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.
1. A way to play back videos at 2x speed while editing in an intuitive way (DaVinci Resolve does this perfectly).
TBH I'm not sure how this isn't a feature since it's straight up a 2x time saver for anyone editing a video since playing back a 10 minute at 2x is only 5 minutes of real life time.
With Resolve I can actively edit / cut / etc. my videos at 2x speed playback but the exported video comes out as 1x. In other words, this isn't a request to adjust the clip speed, it's 100% limited to playback in the editor. Also audio playback is perfect, it sounds exactly like a YouTube video being played at 2x.
With Kdenlive live you have to adjust the playback speed after every time you make a cut (stopping the video) which is very not user friendly and I don't know what algorithm they are using but the audio sounds really poor at 2x. It seems to skip every other frame of audio so it sounds like it's constantly dropping out and not smooth.
2. A revamped title creator so creating titles is as fast and easy as Camtasia.
If anyone has a better workflow for creating lots of captions in kdenlive please let me know. I had to duplicate each title to the media library and drag it into the timeline, because if I simply copy/pasted then the text content/styling would be shared across instances
Personally, the only thing I want is better crop/scale/zoom to conform badly letterboxed video to your timeline resolution. It can be done, but the ergonomics are awful, and its not clear which of the 3 crop filters actually do the thing.
Yes, if I could go back in time and edit my post I would love to see that too.
In Camtasia it was SO easy to do really basic things like...
- Add image to project
- Drag it onto your timeline, it becomes a track
- In the video preview area, use the mouse to move + scale + rotate it and hold ALT to crop
- Optionally fine tune anything you want with text inputs and numbers
The video preview area even had general purpose guidelines for easily centering objects within the video's frame and other tracks relative to your image's track.
It was the most intuitive thing you can possibly use and took seconds to do any type of crop / scale / rotate action.
With Kdenlive, if I want to crop, rotate or scale something I almost always have to find a YouTube tutorial to figure out how to do it. There's 100 ways to do it and all 100 ways are the most user-hostile workflows I've ever seen in any app, like having to manually input X / Y coordinates by hand to move something.
The only reason I don't continue to use Camtasia 9 is because I switched to Linux.
I've made 1,000+ videos and I've absolutely noticed my video quality get worse after I switched to Kdenlive because doing almost anything takes so many more steps. It's like a death by a thousand paper cuts and it makes the video editing process no longer fun.
I wish I knew C++ or I would fix every single thing but I don't. I offered to donate money to the project but it didn't seem like the creators were interested in trading money for features (fair enough). I guess it's just disappointing because the project has really good bones, it has a lot of great features, I want to like using it but the UI for so many super common actions oftentimes leaves me in a state of disbelief.
A couple years ago I did some basic OBS recording of technical stuff and needed a simple, preferably OSS, editing and compositing solution polish up the vids.
The landscape was bonkers. After trying lots of free, freemium, and paid trials I finally landed on Kdenlive. At the time I got the sense that it had just recently, within the past couple(max) years, gotten much better and much more usable than a lot of the internet had caught on to. I'd liken it to the Blender 2.5 release. It was perfectly usable on my system for editing 4k video with my basic needs.
Haven't used it over the past couple years but it's nice to see that they have been pushing it forward even harder. Even based on my 2-3 year old experience with it I'd encourage anyone looking for basic, but comprehensive, video editing needs to give it a go.
Edit: I'm not saying it's limited to basic editing. I just mean that it's perfectly adequate and usable without being overwhelming and "unfriendly". Watch a Youtube Kdenlive 101 intro vid and you're good to go.
Kdenlive has some unfortunate performance regression when working with larger projects with many clips.
I managed to track down a few of them while evaluating Claude Code a while back (mostly certain actions doing O(n) scans over all clips every mouse event needing debouncing), and got it mostly back down to tolerable levels again, but have been holding onto them because unsolicited drive by AI PRs are very annoying from a code project maintenance perspective, as the changes are almost certainly poorly factored.
Was half considering creating a Kdenvibe fork, but that would also be in bad taste. So right now I don't know what to do with the diff.
I'd open a Draft PR and an Issue to explain the problems you encountered and how you've solved them for your own use cases... then leave it up to them to learn from it or close it.
I get annoyed with "drive-by PRs" only when they lack context or are clearly just a way to get some commits into a project (typos and so on), but any findings that can improve my code or its performance is welcome, in my projects at least.
This is a great comment. As someone who has been involved in managing a large (business backed) OSS project I can say that even if we preferred to have our own solutions to issues, we really valued comprehensive issues and draft PRs to reference.
Sometimes you just don't have the time to get a PR to a projects mergeable standards, but the solution as a reference can have a ton of value for those that eventually get a PR across the finish line.
I would say, though, that agentic coding seriously complicates the entire situation...
Creating the PR, doing the explanation you just did, and closing it yourself might be a good option. Then at least your code lives somewhere that someone else can reuse if desired. Ideally combined with a linked issue that you do keep open.
My suggestion is to do a “human summary” of what you asked the agent and what it found, maybe supply the code it generated, mayyybe.. but mostly recommend they not review it but instead, the reviewer give the PR to their own agent to do a reimplementation.
Since code is cheap now, why not replace reviewing with reimplementing!
You should be running your own fork before making pull requests. You don’t have to get other people to use it, you just need to get in the habit of rebasing regularly and cutting releases for yourself. Someday I hope maintainers get better visibility into downstream improvements without the politics of pull requests.
Id say ask AI to ‘describe the problem and solution from a high level. avoid code excerpts if possible.’
Submit as a bug report and mention you have an AI solution for reference if desired.
Interesting that they went to visit the Blender offices, considering Blender still has it's own video editor (that seems to be ramping up on receiving improvements as of late too) which is basically a "competitor" (as far as FOSS has competitors) to Kdenlive.
