Advanced

8 of the Best Free Linux Video Editors

Posted by sde on · 25 comments
LinuxLinks.com; By Steve Emms 		Mail this story
Print this story

Video editing is the process of editing motion video footage. In the new age of personal video, video editing is becoming a central function of the desktop, with the popularity of video editing software ever increasing.

Any self-respecting operating system that has ambitions on becoming the dominant force on the desktop therefore needs to have a good selection of video editing software. Video sharing websites such as YouTube and Google Video are now enormously popular with hundreds of thousands of new videos uploaded every day. Recording digital television to the PC is also increasing prevalent and many users want to edit these broadcasts, if only to remove the advertisements.

In the past, video editing in Linux significantly lagged behind other popular operating system. While there was a good range of software, the vast majority offered limited functionality. However, the situation has dramatically improved, in part because of development on multimedia frameworks (such as GStreamer and MLT). Furthermore, the versatility of Linux video editors has improved markedly. Linux now represents an excellent platform for editing video.

To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 8 excellent video editors. Hopefully, there will be something of interest for anyone interested in editing motion video footage.

Read more

Full Story

  Nav
» Read more about: Story Type: Reviews, Roundups

» Get new stories by e-mail: nightly or as they are published

« Return to the newswire homepage

  Related stories
» More like this

Comments (25)

5 earlier comments in the full thread.

dinotrac ·
caitlyn --

Agreed. I did quite a bit with Cinelerra when I was making videos for my Sunday school and church. A little bit of overkill, but worked fairly well for me, including the chroma key, which let me do a lot of things to surprise the kids.

Definitely quirky. Definitely save your work. Definitely resource-hungry.

But --- worked.
herzeleid ·
Has anybody tried openshot? That's supposed to be the new up and coming linux video editing program that just works.
DarrenR114 ·
I'll give LiVES and Kino a go (I've worked with avidemux and it gives me a bit of trouble with the audio tracks), but I'm gonna leave PiTiVi, Openshot, Kdenlive to those of you who don't mind dealing with the brokenness that is Python and/or KDE.
dinotrac ·
Darren -

Kino is a very basic editor -- but it always worked pretty well for me.

Doesn't have all the effects -- or, ummm, compositing -- that a serious editor does, but it's low-tech editing is pretty approachable once you start working with it. It used to tout itself as the vi of video editing.
DarrenR114 ·
@Dino, thanks for the heads up on Kino... sounds like Kino is to video editing what sox is audio editing.
Steven_Rosenber ·
It's a funny thing, but Kino is starting to look better and better.
herzeleid ·
I apt-get installed openshot and fired it up to have a look. Definitely not a kde app, no qt dependencies - just your usual mainstream gtk+python stuff.

Looks pretty sharp, and seems straightforward. I'm leaving for a party, so I won't edit a movie right now, but I like it already.

Joe
Sander_Marechal ·
Quoting:Doesn't have all the effects -- or, ummm, compositing -- that a serious editor does, but it's low-tech editing is pretty approachable once you start working with it. It used to tout itself as the vi of video editing.


That doesn't sound right. The vi of video editors would be very complex but extremely powerful when you manage to learn it. Low-tech without many effects sounds more like the Nano of video editors.
Steven_Rosenber ·
Kino only works with DV files. No go.

OpenShot crashed when playing a clip.
dinotrac ·
Steven --

Sorry, I forgot about that. Kino was my first cut editor for video downloaded from my video camera.
Steven_Rosenber ·
If I can edit video in iMovie on a Mac G4 with 1 GHz CPU and 1 GB RAM, I should be able to do it in Linux with 1.2 GHz CPU and 1 GB RAM. I can accept slow rendering, but not being able to do it at all?
Sander_Marechal ·
@Steven: My guess is that Apple's software is specifically built to take advantage of the G4's AltiVec instructions to do video fast. x86 did not have anything comparable (yes there was MMX, but that's much slower).
Steven_Rosenber ·
I did try Blender. I did have audio issues (my USB-connected audio isn't always picked up by some applications), but I didn't do my test editing with one of the "edit video with Blender" tutorials, so I barely knew what I was doing.

If it works, I'll suffer with the Blender interface, which resembles what I can only imagine an air-traffic controller's screen crossed with a nuclear-missile-launcher's desktop looks like.
Sander_Marechal ·
@Steven: Blender's UI is very powerful and user-friendly once you get to know it. But it's a bit like vim. Targeted at power users and with a steep learning curve. I do urge you to really learn it though. It's worth it. Blender is a fantastic application that can do wonderful things. I have never regretted the time I spent learning to work with it, even though I don't need to use it much.
dinotrac ·
Sander --

Yes, Blender is amazing and it makes a really nice frozen Margarita, too.
Steven_Rosenber ·
I like the idea of Blender, especially its cross-platform development model ... but I wouldn't call that UI "user-friendly." It's almost "user-hostile," from what I can see.
Sander_Marechal ·
@Steven, that was my first impression too, but once I climbed the rather steep learning curve I love it. It's like Gimp and Vim. Hard to learn but powerful. