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issue144:mon_opinion

Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !


Over the years, I have heard frequent frustrations from Linux users over the lack of good video editors for professional and home use. It is often cited as a reason people stick with Windows and Macs. I have never tried to do professional editing, but I did start making home movies for YouTube in 2008 and I can attest it has been a challenge to find an editor that is useful for making home movies, but I have found one that really works!

It was in 2008 I first started putting together some videos, from 10 frames per second (fps) low-resolution .mov video, shot from a simple point-and-shoot Panasonic camera I had then. I had a relative recommend Avid Free DV (Digital Video), the free version of Avid’s professional software, that would run only on Windows. I downloaded the last version of it before it was discontinued. It proved to be incredibly complex and hard to use, consumed a lot of RAM and CPU power, and produced really poor finished results. No matter, it was discontinued in 2007, and I had moved away from using Windows to Ubuntu, anyway.

My next stop was a Linux video editor, Open Movie Editor, but it proved problematic and never worked right. It looked quite promising, but development was abandoned in 2009 and it never reached its potential.

It was about this time that I discovered JumpCut, an online video editor. This was a different concept; you just uploaded your raw video clips to the website, then edited them online, and JumpCut hosted the final product as well. It worked really well, pretty much flawlessly. The company had been founded in 2005, but it was bought by Yahoo! in October 2006 as a “hot property”. Yahoo! fell into tough times and, as part of restructuring the company, they shut JumpCut down in June 2009. So much for that.

My next video editor was Avidemux, a very simple application found in the Ubuntu repositories. It proved very precise, used very low RAM and CPU resources, rendered videos quite fast, and produced “okay” results. The documentation is poor, but there is a good flossmanuals.net manual that makes up for it. Avidemux also lacks a “drag and drop” timeline, which makes editing videos an exercise in careful planning. I had audio codec compatibility issues, too, but the main drawback was jumpy transitions between video clips. Development of Avidemux was still ongoing in mid-2018, but the last version in the Ubuntu repositories was for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Trusty Tahr, and there has been nothing since.

By 2010 I was testing out a new video editor, Pitivi, which uses the GStreamer backend. It was even included in the Ubuntu ISO as the default video editor starting with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. It has a very good interface, good documentation, and is very easy to use. I quickly discovered that it suffered from using up all the RAM and CPU and also from stability issues. The endless crashes made it unusable. It was removed from the Ubuntu ISO file starting with Ubuntu 11.10, due to the “poor reception” from users as well as “lack of fit with the default user-case for Ubuntu”, as well as “lack of ‘polish’ and maturity”.

Next was Cinelerra, a professional-style video Linux editor project started in 2002 and still in development in 2019. There were no packages available on Ubuntu in 2010 or since, and so I tried it out on another distro, Puppy Linux, and discovered it was very complex to use. Cinelerra has many forks and branches, including Cinelerra-HV, Cinelerra-CV and Cinelerra-GG Infinity, none of which have packages in the Ubuntu repositories. It can be compiled and run, but the website warns, “There are many dependencies. Don't be surprised if the source code requires some tweaks and the binary doesn't work. Downloads have no support or warranty.”

I moved onto Kino, a good, solid, simple, Linux video editor that was in the Ubuntu repositories. Kino was a breath of fresh air in the video editing world. It worked, was simple to use and had really nice smooth transitions. It worked on only .dv files, but converted just about any other video format to .dv first, automatically. The only drawback was that Kino development ended in 2009 and the project abandoned. I used it from 2010-2013, though. Over time, I found that it couldn’t deal with newer formats, and even though the last version, 1.3.4, remains in the newest Ubuntu release repositories, it no longer works all that well on modern video formats and doesn’t output in modern free video formats.

Between 2013 and 2016 I tried various new versions of Pitivi once again, including through flatpack downloads, but it still proved too unstable, slow and resource intensive to use. Some versions almost worked, some just crashed on opening.

In December 2016, I tried out Kdenlive (KDE Non-Linear Video Editor), a project that was started in 2002 and has been part of the KDE desktop since 2015. It uses the Media Lovin' Toolkit (MLT) and libraries such as FFmpeg. The interface uses the Qt toolkit, so it integrates nicely into Kubuntu and now Lubuntu, which has used Qt since 17.10. It runs well on the other Ubuntu flavors, as well.

Kdenlive has an excellent on-line manual, is easy to use, and has a wide variety of input and output video formats, including modern free formats such as .webm and Therora. It renders videos quite quickly, has really nice, smooth, transitions, and doesn’t eat up all of my desktop’s RAM or CPU, either. Best of all is its stability; I have yet to see a single crash. Kdenlive is under active development and each new Ubuntu release includes a newer version in the repositories.

I have now been using Kdenlive for more than two years and find it hard to fault. It took me eight years of trial and error, but I finally found a Linux video editor that really works for making home movies.

issue144/mon_opinion.1556862041.txt.gz · Dernière modification : 2019/05/03 07:40 de d52fr