I'd love to know more what actually went down there, is there plans about sharing of code or something similar, considering the two applications serve similar use cases when it comes to video editing?
Great work responding to the only point I tried to make as weak as possible, and even provided an explanation for why it isn't "correct" in the first place...
Calling FOSS devs "competitors" is such a corporate-minded statement that completely misses the point. FOSS devs all work together to achieve a common goal and don't see other projects as competitors, they see them as friends.
Competition for non-monetary resources is absolutely a thing. Developer time is scarce and other projects can absolutely see others as competitors in this regard. We have plenty of stories of project forks sprouting because of frustration/disagreement/etc and the new fork starts gathering more attention/contributions because of better governance, better devx, saner environment, etc.
Yes, but this is not a case of project hard fork, not even a soft fork. They are two completely unrelated projects.
People contributing to KDE would probably not contribute to Gnome for a variety of reasons - and vice versa - and it's perfectly fine. One aspect of open source is biodiversity.
I agree, that what I literally tried to qualify it... Goddamn some of you seem to write comments with the sole purpose to disagree with the smallest of things.
Comrade, thank you for correcting the record. The word "competitor" has been retired from the lexicon effective immediately. All FOSS developers are friends. All FOSS developers have always been friends. Anyone who remembers otherwise will be assisted by the Ministry of Love in recovering the correct memory.
Blender is a wild untamed beast of a thousand panels. Those who wrangle the beast are wise and powerful. But they became that was from the journey. Kdenlive is a much more approachable quest for someone who is just entering the dungeon.
What's great about Blender, is that if you learn the UI, controls and hotkeys for the purposes of 3D, you can basically use the same UI, controls and hotkeys for video editing, and vice-versa of course :)
People overplay how unfriendly it is nowadays too, very far from how it was a decade ago, when it was really hard to understand how the UI and UX worked.
I think I use Numpad 0 daily for "Change viewport view to camera view", but surely it can be rebound like most other shortcuts, don't think there is a requirement to have a Numpad, afaik.
yeah, my one use of kdenlive has been to slap an on-screen telemetry track over a video - and it worked great for that, speaking as someone who has no interest in video editing :-)
I recently switched from Shotcut to Kdenlive. Kdenlive's UX is much more intuitive. Lots of features, I still feel like a beginner, which is such a fun feeling!
I'm using it together with OBS to post short demo videos of my side project. I could use Loom I guess, but I prefer to keep my tech stack FOSS when I can.
Creating "non standard" video resolutions is a bit of a pain though. But I've solved that with an ffmpeg oneliner.
Glad this project is still going, but have they ever fixed its stability and being able to change the framerate without breaking the whole project? Last I tried, trying to export the video with a different fps just broke all the keyframe timings...
Changing project framerate is apparently quite a hard problem, even DaVinci Resolve when you change it, warns you that you cannot change it for that project again.
Probably internally everything in a project is referenced to specific frame numbers, which would break if you changed the project framerate.
Related: Niccolò Venerandi (a KDE developer) criticizes Kdenlive and proposes a proof of concept of a QML-based node-based video editor using shaders to achieve full GPU acceleration for everything (Kdenlive doesn't use GPU/is unstable and hiccups)
This is a pretty neat project idea and presentation! I hope this goes well.
I'm honestly surprised (shocked!) that video editors don't use a GPU ("video card") for rendering and that it's all CPU based. That would, honestly, never have occurred to me to even try and do this in CPU. Is this merely decades of historical baggage?
Kdenlive is amazing. As someone that learned basic video editing through cracked versions of Premiere growing up, I love that a completely free tool can do everything I need for editing without the nonsense of basic editors or tools like Clipchamp that lock ffmpeg flags like 4k rendering behind paid gates. My only issue with the tool right now is crashing and corrupted backups which happened a few times on the video I edited a few weeks ago.
Shotcut can only leverage the GPU hardware acceleration during the render output phase.
Typically, some people get a DaVinci Resolve license card when buying the "Speed Editor" hardware for a $100 more than just the software. That silly little wheel does wonders for quickly scrubbing though media. GPU VRAM starts to matter again as color grading is one area people want to see preview quickly.
Very informative, thank you. I have been using Shotcut for a while and wrote a frei0r plugin but it needs migrating to the new 10 bit MLT framework. I have been using Shotcut with 4K footage and it is indeed very slow so I have been using proxy files.
I did have PowerDirector but have been very disappointed with it so wrote a converter to convert their format to Shotcut's XML format so I can move my projects to Shotcut.
Ideally I'd use DaVinci Resolve but as the free one doesn't support 10 bit I can't try any of the HLG videos I shot on holiday.
Compared to other options, the one-time cost was our best tradeoff for the project. It was a much better value than adobe subscriptions water-marking everything. A low bar to clear, but important to some...
Cinelerra GG should have EXR and 10bit support, but our folks had a hard time figuring out the program even with a manual. ymmv =3
After trying all the alternatives I can say that Kdenlive has become my goto for video editing. It's so great to see the team adding amazing new features and optimizing sub-systems. Well done.
Holy!
When I moved over to Linux (2018ish) video and photo editing was still the thing, where I was still moving back to Windows or macOS
But apparently I should really take another look at Kdenlive, looks like a lot of things have improved heavily, that it could hit the sweet spot between my love hate relationship with Resolve and the ease of use of Sony Vegas back in the day.
Thanks for posting !
Every KDE app I try (and the Plasma desktop) seems so good on paper, and they promise me the world! Then, wen I actually try them out, they always end up crashing or doing something weird. Like I cannot stand GIMP, so I've tried using Krita, but I don't think I've ever managed to finish something in it before it crashes. It's the same with Kdenlive.
