State of Kdenlive
89 points
2 hours ago
| 9 comments
| kdenlive.org
| HN
visiohex
45 minutes ago
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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.
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freedomben
30 minutes ago
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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.
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BodyCulture
7 minutes ago
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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.

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nathanmills
42 minutes ago
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Or with Tenacity insead of Audacity for the 100% invasive free software setup!
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aleda145
1 hour ago
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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.

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popcar2
1 hour ago
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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...
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Doohickey-d
7 minutes ago
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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.

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annnoo
22 minutes ago
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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 !
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dadoomer
1 hour ago
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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.
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longitudinal93
1 hour ago
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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.
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embedding-shape
1 hour ago
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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?

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prmoustache
1 hour ago
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Open source projects do not necessary see alternatives as "competitors" if they don't market/sell their software.
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embedding-shape
1 hour ago
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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...
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nathanmills
39 minutes ago
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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.
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embedding-shape
21 minutes ago
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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.
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TehCorwiz
57 minutes ago
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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.
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ekianjo
41 minutes ago
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Good progress but kdenlive still cannot handle HDR videos
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f_r_d
20 minutes ago
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It is in the roadmap ;)
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echelon
52 minutes ago
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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.

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lunar_rover
29 minutes ago
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> 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.

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Pay08
24 minutes ago
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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.

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f_r_d
25 minutes ago
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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)

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opan
16 minutes ago
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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.

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yellow_lead
7 minutes ago
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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.
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freedomben
32 minutes ago
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> *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.

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pipeline_peak
49 minutes ago
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Google
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