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.
There’s Lightworks, too, although it’s geared toward the editing process. I like it, though, and have been able to make it work for general video editing. The color correction tools are better than Kdenlive and not as good as DaVinci Resolve, but unlike Resolve, it will decode/encode H.264 and AAC. It’s powerful without being quite as overwhelming as Resolve can be for newbies. There’s no advanced setup involved unlike Resolve. The playback is responsive even with 4K footage. Kdenlive is great too, if you don’t need more advanced features or are working with a lot of 4K footage.
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.
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.
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
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!)
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?
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