That's pretty weird; both Gimp and Krita (very different tools) were rock-solid to me. Speaking of KDEnlive, I experienced a few anomalies and crashes using the version from my distro; I switched to an AppImage version, and with it, everything Just Works™.
I suspect your crashes may also be related to dependencies, not some deficiencies of the application itself. Try a different build / AppImage / Flatpak, and see if you encounter the same problems.
I don’t use any KDE apps, but the Plasma desktop has been absolutely rock solid and super performant for me.
I do think that the idea that each toolkit has its own native app for each thing you might want to do with a computer is a recipe for a forest of half-maintained nearly-good apps. A lot of the KDE and GNOME app suites feel like checking boxes.
The entire KDE ecosystem is basically stuck on c++ I imagine the number of people volunteering to work on it in their free time isn’t exactly skyrocketing.
That's quite the impressive feature set. I do want to use Kdenlive but coming from Shotcut I didn't find the UI as easy to use, especially when it comes to handling the timeline... Maybe I'll try it again one day.
I like Kdenlive, but for the simple video editing I do (cuts, splices, remove/replace audio, freeze frame etc) the fastest thing is ffmpeg.
I just give an LLM a list of files, a set of steps and timestamps, a directory to work in and have it write a bash script that calls ffmpeg. I just view the source videos with VLC and get the timestamps I want.
I mostly use this to edit my YouTube videos and this really beats importing files, dragging things around and all that and it only takes a few minutes to edit now.
It will be a beautiful day when I can finally lose all my Adobe accounts and software. Kdenlive is definitely on the right track BUT having a real risk to lose my project after days and weeks of work is not something I am able to afford. I am following this with great interest and waiting for the right time to jump on board.
Where did you hear about loosing your work? Did you experience it? Did you report it? Kdenlive has a very robust project recovery system, even if it crashes you are able to recover your lost work. Also in any software you must continuously save.
I tried it 10 years ago and it was very buggy, crashing and freezing. The main option was Openshot, which was also in development and buggy (something happened then, that Openshot almost stopped development).
There was no good foss option, so I settled for Sony Vegas from pirate bay.
Openshot is alive and well and actively developed, but it's still buggy as hell. I use it 'cos it's super simple and so easy to use, but e.g. I use a specific daily build 'cos release 3.5.1 broke libopus again.
it's been 3 years since I completely gave up on kdenlive.
I put time and effort to get around the dated and unintuitive UI/UX, but it is too convoluted to do even some basic stuff. and the repeated crashes are too much of a pain to be ready for everyday use.
I tried alternatives such as openshot and shotcut, but they too have a lot of room for improvement. it seems there always a flaw of some kind and a lack of usability for this kind of software.
not taking anything for the time, efforts ad good will the devs put into these software, and many thanks to them for everything. but commercial software benefits from the years of having team of full time employees giving them a serious edge on opensource software for video editing.
Is that due to patent issues? A lot of people running open source H.264 codecs¹ on Linux just ignore the patents and assume they're under the radar, but I bet a high-profile commercial entity can't get away with that. Like as a point of comparison, I remember the Raspberry Pi selling add-on license keys for certain codecs at one point for a similar reason, but that probably doesn't look like such a good strategy for a video editor on a niche platform. Then there was the thing where Red Hat had some kind of licensing deal with Cisco…
¹ I don't remember which implementations are subject to this or what the actual terms are.
How is KDE doing with respect to QT, given that QT is commercial (with LGPL licensing) and has passed through several ownership changes?
Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes?
How are they doing with respect to the GTK/Gnome folks? (Did Gnome ever get over their issues? I tuned out around the time of Gnome 3 and the headaches everyone was having with Ubuntu vs. Gnome with respect to the desktop compositor.)
Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? (This is not a moral question! No religious fights. I'm seriously curious.)
Which distro(s) have the best KDE? I've been stuck on Mac for a bit and want to dive in again soon.
> Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes
The relationship between the two orgs is currently healthy. They have different needs, but collaboration innl the Free Qt Foundation has been productive of late and hasn't hit major roadblocks.
The annual Qt Contributor meetup and KDE events are semi-regularly co-located. KDE people help maintain a few of the modules, or rank as biggest external contributors.
It's a relationship that always deserves active maintenance but has been holding steady overall.
> How is KDE doing with respect to QT, given that QT is commercial (with LGPL licensing) and has passed through several ownership changes?
KDE has the right to distribute Qt under a BSD-like licence after legal dispute.
> Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes?
It is. KDE 6 is based on Qt 6.
> How are they doing with respect to the GTK/Gnome folks? (Did Gnome ever get over their issues? I tuned out around the time of Gnome 3 and the headaches everyone was having with Ubuntu vs. Gnome with respect to the desktop compositor.)
GNOME is still very stubborn but many of their works have come to fruition. KDE has adopted Flatpak and immutable OS.
> Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? (This is not a moral question! No religious fights. I'm seriously curious.)
Depends on your taste really. There are multiple rant articles about GNOME and I can write a fairly similar one about KDE. GNOME is the more polished out of the two, KDE has more features and has a less experimental workflow. Personally I also recommend trying out Pantheon, the DE of elementary OS.
Neither can reach the height of Windows and Mac OS X's prime since many UX issues are deeply ingrained, like FHS and XDG. You'll probably miss macOS application bundles.
> Which distro(s) have the best KDE? I've been stuck on Mac for a bit and want to dive in again soon.
Personally I use Sway. I wouldn't recommend GNOME. KDE seems okay from what I've used of it on SteamOS, and I have a few friends who seem to like KDE as well.
For a distro, maybe Arch or Fedora. Be aware with Fedora that it's more work than most distros to get proper media playback of certain codecs working, due to some sort of fear of patents. You have to replace a bunch of packages and it took me a while of messing around when I set up Fedora on an HTPC before I got the expected performance with various videos. I run Guix System on my personal machine, but it's pretty advanced and niche, so probably wouldn't recommend it to a new user.
