabilities are bigger, the color gradation is amazing, the editing process is ergonomic and streamlined. But the big but. I only use it on my windows machine. On linux it only works with a certain file extension, and the installation can be a hassle.
So when on linux I use shotcut or kdenlive. I think shotcut has a good and fast renderer. But yes, I know what you mean.
It's a shame that Davinci on linux is kind of broken.

pretty valid ranting to me....
this has been my gripes with Linux since forever... I keep coming back to Linux(Ubuntu or Linux Mint) because it keeps getting better and better... Linux Mint for me fills my needs and was VERY STABLE and reliable.... the Open Source video editor are okay but they are no way good in UI/UX <-- you need these things in video editing lol....yes there is Davinci Resolv but cmon you gotta be real its not a handy tool and its massive load if you just wanna install it on your old intel 4th gen laptop lol ... on Windows you can just install some 300mb size installer for a video editor and you would be greeted some decent video editors.....
I'm hoping that the Android app thing(Anbox/Waydroid) will get really good like Apple Rosetta 2 so that we can just run Android Video editors....

Hey I think I know what happened with your issue with the 12 minute video was a bigger file size than your longer video. It is due to the fact that Kdenlive uses FFmpeg as its rendering tool and uses CRF(if you are not using the experimental hardware excellaration which will use CQP, which does a similar thing) as its rate control.

CRF is practicaly a quality preset which will change the bitrate use to meet a certain quality standard. If your video has more movement or detailed things in it, it will raise the bitrate it for that part of the video to maintain the quality of which you set(0 CRF = highest quality, 51 CRF = lowest). That smaller video might have had things that would require more bitrate to encode so it ended up with a larger file size. I hope this helps!


(even though I am a few months late)

I am a professional graphic designer and I use Linux. I often do animation which I finalize and sound in Kdenlive. Recently, I have also been doing special effects (VFX) and audio for a TV commercial, also using Kdenlive and Blender for that. It has some pains and limitations, but overall it's a great program. I do not agree that Kdenlive is missing something. Maybe you lack the skills and patience to learn to use this program well? Maybe you need something easier? I recommend Olive Video editor but version 0.1. Blender is also a good alternative to Kdenlive. It has a pretty convenient built-in video editor. All in all, there is no better video program in the Open Source world than Kdenlive. As for crash problems, kdenlive can usually recover the whole project.

It's not an issue with bugs or coding. It's an issue with KDE development in general. Ever since KDE 4 the attitude of the developers has been "don't like it? Too bad." Check the issues on almost any K project and see how quickly any feature requests are closed or how many years bug reports are open for simple things like file management issues. Stop it with the damn feature bloat and fix the bugs and the usability of the apps!

Absolutely, KDEnlive is great... but it is by no means professional. The only other great linux editor is DaVinci, but it is shit when it comes to hardware, and the free version needs a fucking script to convert videos for it to work, so it's not really usable tbh.
At the end of the day linux is truly missing a FinalCut or a Premiere alike, it really is.

Please kde kdenlive community STOP NEW FEATURES and solve the bugs. 1 year long. Thx.
2 years...

you should try blender, it has a video editor, and its stable and quite good actually :)

Maybe because I have alot of yours with Adobe but kdenlive and divinci are so counter intuitive. Like it should be a matter of just finding the tool I now need in a different place. But everything is couched in menus and menus and toggles like why

To anyone who might have the time, why is it that the kdenlive executable for Windows has a smaller size than that rpms of .Deb versions?

Try harder to install davinci resolve xD
What do you thing about editing in blender?

I’ve been using Shotcut for quite a while, which you said you tried. Was it just that you didn’t like the looks of it, or was there some missing functionality.

Use Davinci Resolve and nvidia gpu with proprietary driver and CUDA. Problem mostly solved.

Excuse my ignorance but why not update until all your video projects are finished/uploaded? Then start the new projects on the new version?

The Olive video editor is pretty good for simple videos. Plus Gimp for additional graphics.
But I couldn't do without my GPU Passthrough Windows VM with Adobe stuff.

For stability, try the Blender VSE.

Da Vinci Resolve sucks on Linux. I had problems installing it as well, plus it's using an archaic script to install instead of shipping it as .rpm or flatpak like any other sane app does.

I've never used Kden for anything so I can't personally make any judgments. However, I''d like to suggest the same thing I did with using Gimp. I hated it at first so I used whatever I could to get by. BUT, I forced myself to use it every day for something... Sometimes I'd just pick a feature I knew I'd use a lot then open an image and work at it till I could say.. ahhhh, so that's how to do it. I find Olive to be the same... yes it's alpha but it hasn't crashed on me in a long time. Just a few weeks ago I actually got DiVinchi installed on my desktop. Unfortunately we are going back to Mx for another 6 months and leaving just a few days from now... Not much time to use it before we leave. Anyway, I feel your pain and have seen other YT videos complaining about similar issues you have mentioned... Another complaint I see a lot is about how long Kden takes to render a video..

I use kdenlive and have the same problems. In their defense having come from being a windows lifer to a Linux user. Kdenlive is still better than most free alternatives for windows as well.

You are a good person, you recognized something that you wanted to improve. That is awesome. You're such a cool guy. Just also know it's ok to have some imperfections. We all do.

This is what you get with freedom software. There is no incentive to make a good product for free. This is why paid software exists.

I feel your pain, krita is the same, and I'm on linux. Supposedly is even worse on windows.

I have the same issue with Kdenlive that I do with pretty much every KDE app - everything feels like it's in beta. They're pretty and the features they keep adding sound great, but that doesn't matter if it's constantly crashing on you.

I been using three video editors. I like kdenlive, openshot and shotcut. I haven't edited a video for a while. But when Qt got introduced and apps start using it; especially video editor apps. Things went hay-wired. openshot was great until they move to Qt. They still had their older version and I just stuck with that. Not sure that's a choice now. Build your own kdenlive to get some INSTALL_PREFIX to your liking.

Matt, you do a good job. Sometimes, you sound like Cap-tain Ki-rk. :-)

Resolve?

Davinci Resolve seems to install fine for me on EndeavourOS, both 17 and the 18 beta. Just needed cuda and libxcrypt-compat installing as well. I've yet to get really stuck into it so I don't know if it fully functions as well as in Windows, but time will tell.

Davinci Resolve.

Lol you think video editing is bad, try serious music production