I’m looking for a program that can cut video, adjust exposure levels, color correct, stabilize and encode.
I’ve never done anything like this before, so ease of use would be great. But if there’s an established standard program (like Gimp for photos), I’ll learn it. Any suggestions would be helpful.
In addition to all of the open source options that have been offered, Davinci Resolve runs well on Linux and has all of the above features (and many, many more). It’s also a buy once keep forever situation rather than a subscription since they make their real money on hardware. OSS it isn’t, but it’s incredibly powerful, has an extensive free (as in beer) edition and beats the hell out of paying a monthly fee.
As for DaVinci Resolve, installation can be a bit weird if you don’t happen to run one of the officially supported Distros. Because of that, the easiest way to run it is probably via DistroBox, Michael Horn made a great tutorial about that: youtu.be/wmRiZQ9IZfc
Personal example: Fedora (38 - 39). Resolve uses libs which depends on some older versions of a lib, which they don't ship in the installer.
So I had to replace the depending libs so that Resolve can run with Fedoras more recent libs.
It wouldn’t be trivial to package such a big app as a flatpak (or snap for that matter) and also maintain it properly, so as long as the original developers don’t do the work I think it is unlikely to happen. But for a tool that I’m going to be using a lot in the future I think it makes sense to invest the time once to install it, even if it’s a bit more complicated.
For sure try out olive You can’t do automatic stabilization but manual works fine, However I will always use gyroflow whenever possible anyways. If needed you can easily script motion tracking data from 3rd party sources.
but it is properly color managed throughout the entire editor so doing color correction works properly and accurately. the node system is really powerful despite it’s early nature, and as far as I know olive is the only FOSS editor with proper OCIO integration, which means you get industry standard color management tooling including things like ACES support. You also have OTIO support for importing and exporting editorial cutting information.
I’ve found Shotcut to be more stable than Kdenlive. Tho I haven’t tried the latest kdenlive yet. Both have glaxnimate support so motion graphics is possible with both.
Huh, how come I’ve never heard about this, but it looks so professional (?), at least for the website presentation.
Is it better than the common Kdenlive and Blender in your experience?
I had the most luck with shotcut. I’ve been meaning to try kdenlive again though but there were a few fx I needed that immediately apparent in shotcut that I could not find quickly in kdenlive.
I suspect kdenlive has it covered but timelines dictated that I not change horses mid race, and I haven’t got back to retry.
Shotcut is great, especially because ffmpeg, GPU acceleration and very easy to learn workflows (although admittedly not so intuitive that you get them right away).
I don’t know about Kdenlive, but I tried Openshot and found it to be much slower and lacking functionality, although it’s even easier to use for the basics.
I actually want to give kdenlive another shot. But since I already figured out the keyframe mechanics in shotcut it was a too tall an order to relearn a new WY to do it in short order (clock was ticking for me to get a video done for a kid’s b-day!)
It’s underrated, but it has so much untouched potential to make it really shine and it is unfortunately still a bit unintuitive to use.
I wonder if it will ever get some love again by the devs, because it’s clear that the focus is 99% on the 3D aspect of things right now and it will most likely be so for a long time to come, for good reasons of course, the advancements there have been astounding and really needed because they’re THE libre 3D animation software, while there are already other established libre video editors out there, so there is less necessity. But I still believe that if Blender was to ever give a refresh to the VSE, it would immediately outclass all the other options
You’ve probably got your answer already, but just wanting to confirm that Kdenlive can do all the things you listed.
Though the editor itself is very easy to use and obvious (if you previously have used premiere etc), you might find the UI for some of the individual effects a bit confusing. There’s tool tips and sometimes help videos and stuff, but you might find yourself dragging a few sliders left and right to find out what they actually do :)
Note that generally speaking, Kdenlive doesn’t currently support graphics-card-accelerated timeline preview very well, so if you’re packing on the effects, you might not get real-time playback in the timeline without “preview rendering”. If you ever used Premiere 20 years ago, it works the same as that.
From memory, Olive has the best “in-timeline” graphics card acceleration - but is otherwise at a much earlier stage of development.
As others have mentioned, some or all of these are also doable in Shotcut, Openshot, Olive.
Also, you might be interested in TJFree Tutorials on YouTube, which has a playlist of Kdenlive tutorials - for older versions, but it’s mostly going to be the same. He also has tutorials in loads of other FOSS creative software. I found he tended to be “clear and efficient” and doesn’t take 5 minutes to give you 1 minute’s information.
Thank you, I’ll keep that in mind if I need to do more.
Currently, I just have a 5 minute clip that needs cutting, stabilizing and some color correction, and Shotcut let me do that without tutorials or manuals.
Thanks. I tried both, and Shotcut was the one where I actually understood how to import, edit and export a video without consulting the manual, so I’m going with that.
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