I unfortunately have to use GNOME on my work laptop with Ubuntu 24.04 and it is honestly a pain compared to my personal computers running Plasma. The comparison is not entirely fair because I am pitching GNOME from 2024 to the latest version of Plasma, but the difference in UX is night and day. UI is smoother and more fluid, I can configure my system exactly how I want it to be.
I don't know what you mean by "story", but KDE is a collection of software more or less (emphasis on the less, at least compared to Gnome) interlinked with each other.
Qt specifically has the LGPL as a non-commercial license for open-source projects. This is part of a deal they made with KDE when it changed hands a while back.
Qt is being actively developed, but I don't believe KDE has any influence on it. They updated the entirety of their stack to Qt6 a year ago, they can definitely incorporate the changes.
KDE and GNOME generally don't care about each other. As for my personal opinion, Gnome's problems have only gotten worse in my experience, but perhaps in ways that don't matter to the average user.
Gnome if you like a MacOS-style UI, KDE Plasma if you prefer the Windows-style.
Generally, any distro will do. Rolling-release ones, or stable ones with a shorter update cycle (like Fedora) will get new features faster, but even Debian has KDE Plasma 6 nowadays.
> *Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment?
I suggest people try Gnome first and see how it meshes with you. Learn a few common keyboard shortcuts, especially Super Key, Super + (type to search), Alt+tab, etc.
If you know you're a customizer/tinkerer then maybe start with KDE. The knobs can be overwhelming though for people who want a more "just works" kind of experience.
Regardless, Fedora is IMHO the best experience (for a usable general purpose system) for both, so that's a great place to start.
I don't have much to add other than to say Kdenlive works great on Windows and probably MacOS too. Shouldn't be a surprise as QT has historically been one of the better cross platform GUI libs of the past 20+ years.
I have I have been using Cinerella for about 30 years. I asked Gemini about it and it told me there would be nothing new or exciting in Kdenlive. Only recently it started to be a worthy competitor.
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.
> much more capable than basic editors like iMovie, but doesn't have the overwhelming learning curve
Kate/Kdevelop also feels the same way, but for editors. Just the right amount of features.
Minor quibble, but I loved the mechanic of FCP taking over a second screen as a full-res scrub monitor. It made the computer feel like an appliance.
I think the Kdenlive option is to move the scrubbing monitor window to the second monitor.
Follow-up to this: there is indeed an option. Extremely nitpicky, but it doesn’t do Apple’s sweet fade in/out when it takes over the second monitor.
Or with Tenacity insead of Audacity for the 100% invasive free software setup!
I thought they rolled back those changes in a hurry.
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.
> doesn't support the audio in most of the source videos I am using
What codecs are you using, and what's the source?
AAC and mostly recordings of VR games I have to first convert the audio track to MP3 for Davinci Resolve to support it.
If you're recording the games why don't you just record them in a better codec?
AAC is pretty horrible quality. Just use PCM, the size difference is nothing compared to the size of the video stream.
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.
Well, I don't know, nothing really seems to support AAC. I've yet to find anything other than ffmpeg that can read it.
Why not convert to PCM to avoid quality degradation?
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.
Do you deal with log encoded video?
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.
Yes, obviously I write from experience.
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.
Comparing usability/stability of premiere against anything is kind of putting your finger on the scale lol
Right, but it is the SOTA and the sort of poster boy of everything kdenlive competes with.
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.
Is it? I'd say in the higher end that would be Media Composer.
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.
Avid/1 was released in 1989. And there were others before it, although I think often on more proprietary or niche hardware (Avid/1 was Mac already).
Things like that: https://www.lucasfilm.com/news/lucasfilm-originals-the-editd...
I think Media Composer always had a lead in feature film / TV. It's possible Premiere Pro had a lead in other markets.
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.
Compositors like Nuke are also node-based.
It's almost like nodes are a better technique than layers for this sort of work, and AE was wrong all along... ;-)
Even if they were the oldest NLE, that does not automatically make them “the gold standard.”
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.
Shotcut also has 10 bit support, which is wonderful (even if the display in-program is NOT 10bit).
> 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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9gbsDkzKK8
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.
Based on your comment I guess you have never used Premiere Pro (and never learned ctrl + s)
premiere pro is still hugely unstable but think kdenlive is somehow even worse if you can believe it. It is basically unusable.
I've been using it recently and haven't noticed any stability issues at all so far.
I've been using it and it crashes all the time.
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".
Same, and corrupts backup saves
Arguments like this are much more compelling if you cite specifics rather than giving us your own conclusions.
Kdenlive being crash prone is a known thing, but for the parent to say the devs don't care goes too far.
Would it be any better if they cared but still couldn't tame them in a 25 year old project?
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.
Some very talented engineers work at Microsoft, that much is clear. Whether any of them work on the new parts of Windows 11 is less clear...
AI will vibecode it to Windows Vista quality!
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.
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So it will become… good?
“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.
If they cared the issue wouldn't have gone on for a decade or more.
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.
god I wish Adobe understood this
Why would they care? They are quite literally the: "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." of their market segment.
A bit dramatic for telling us you don't bother to save your work. No matter if it's avid, davinci or premiere they all crash from time to time.
I've had several instances of Kdenlive corrupting my save file, making them unable to be recovered. So no, that's not always a solution.
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.
Meanwhile resolve is fantastic and it's free.
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.
This argument would be a lot more convincing if you linked to issues or something.
I can second the sentiment, I have had kdenlive crash on me several times without saving.
I still use it because it's great for quick and simple things, and I save frequently, but it is extremely frustrating when it happens.
