Flowblade: Open-source video editor for Linux(jliljebl.github.io) |
Flowblade: Open-source video editor for Linux(jliljebl.github.io) |
- Opening Movie Maker redirects to the Photos app, with a note that Microsoft Clipchamp has this functionality now and Movie Maker is deprecated.
- Install Clipchamp and see that its hilariously bad at batch-adding clips to the timeline. Adding 300 clips, one at a time, is a dealbreaker.
- Look up reviews for free 3rd party apps to do this on Windows. Find everyone recommending DaVinci Resolve. Fine. Install Resolve. Looks great. Import my clips, and get only audio. A quick Google search tells me that Resolve free version doesn't support importing 10-bit video. Welp.
- Let's try FOSS then. Shotcut is supposedly better than Openshot. Install Shotcut. Import all clips, add to timeline and export. Takes a few hours to export, displays a Success message and gives me the first few seconds of video, followed by a couple of hours of just audio.
- F** it, let's try Openshot. Hesitant because I've heard a lot of crashing happens, but what do I have to lose. Install. Import clips. Add to timeline. Let's me add transitions. Export takes a few hours. Gives me flawless output file.
Moral of the story: For occasional amateur video editing, Openshot is great.
- Kdenlive is also a fairly capable video editor. https://kdenlive.org/en/
- From what I have heard the Blender video editor for many people is a go to tool as well. In this case it likely would have been overkill, but figured it is worth mentioning.
And yes, Blender would have been overkill, but I might've gone that route if Openshot didn't work out.
Blender is great as well if you happen to be a programmer, as everything is also callable as Python functions. The "built-in docs" in form of hovering over buttons and seeing what the equivalent Python code would be, makes it super easy to script together one-off scripts for doing things like "Add 300 video clips with a 100ms fade-in-out between all of them".
Middle-school-me's still waiting for Lightworks's free Linux release. Are Avidemux, Kino, Cinelerra, PiTiVi still around?
once I started working with DaVinci.. game changer, from start to finish, with some advanced motion tracking, title overlays, in less than a few hours. Upside is also that there are plenty of tutorials available for DaVinci, from beginner to advanced
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/edi...
EDIT also, since last I used it, the Blender Compositor has gotten a lot better. Dang.
For simple horizontal edits, it can be quite convenient. But they really need to fix a bug or two, especially considering the amount of footage by phones out there.
I don't know, I'm asking.
People sometimes suggest Blender, which is of course high quality software, but most people reaching for a video editor benefit from a tool with fewer options that is more aimed at basic use cases.
Perhaps "Flowblade: Open-Source Video Editor for Linux" would be a more appropriate title.
I wonder if we should just accept it or if we really want every tool to list supported operating systems already in headlines? (and nowadays mobile probably counts too)
For clarity, my comment was more along the lines of 'saved you a click' than expectations/aspirations for every tool to cover every popular-ish environment.
As a user I want the most polished program available and am not against using closed source if it meets my needs as is and I don't need to modify it beyond it's supported options.
There is a popular prejudgement (IMHO fact based) that artists are picky so FLOSS tools for artists often try to communicate secondarily that is FLOSS and where is being developed.
For "picky" I mean statements like "is not photoshop", "is not premiere" and if you go to Adobe sites there are no links to code repositories. This projects try to sell themselves similarilly. (hope I made myself clear)
Flowblade – Free and Libre Video Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19089326 - Feb 2019 (7 comments)
Flowblade – Free and Libre Video Editor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12534245 - Sept 2016 (1 comment)
Yes, Resolve is great. If you're not using it in Linux, at least.
IN Linux, however, I've found Kdenlive to be a bit rough, but completely reasonable for many medium editing tasks. Yes, it occasionally crashes, but not with any frequency where it makes it unusable. I haven't really lost much in the way of work when it does crash, either. Save early, save often. Etc.
Black Magic also provide a custom Rocky Linux ISO with each release. It's not widely-advertised and I found it at the end of their release notes PDF.
>For users setting up new systems or looking to use a standardized DaVinci Resolve environment, a standard Rocky Linux 8.6 ISO is available to download at:
>https://downloads.blackmagicdesign.com/DaVinciResolve/DaVinc...
>(MD5: https://downloads.blackmagicdesign.com/DaVinciResolve/DaVinc...).
