I had a go testing out what FOSS had to offer in this space a few years ago. I tried KDEnlive, Olive and Blender (well not really, I read about it).
At the time KDEnlive seemed to be everyone’s favourite in this space. As an editor, I can’t say I loved it, and at the time the interface was just plain awful, I looked at some screenshots just before this comment and it looks like it’s come a very long way.
I really liked Olive. At the time it was for some reason restricted to something like 720p exports and weirder still it would ONLY work with h264 MP4 files. That was enough to make it functionally useless which was a shame because it was the first FOSS app I’d tried or looked at for editing that actually seemed to work like one would expect a video editor to work. Maybe I was just set in my ways but when you train on the commercial offerings which all kind of adhere to a sort of unofficial standard way of doing things that coalesced over decades, you really don’t want to reinvent that wheel. From what I could see before this post it looks like it’s only gone from strength to strength because it based on pictures alone it looks really cool. I guess pictures don’t tell you much about what it’s like to use and apparently it used to be very unstable. Hopefully it’s better now.
Blender, from what I read, was a surprisingly popular choice for editing which is baffling to me because, just because you COULD edit in it, doesn’t mean you should. It’s not built for it at all, it’s 3d modelling and animation software, I reckon you’d have an awful time trying to use it for editing and that’s what people at the time said when I saw forum posts asking if you could use it for this purpose but strangely I came across a few who did nonetheless. I can only assume they had extremely basic needs.
Bonus points: (not FOSS) I also tried LightWorks, which at the time was closed source but said they were about to open source. Nobody believed them and indeed they didn’t and to this day haven’t. It’s uhh… fine. If it was FOSS I’d be impressed but given the competition in the commercial market, it didn’t seem worth bothering. Ironic since I believe they were one of the first computer based editing platforms.
Resolve isn’t FOSS but it has a very good very richly featured free version that would likely beat out anything currently offered in the FOSS world, at least that was the case when I was looking in to this around 2017 or so. Worth a mention because it’s really good. Personal if it’s commercial software and a big project I’d probably still use premiere or avid for the editing part and resolve for the rest but the editing gets better ever day rapidly and they’re by far the least scummy company for this kind of software. It’s a one time purchase too. Own it forever.
Actually I totally forgot about it. I thought I remembered trying a 3rd but since I couldn’t remember what it was I had to exclude it from the list. I remember almost nothing of it. I think I recall liking it slightly more than KDEnlive because I seemed to just plain hate that but everything else has long since left me. I think that probably doesn’t bode well for what I might have thought of it, or maybe it means there fewer notable problems. Nevertheless at the time I definitely decided that I ever had to go FOSS, I’d look to Olive.
Trouble is, with the FOSS offerings, I’m definitely grading on a curve. At the time absolutely nothing available FOSS stood even a chance of being useful form serious work, the lack of professional codec support already crippled most things right out the gate and the number of problems would be too big to overcome. I can’t speak from experience but I suspect that’s probably still the case even now. That said if you literally only have to edit some things together, you’re not dealing with deadlines, you don’t need a particularly collaborative workflow, you don’t have to deal with broadcast or cinema standards and you don’t have many terabyte of footage, probably almost any FOSS app would do the job well enough when you get used to it.
Great comment all around albeit with maybe a bit outdated yet personal experience.
I would say, don’t underestimate blender, it has a lot of parallel progress going on and while I never used it for video editing, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s pretty powerful in that area.
I’m personally a resolve user and I think it doesn’t have anything to envy from avid or premiere at this stage (you admit yourself it was 8 years since you tried it). It’s incredibly powerful and the free version should get you by for most projects though you might run into a few things where you wish you had the studio version.
My personal experience when I was shopping around before settling on resolve (3/4 years ago) was that all the other FOSS options I tried were mid at best.
Regarding Resolve, that’s actually the only bit of insight I could offer based on recent experiences compared to all the outdated info about the FOSS stuff. Of course nothing said here can be objective given personal preference but based on trying to get work done this is my impression at the present time.
I use the studio version every day for colour grading, it is fantastic for that. I couldn’t get used to fusion, being only a kind of bodge-job amateur in visual FX and motion GFX, it’s very hard to get used to after initially using after effects for that kind of work however I understand it’s very good. The editing side however, I really want it to be good enough, and if I was doing maybe an ad, or a corporate gig or perhaps short YouTube videos or interviews, it’d probably be fine. However, try as I might and try I really really did, I could not judge it on par on a recent major documentary project where I was forced to use it, compared to Premiere or Avid. It has far more recent, really cool features that I think in time will become indispensible and I love playing with them, but the basic nuts and bolts, while very nearly being there, don’t seem to work as comfortably at scale. Things like multi camera workflows in particular work in frustrating ways that hold you back and become inefficient with enough scale, the lack of auto-patching too gets on my nerves and I also find it extremely frustrating how many things cannot be done keyboard only, even with the crazy expensive full-size editor keyboard. A lot of the problems are quite minor things that would sound like nitpicking to most users but once you find yourself dealing with a big enough pool of footage and timelines the importance of the little things becomes manifest. It’s definitely getting better, at a rapid pace. I’m team Resolve because I just want them to win, especially because despite proclaiming it better, I really dislike using Avid and I also really dislike Adobe as a company even if I generally like their software.