The parent does not want (or claims) to produce a report on Kdenlive's reliability or lack thereof.
He merely comments on it. Those interested either already know (and agree or disagree) or can find out with a test run.
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.
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I wish Kdenlive had 2 things:
1. A way to play back videos at 2x speed while editing in an intuitive way (DaVinci Resolve does this perfectly).
TBH I'm not sure how this isn't a feature since it's straight up a 2x time saver for anyone editing a video since playing back a 10 minute at 2x is only 5 minutes of real life time.
With Resolve I can actively edit / cut / etc. my videos at 2x speed playback but the exported video comes out as 1x. In other words, this isn't a request to adjust the clip speed, it's 100% limited to playback in the editor. Also audio playback is perfect, it sounds exactly like a YouTube video being played at 2x.
With Kdenlive live you have to adjust the playback speed after every time you make a cut (stopping the video) which is very not user friendly and I don't know what algorithm they are using but the audio sounds really poor at 2x. It seems to skip every other frame of audio so it sounds like it's constantly dropping out and not smooth.
2. A revamped title creator so creating titles is as fast and easy as Camtasia.
The title creator is bad... as a total amateur who needs to edit a video every now and then, it hurt me.
If anyone has a better workflow for creating lots of captions in kdenlive please let me know. I had to duplicate each title to the media library and drag it into the timeline, because if I simply copy/pasted then the text content/styling would be shared across instances
Personally, the only thing I want is better crop/scale/zoom to conform badly letterboxed video to your timeline resolution. It can be done, but the ergonomics are awful, and its not clear which of the 3 crop filters actually do the thing.
Yes, if I could go back in time and edit my post I would love to see that too.
In Camtasia it was SO easy to do really basic things like...
The video preview area even had general purpose guidelines for easily centering objects within the video's frame and other tracks relative to your image's track.It was the most intuitive thing you can possibly use and took seconds to do any type of crop / scale / rotate action.
With Kdenlive, if I want to crop, rotate or scale something I almost always have to find a YouTube tutorial to figure out how to do it. There's 100 ways to do it and all 100 ways are the most user-hostile workflows I've ever seen in any app, like having to manually input X / Y coordinates by hand to move something.
The only reason I don't continue to use Camtasia 9 is because I switched to Linux.
I've made 1,000+ videos and I've absolutely noticed my video quality get worse after I switched to Kdenlive because doing almost anything takes so many more steps. It's like a death by a thousand paper cuts and it makes the video editing process no longer fun.
I wish I knew C++ or I would fix every single thing but I don't. I offered to donate money to the project but it didn't seem like the creators were interested in trading money for features (fair enough). I guess it's just disappointing because the project has really good bones, it has a lot of great features, I want to like using it but the UI for so many super common actions oftentimes leaves me in a state of disbelief.
I wish Kdenlive had an api so that I could improve the QOL for myself.
It is open source so you still can but I concede that's probably easier with plugins.
A couple years ago I did some basic OBS recording of technical stuff and needed a simple, preferably OSS, editing and compositing solution polish up the vids.
The landscape was bonkers. After trying lots of free, freemium, and paid trials I finally landed on Kdenlive. At the time I got the sense that it had just recently, within the past couple(max) years, gotten much better and much more usable than a lot of the internet had caught on to. I'd liken it to the Blender 2.5 release. It was perfectly usable on my system for editing 4k video with my basic needs.
Haven't used it over the past couple years but it's nice to see that they have been pushing it forward even harder. Even based on my 2-3 year old experience with it I'd encourage anyone looking for basic, but comprehensive, video editing needs to give it a go.
Edit: I'm not saying it's limited to basic editing. I just mean that it's perfectly adequate and usable without being overwhelming and "unfriendly". Watch a Youtube Kdenlive 101 intro vid and you're good to go.
Kdenlive has some unfortunate performance regression when working with larger projects with many clips.
I managed to track down a few of them while evaluating Claude Code a while back (mostly certain actions doing O(n) scans over all clips every mouse event needing debouncing), and got it mostly back down to tolerable levels again, but have been holding onto them because unsolicited drive by AI PRs are very annoying from a code project maintenance perspective, as the changes are almost certainly poorly factored.
Was half considering creating a Kdenvibe fork, but that would also be in bad taste. So right now I don't know what to do with the diff.
I'd open a Draft PR and an Issue to explain the problems you encountered and how you've solved them for your own use cases... then leave it up to them to learn from it or close it.
I get annoyed with "drive-by PRs" only when they lack context or are clearly just a way to get some commits into a project (typos and so on), but any findings that can improve my code or its performance is welcome, in my projects at least.
This is a great comment. As someone who has been involved in managing a large (business backed) OSS project I can say that even if we preferred to have our own solutions to issues, we really valued comprehensive issues and draft PRs to reference.
Sometimes you just don't have the time to get a PR to a projects mergeable standards, but the solution as a reference can have a ton of value for those that eventually get a PR across the finish line.
I would say, though, that agentic coding seriously complicates the entire situation...
Creating the PR, doing the explanation you just did, and closing it yourself might be a good option. Then at least your code lives somewhere that someone else can reuse if desired. Ideally combined with a linked issue that you do keep open.
You can write a bug report for each problem and attach a patch with the corresponding hack. Best thing you can do short of providing clean fixes.
My suggestion is to do a “human summary” of what you asked the agent and what it found, maybe supply the code it generated, mayyybe.. but mostly recommend they not review it but instead, the reviewer give the PR to their own agent to do a reimplementation.
Since code is cheap now, why not replace reviewing with reimplementing!
You should be running your own fork before making pull requests. You don’t have to get other people to use it, you just need to get in the habit of rebasing regularly and cutting releases for yourself. Someday I hope maintainers get better visibility into downstream improvements without the politics of pull requests.