>The ISO file can be burned to a bootable USB flash drive or a DVD for the installation process. Before installation, ensure that you have backups of your files, including media and Resolve project libraries. Turn off UEFI Secure Boot in BIOS configuration and boot from the ISO.
>Selecting the Automatic option will erase all the files on your connected drives during installation. Please ensure that you only connect a single boot drive to install the OS onto. Alternatively, select Manual configuration and customize the target drive and partitions when installing the OS.
>The installer takes care of all dependencies - including standard libraries, Nvidia drivers and DeckLink drivers. When the installation is complete, you can reboot the system once, and download and install DaVinci Resolve using the instructions above. When upgrading DaVinci Resolve, please check this section in the new installer for any special instructions you may need for the new version.
I do believe that Resolve is not open source, correct? That's not an issue for me but it could be for others.
Some of its built-in tools are quite sophisticated, e.g. setting up key frames that follow a moving object (a bird in this case), and then adding tracking 'targeting graticules' or changing orientation from landscape to vertical (i.e. for mobile), but dynamically changing the screen clipping coords so that a bird flying across the landscape view remains central when converted to vertical.
This was all with the free version. I've some prior experience with video editing software so the learning curve wasn't too bad. I did watch some of DaVinci's tutorials to understand the basic conventions, e.g. around the major tool modes, use of the node-graph editor for assembling effects, etc.
All of those components are production-ready, free (as in beer), have a dedicated team working on the product. Plus, the parent company seems in very good health and doesn't seems to make stupid decision (probably because they're making most of their money on hardware ?)/
It definitely does, at least for certain platforms and formats. https://documents.blackmagicdesign.com/SupportNotes/DaVinci_...: "For macOS and Windows, DaVinci Resolve will also read most formats natively supported by the operating system."
I'm not aware of a Resolve compatibility matrix that encompasses every possible platform, host OS, and format, but it doesn't take long to just try the free version. If the Sony source doesn't work directly, I'd recommend using ffmpeg to convert a test file to ProRes before giving up.
Worst case, the $300 one-time cost is one of the best deals in commercial/professional software.
I tested a few such as openshot, flowblade, ... about 10 months ago.
flowblade has the best UI IMHO (more streamlined), but it was annoyingly restrictive for quick edits such as opening a clip, apply just a trim and maybe add 1 filter (usually crop).
It also wasn't very stable.
I ended up with shotcut for most of my needs. It's very flexible and has a good balance in ui/features: intuitive enough that I had to spend zero time learning it, yet has more than what I will ever need. Although it's not as smooth performance-wise as flowblade. It never crashed on me yet.
I didn't like the UI of openshot, but this is a subjective thing. Felt space-wasting and oversimplified, which might be a plus to some. It also did crash a lot for me.
I use avidemux a lot for cuts. It's the fastest editor for this by FAR. UI is minimal. I would say underrated, although it's a pretty well-known tool, just in a different class (not a NLE).
I was a big fan of "cinelerra" some years ago. It's blazingly fast, but very restrictive in the formats it accepts, which is why I stopped using it. I mostly cut random videos coming from random cameras/phones/etc, so I value free-form over standardized workflows.
Don't forget Blender. For some more complex stuff, I successfully used blender's NLE to track/mask clips. Worked perfectly, absolutely stable even for complex videos, although it needed slight more RTFM than the other options and noticeably heaver in terms of system requirements.
I ended up using Windows and had a just barely usable system. I had a lot of problems with poor scrubbing performance and renders that sometimes had black frames randomly in them that I fixed by converting everything to prores (and blowing up into huge files).
My long term fix was to get a mac, where it runs flawlessly with basically no effort. It's a great tool, but there are some pitfalls.
I ended up using Blender, and while it’s powerful and super useful to be able to link scenes from other files, one huge missing feature is support for videos of varying frame rates. If your videos don’t match, the audio will be either much longer or much shorter than the video clips.
Had a few hard crashes too and lots of bugs, but definitely usable.
Not being used to the concepts of video editing, I found it easy to find a workflow that worked for me (cutting out mistakes and stitching remaining ends).
https://github.com/fat-tire/resolve
.. allows one to execute Resolve in a container (Docker AND Podman)... and now Linux is my go-to env for running Resolve. Just being able to run N+1 versions of Resolve on the same workstation is a lifesaver.
> EDIT also, since last I used it, the Blender Compositor has gotten a lot better. Dang.
The compositor's always been great. What's changed? It looks pretty much the same as it always did even around the 2.4X days?