I had a go testing out what FOSS had to offer in this space a few years ago. I tried KDEnlive, Olive and Blender (well not really, I read about it).
At the time KDEnlive seemed to be everyone’s favourite in this space. As an editor, I can’t say I loved it, and at the time the interface was just plain awful, I looked at some screenshots just before this comment and it looks like it’s come a very long way.
I really liked Olive. At the time it was for some reason restricted to something like 720p exports and weirder still it would ONLY work with h264 MP4 files. That was enough to make it functionally useless which was a shame because it was the first FOSS app I’d tried or looked at for editing that actually seemed to work like one would expect a video editor to work. Maybe I was just set in my ways but when you train on the commercial offerings which all kind of adhere to a sort of unofficial standard way of doing things that coalesced over decades, you really don’t want to reinvent that wheel. From what I could see before this post it looks like it’s only gone from strength to strength because it based on pictures alone it looks really cool. I guess pictures don’t tell you much about what it’s like to use and apparently it used to be very unstable. Hopefully it’s better now.
Blender, from what I read, was a surprisingly popular choice for editing which is baffling to me because, just because you COULD edit in it, doesn’t mean you should. It’s not built for it at all, it’s 3d modelling and animation software, I reckon you’d have an awful time trying to use it for editing and that’s what people at the time said when I saw forum posts asking if you could use it for this purpose but strangely I came across a few who did nonetheless. I can only assume they had extremely basic needs.
Bonus points: (not FOSS) I also tried LightWorks, which at the time was closed source but said they were about to open source. Nobody believed them and indeed they didn’t and to this day haven’t. It’s uhh… fine. If it was FOSS I’d be impressed but given the competition in the commercial market, it didn’t seem worth bothering. Ironic since I believe they were one of the first computer based editing platforms.
Resolve isn’t FOSS but it has a very good very richly featured free version that would likely beat out anything currently offered in the FOSS world, at least that was the case when I was looking in to this around 2017 or so. Worth a mention because it’s really good. Personal if it’s commercial software and a big project I’d probably still use premiere or avid for the editing part and resolve for the rest but the editing gets better ever day rapidly and they’re by far the least scummy company for this kind of software. It’s a one time purchase too. Own it forever.
No Shotcut love? I found it pretty easy to use ot after Premiere.
Actually I totally forgot about it. I thought I remembered trying a 3rd but since I couldn’t remember what it was I had to exclude it from the list. I remember almost nothing of it. I think I recall liking it slightly more than KDEnlive because I seemed to just plain hate that but everything else has long since left me. I think that probably doesn’t bode well for what I might have thought of it, or maybe it means there fewer notable problems. Nevertheless at the time I definitely decided that I ever had to go FOSS, I’d look to Olive.
Trouble is, with the FOSS offerings, I’m definitely grading on a curve. At the time absolutely nothing available FOSS stood even a chance of being useful form serious work, the lack of professional codec support already crippled most things right out the gate and the number of problems would be too big to overcome. I can’t speak from experience but I suspect that’s probably still the case even now. That said if you literally only have to edit some things together, you’re not dealing with deadlines, you don’t need a particularly collaborative workflow, you don’t have to deal with broadcast or cinema standards and you don’t have many terabyte of footage, probably almost any FOSS app would do the job well enough when you get used to it.
Great comment all around albeit with maybe a bit outdated yet personal experience.
I would say, don’t underestimate blender, it has a lot of parallel progress going on and while I never used it for video editing, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s pretty powerful in that area.
I’m personally a resolve user and I think it doesn’t have anything to envy from avid or premiere at this stage (you admit yourself it was 8 years since you tried it). It’s incredibly powerful and the free version should get you by for most projects though you might run into a few things where you wish you had the studio version.
My personal experience when I was shopping around before settling on resolve (3/4 years ago) was that all the other FOSS options I tried were mid at best.
Regarding Resolve, that’s actually the only bit of insight I could offer based on recent experiences compared to all the outdated info about the FOSS stuff. Of course nothing said here can be objective given personal preference but based on trying to get work done this is my impression at the present time.
I use the studio version every day for colour grading, it is fantastic for that. I couldn’t get used to fusion, being only a kind of bodge-job amateur in visual FX and motion GFX, it’s very hard to get used to after initially using after effects for that kind of work however I understand it’s very good. The editing side however, I really want it to be good enough, and if I was doing maybe an ad, or a corporate gig or perhaps short YouTube videos or interviews, it’d probably be fine. However, try as I might and try I really really did, I could not judge it on par on a recent major documentary project where I was forced to use it, compared to Premiere or Avid. It has far more recent, really cool features that I think in time will become indispensible and I love playing with them, but the basic nuts and bolts, while very nearly being there, don’t seem to work as comfortably at scale. Things like multi camera workflows in particular work in frustrating ways that hold you back and become inefficient with enough scale, the lack of auto-patching too gets on my nerves and I also find it extremely frustrating how many things cannot be done keyboard only, even with the crazy expensive full-size editor keyboard. A lot of the problems are quite minor things that would sound like nitpicking to most users but once you find yourself dealing with a big enough pool of footage and timelines the importance of the little things becomes manifest. It’s definitely getting better, at a rapid pace. I’m team Resolve because I just want them to win, especially because despite proclaiming it better, I really dislike using Avid and I also really dislike Adobe as a company even if I generally like their software.