Id say ask AI to ‘describe the problem and solution from a high level. avoid code excerpts if possible.’ Submit as a bug report and mention you have an AI solution for reference if desired.
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Interesting that they went to visit the Blender offices, considering Blender still has it's own video editor (that seems to be ramping up on receiving improvements as of late too) which is basically a "competitor" (as far as FOSS has competitors) to Kdenlive.
I'd love to know more what actually went down there, is there plans about sharing of code or something similar, considering the two applications serve similar use cases when it comes to video editing?
Open source projects do not necessary see alternatives as "competitors" if they don't market/sell their software.
Great work responding to the only point I tried to make as weak as possible, and even provided an explanation for why it isn't "correct" in the first place...
This is hacker news. Every opinion you write will be greeted with an argument for the opposite opinion. It's par for the course on here.
Calling FOSS devs "competitors" is such a corporate-minded statement that completely misses the point. FOSS devs all work together to achieve a common goal and don't see other projects as competitors, they see them as friends.
Competition for non-monetary resources is absolutely a thing. Developer time is scarce and other projects can absolutely see others as competitors in this regard. We have plenty of stories of project forks sprouting because of frustration/disagreement/etc and the new fork starts gathering more attention/contributions because of better governance, better devx, saner environment, etc.
Yes, but this is not a case of project hard fork, not even a soft fork. They are two completely unrelated projects. People contributing to KDE would probably not contribute to Gnome for a variety of reasons - and vice versa - and it's perfectly fine. One aspect of open source is biodiversity.
I agree, that what I literally tried to qualify it... Goddamn some of you seem to write comments with the sole purpose to disagree with the smallest of things.
Comrade, thank you for correcting the record. The word "competitor" has been retired from the lexicon effective immediately. All FOSS developers are friends. All FOSS developers have always been friends. Anyone who remembers otherwise will be assisted by the Ministry of Love in recovering the correct memory.
Blender is a wild untamed beast of a thousand panels. Those who wrangle the beast are wise and powerful. But they became that was from the journey. Kdenlive is a much more approachable quest for someone who is just entering the dungeon.
What's great about Blender, is that if you learn the UI, controls and hotkeys for the purposes of 3D, you can basically use the same UI, controls and hotkeys for video editing, and vice-versa of course :)
People overplay how unfriendly it is nowadays too, very far from how it was a decade ago, when it was really hard to understand how the UI and UX worked.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I love it at tinker with it regularly. But power comes with complexity. It's always a trade off.
It's been ages since I last tried Blender, is it still unusable without a numpad?
No, I use Blender a lot and don't even know what they have mapped to the numpad.
I think I use Numpad 0 daily for "Change viewport view to camera view", but surely it can be rebound like most other shortcuts, don't think there is a requirement to have a Numpad, afaik.
yeah, my one use of kdenlive has been to slap an on-screen telemetry track over a video - and it worked great for that, speaking as someone who has no interest in video editing :-)
I recently switched from Shotcut to Kdenlive. Kdenlive's UX is much more intuitive. Lots of features, I still feel like a beginner, which is such a fun feeling!
I'm using it together with OBS to post short demo videos of my side project. I could use Loom I guess, but I prefer to keep my tech stack FOSS when I can.
Creating "non standard" video resolutions is a bit of a pain though. But I've solved that with an ffmpeg oneliner.
Glad this project is still going, but have they ever fixed its stability and being able to change the framerate without breaking the whole project? Last I tried, trying to export the video with a different fps just broke all the keyframe timings...
Changing project framerate is apparently quite a hard problem, even DaVinci Resolve when you change it, warns you that you cannot change it for that project again.
Probably internally everything in a project is referenced to specific frame numbers, which would break if you changed the project framerate.
Related: Niccolò Venerandi (a KDE developer) criticizes Kdenlive and proposes a proof of concept of a QML-based node-based video editor using shaders to achieve full GPU acceleration for everything (Kdenlive doesn't use GPU/is unstable and hiccups)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlgrCqgnk-M
This is a pretty neat project idea and presentation! I hope this goes well.
I'm honestly surprised (shocked!) that video editors don't use a GPU ("video card") for rendering and that it's all CPU based. That would, honestly, never have occurred to me to even try and do this in CPU. Is this merely decades of historical baggage?
Kdenlive is amazing. As someone that learned basic video editing through cracked versions of Premiere growing up, I love that a completely free tool can do everything I need for editing without the nonsense of basic editors or tools like Clipchamp that lock ffmpeg flags like 4k rendering behind paid gates. My only issue with the tool right now is crashing and corrupted backups which happened a few times on the video I edited a few weeks ago.
I've used Kdenlive for years. I'm someone who only needs video editing every once in a while, but even then I definitely recommend learning it.
Other options for Mac/Win/Linux =3
Davinci Resolve
* CorridorKey plugin (cutting edge green/blue screen "AI" masking)
* Blender EXR workflows
* Paid (unless buying a really expensive camera)
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
https://github.com/alexandremendoncaalvaro/CorridorKey-Runti...
Cinelerra GG
* less popular, but had GPU cluster acceleration at one point
* FOSS
https://download.cinelerra-gg.org/?path=%2Fimages
Shotcut
* simple to learn
* compatible with most platforms, but slow
* FOSS
https://www.shotcut.org/download/
What is slow about Shotcut? Genuinely curious
Shotcut can only leverage the GPU hardware acceleration during the render output phase.
Typically, some people get a DaVinci Resolve license card when buying the "Speed Editor" hardware for a $100 more than just the software. That silly little wheel does wonders for quickly scrubbing though media. GPU VRAM starts to matter again as color grading is one area people want to see preview quickly.
