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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 :-)
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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 !
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> *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 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 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.