Video Editors

[Fire_String]

Hi All.
My Debian and Ubuntu installations have all the typical and well covered (on this forum), low latency optimizations afforded by the KX-Studio repo's. I have been using Openshot 1.4.3 to edit some phone footage (Moto-G 720p 30fps) that whilst intuitive to use, is a total crash-fest.
Even the mantra 'save and save often' is pushed to the limit. I find that I need to use the 'save as' option every good move, to make (and keep) progress. My system chugs along pretty well by all accounts, despite having a now ageing core 2 duo 3GHz processor and 4GB of RAM. Does anyone else have similar crash issues with Openshot?

My next footage will be attempted with the less intuitive (to me) Flowblade..

[bhilmers]

Does anyone else have similar crash issues with Openshot?

Yes, the crashing is so terrible it makes me laugh, it literally crashes every few minutes. It's amazing that such a basic editor is so unstable. Unfortunately, I've had similar luck with all the other FOSS video editors; either they lack professional level features, or they are too prone to crashing, or have awkward workflows/interfaces). I hear KDE users have better luck with some programs, but I run Ubuntu Studio which uses XFCE and promotes Open Shot, and is unusable for all but the most simple edits.

[durfnap]

What about Kdenlive?

[Fire_String]

Thanks for your replies. I'm glad it's not just my system.
Your experiences are much the same as my own with such editors
I was beginning to wonder if video editors were compatible with optimized systems
such as KX-Studio et al.

What about Kdenlive?

I have tried it very recently, but found it crashed often too. It might be in part due to the Xfce centric
desktop that I totally prefer. Potentially there might be missing KDE components (that I don't want )
that cause further instability (maybe).

I hope to acclimatise to Flowblade, as it doesn't seem prone to crashing (yet). I will use it in anger for my next
video project to see how it goes.

[Aleks]

Here's to the argue that we had about how Unity is bad, and how XFCE is good awhile ago. I use Kdenlive with Unity on a regular basis, even created a movie for a short documentary festival with it, and it never crashes on me

[asbak]

Cinelerra is another option

[durfnap]

Kdenlive did a alot of refactoring and have a new release out.
Shotcut is promising too. Based on MLT like Kdenlive.

[Alwaysanewb]

Seemed like josh the person who wrote and maintains open shot stopped working and updating it right after he got about $40,000 from crowd funding for a 2.0 release. It's a shame openshot was awesome. Hope he resolves his issues and gets back to it. I was a great program until then.

I personally started using blender to do video editing after this. It's doesn't crash and it seems the sky is the limit with what can be done with it but it is a heck of a learning curve if you have never messed around with it. I would look up basic video editing in blender and watch a bunch of youtube videos. That's what I did and I'm dense as a sack of rocks and have gotten to where it's quite intuitive and wouldn't want to edit any other way. It doesn't crash at least on my computer. It can be a bit resource intense though. I don't know if it limits that on slower computers and just takes longer to render.

[PaulyWally]

I have used both Cinelerra and Blender (once).

Cinelerra I used quite extensively several years ago. It is very powerful and fairly stable (it crashed... but not very often). The program is great. A lot can be done with it. I haven't used it in a while, but I'm going back to Linux for MM production. So I'm looking forward to using it again. It has (IMO) a very steep initial learning curve, but once you are acquainted with the workflow things get easier.

I recently used Blender for video editing for the first time. I was on a Windows machine and just needed to splice together a few scenes from a camcorder into a short 2 minute video. I think it took me about 3 hours to download, install, watch some YouTube instructions, create and render the video the way I wanted. I didn't think that was too bad at all for having never used it before.

I've also used Blender in the past for 3D modeling and compositing. I think a lot of people feel that Blender has a steep learning curve. But I actually think that it's quite intuitive and quick to grasp concepts. The thing that tripped me up a lot in the beginning was the "odd" navigational system of the application. i.e. - you don't use the mouse or keyboard the way you might be used to. I believe I read somewhere that Blender did this on purpose because they feel it is a far more efficient use of the mouse/keyboard for this type of work... so they are sticking to it.

From what I remember, Cinelerra had a pretty good number of instructables/docs online. But I know Blender is used more widely. So there's likely a lot more community support for it.