Best regards =3
Very informative, thank you. I have been using Shotcut for a while and wrote a frei0r plugin but it needs migrating to the new 10 bit MLT framework. I have been using Shotcut with 4K footage and it is indeed very slow so I have been using proxy files.
I did have PowerDirector but have been very disappointed with it so wrote a converter to convert their format to Shotcut's XML format so I can move my projects to Shotcut.
Ideally I'd use DaVinci Resolve but as the free one doesn't support 10 bit I can't try any of the HLG videos I shot on holiday.
For our use-case, a $50 course package sale for getting Blender -> Fusion workflow just made sense.
https://www.udemy.com/course/davinci-resolve-training-course...
https://www.udemy.com/course/fusion_blender_vfx/ (needs the paid studio version)
Compared to other options, the one-time cost was our best tradeoff for the project. It was a much better value than adobe subscriptions water-marking everything. A low bar to clear, but important to some...
Cinelerra GG should have EXR and 10bit support, but our folks had a hard time figuring out the program even with a manual. ymmv =3
After trying all the alternatives I can say that Kdenlive has become my goto for video editing. It's so great to see the team adding amazing new features and optimizing sub-systems. Well done.
Holy! When I moved over to Linux (2018ish) video and photo editing was still the thing, where I was still moving back to Windows or macOS But apparently I should really take another look at Kdenlive, looks like a lot of things have improved heavily, that it could hit the sweet spot between my love hate relationship with Resolve and the ease of use of Sony Vegas back in the day. Thanks for posting !
Every KDE app I try (and the Plasma desktop) seems so good on paper, and they promise me the world! Then, wen I actually try them out, they always end up crashing or doing something weird. Like I cannot stand GIMP, so I've tried using Krita, but I don't think I've ever managed to finish something in it before it crashes. It's the same with Kdenlive.
Damn shame.
That's pretty weird; both Gimp and Krita (very different tools) were rock-solid to me. Speaking of KDEnlive, I experienced a few anomalies and crashes using the version from my distro; I switched to an AppImage version, and with it, everything Just Works™.
I suspect your crashes may also be related to dependencies, not some deficiencies of the application itself. Try a different build / AppImage / Flatpak, and see if you encounter the same problems.
I don’t use any KDE apps, but the Plasma desktop has been absolutely rock solid and super performant for me.
I do think that the idea that each toolkit has its own native app for each thing you might want to do with a computer is a recipe for a forest of half-maintained nearly-good apps. A lot of the KDE and GNOME app suites feel like checking boxes.
The entire KDE ecosystem is basically stuck on c++ I imagine the number of people volunteering to work on it in their free time isn’t exactly skyrocketing.
That's quite the impressive feature set. I do want to use Kdenlive but coming from Shotcut I didn't find the UI as easy to use, especially when it comes to handling the timeline... Maybe I'll try it again one day.
Just spend 3-4 days of quality time with it, watch a few youtube tutorials when stuck, and things will fall into place.
(Same story, shotcut → kdenlive.)
I like Kdenlive, but for the simple video editing I do (cuts, splices, remove/replace audio, freeze frame etc) the fastest thing is ffmpeg.
I just give an LLM a list of files, a set of steps and timestamps, a directory to work in and have it write a bash script that calls ffmpeg. I just view the source videos with VLC and get the timestamps I want.
I mostly use this to edit my YouTube videos and this really beats importing files, dragging things around and all that and it only takes a few minutes to edit now.
Kdenlive is great. With zero video-editing experience, I was able to easily edit a demo video, cutting portions, clipping pauses, etc.
Projects like this is why making languages like C++ safer is also relevant, we're not rewriting the world.
Kudos for keeping improving Kdelive.
It will be a beautiful day when I can finally lose all my Adobe accounts and software. Kdenlive is definitely on the right track BUT having a real risk to lose my project after days and weeks of work is not something I am able to afford. I am following this with great interest and waiting for the right time to jump on board.
Where did you hear about loosing your work? Did you experience it? Did you report it? Kdenlive has a very robust project recovery system, even if it crashes you are able to recover your lost work. Also in any software you must continuously save.
It sounds like you have no crash or corruption problems in Premiere at all.
> having a real risk to lose my project after days and weeks of work is not something I am able to afford
Clearly you can, if you are currently using Premiere.
just download davinci resolve for free
I tried it 10 years ago and it was very buggy, crashing and freezing. The main option was Openshot, which was also in development and buggy (something happened then, that Openshot almost stopped development). There was no good foss option, so I settled for Sony Vegas from pirate bay.
Openshot is alive and well and actively developed, but it's still buggy as hell. I use it 'cos it's super simple and so easy to use, but e.g. I use a specific daily build 'cos release 3.5.1 broke libopus again.
it's been 3 years since I completely gave up on kdenlive.
I put time and effort to get around the dated and unintuitive UI/UX, but it is too convoluted to do even some basic stuff. and the repeated crashes are too much of a pain to be ready for everyday use.
I tried alternatives such as openshot and shotcut, but they too have a lot of room for improvement. it seems there always a flaw of some kind and a lack of usability for this kind of software.
not taking anything for the time, efforts ad good will the devs put into these software, and many thanks to them for everything. but commercial software benefits from the years of having team of full time employees giving them a serious edge on opensource software for video editing.
has someone here moved from DaVinci Resolve to Kdenlive? how was that experience?
i just was a bit shocked to find out Resolve didn't support h.264 on their free tier on Linux, and i don't want to re-encode all my footage to AV1
Is that due to patent issues? A lot of people running open source H.264 codecs¹ on Linux just ignore the patents and assume they're under the radar, but I bet a high-profile commercial entity can't get away with that. Like as a point of comparison, I remember the Raspberry Pi selling add-on license keys for certain codecs at one point for a similar reason, but that probably doesn't look like such a good strategy for a video editor on a niche platform. Then there was the thing where Red Hat had some kind of licensing deal with Cisco…
¹ I don't remember which implementations are subject to this or what the actual terms are.
Is Kdenlive owned/part of KDE?
What's the story with KDE?
How is KDE doing with respect to QT, given that QT is commercial (with LGPL licensing) and has passed through several ownership changes?
Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes?
How are they doing with respect to the GTK/Gnome folks? (Did Gnome ever get over their issues? I tuned out around the time of Gnome 3 and the headaches everyone was having with Ubuntu vs. Gnome with respect to the desktop compositor.)
Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? (This is not a moral question! No religious fights. I'm seriously curious.)
Which distro(s) have the best KDE? I've been stuck on Mac for a bit and want to dive in again soon.
KDE is a community (this year it turns 30!) and Kdenlive is part of it. Visit the website and read more about it.
Regarding you Qt question, there is the KDE Free Qt Foundation, more info: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/
I cannot tell you which DE to choose, I guess try them both and use what you like.
KDE distros that work well, try Arch (and derivatives like CachyOS), Fedora and there is also KDE Linux (but that is still alpha)
> Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes
The relationship between the two orgs is currently healthy. They have different needs, but collaboration innl the Free Qt Foundation has been productive of late and hasn't hit major roadblocks.
The annual Qt Contributor meetup and KDE events are semi-regularly co-located. KDE people help maintain a few of the modules, or rank as biggest external contributors.
It's a relationship that always deserves active maintenance but has been holding steady overall.
> How is KDE doing with respect to QT, given that QT is commercial (with LGPL licensing) and has passed through several ownership changes?
KDE has the right to distribute Qt under a BSD-like licence after legal dispute.
> Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes?
It is. KDE 6 is based on Qt 6.
> How are they doing with respect to the GTK/Gnome folks? (Did Gnome ever get over their issues? I tuned out around the time of Gnome 3 and the headaches everyone was having with Ubuntu vs. Gnome with respect to the desktop compositor.)
GNOME is still very stubborn but many of their works have come to fruition. KDE has adopted Flatpak and immutable OS.
> Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? (This is not a moral question! No religious fights. I'm seriously curious.)
Depends on your taste really. There are multiple rant articles about GNOME and I can write a fairly similar one about KDE. GNOME is the more polished out of the two, KDE has more features and has a less experimental workflow. Personally I also recommend trying out Pantheon, the DE of elementary OS.
Neither can reach the height of Windows and Mac OS X's prime since many UX issues are deeply ingrained, like FHS and XDG. You'll probably miss macOS application bundles.
> Which distro(s) have the best KDE? I've been stuck on Mac for a bit and want to dive in again soon.
Personally I like Fedora.
Personally I use Sway. I wouldn't recommend GNOME. KDE seems okay from what I've used of it on SteamOS, and I have a few friends who seem to like KDE as well.
For a distro, maybe Arch or Fedora. Be aware with Fedora that it's more work than most distros to get proper media playback of certain codecs working, due to some sort of fear of patents. You have to replace a bunch of packages and it took me a while of messing around when I set up Fedora on an HTPC before I got the expected performance with various videos. I run Guix System on my personal machine, but it's pretty advanced and niche, so probably wouldn't recommend it to a new user.
I unfortunately have to use GNOME on my work laptop with Ubuntu 24.04 and it is honestly a pain compared to my personal computers running Plasma. The comparison is not entirely fair because I am pitching GNOME from 2024 to the latest version of Plasma, but the difference in UX is night and day. UI is smoother and more fluid, I can configure my system exactly how I want it to be.
Kdenlive is part of KDE, yes.
I don't know what you mean by "story", but KDE is a collection of software more or less (emphasis on the less, at least compared to Gnome) interlinked with each other.
Qt specifically has the LGPL as a non-commercial license for open-source projects. This is part of a deal they made with KDE when it changed hands a while back.
Qt is being actively developed, but I don't believe KDE has any influence on it. They updated the entirety of their stack to Qt6 a year ago, they can definitely incorporate the changes.
KDE and GNOME generally don't care about each other. As for my personal opinion, Gnome's problems have only gotten worse in my experience, but perhaps in ways that don't matter to the average user.
Gnome if you like a MacOS-style UI, KDE Plasma if you prefer the Windows-style.
Generally, any distro will do. Rolling-release ones, or stable ones with a shorter update cycle (like Fedora) will get new features faster, but even Debian has KDE Plasma 6 nowadays.
> *Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment?
I suggest people try Gnome first and see how it meshes with you. Learn a few common keyboard shortcuts, especially Super Key, Super + (type to search), Alt+tab, etc.
If you know you're a customizer/tinkerer then maybe start with KDE. The knobs can be overwhelming though for people who want a more "just works" kind of experience.
Regardless, Fedora is IMHO the best experience (for a usable general purpose system) for both, so that's a great place to start.
I can't answer all of those but I personally prefer KDE to Gnome, and Fedora KDE or Kubuntu are the best. I like Fedora KDE.
I don't have much to add other than to say Kdenlive works great on Windows and probably MacOS too. Shouldn't be a surprise as QT has historically been one of the better cross platform GUI libs of the past 20+ years.
The valuation of The QT company is currently half billion $. That should probably answer your question regarding Qt.
Google
I can confirm that it got more stable for me in 2025. Good job!
How does it compare to Blender’s VSE? I’ve used both for different tiny projects but I’m interested to hear from anyone using them more in-depth.
Good progress but kdenlive still cannot handle HDR videos
It is in the roadmap ;)
I think something planned for this year right?
I have I have been using Cinerella for about 30 years. I asked Gemini about it and it told me there would be nothing new or exciting in Kdenlive. Only recently it started to be a worthy competitor.
Very thankful for this video editor.
kdenlive is really good
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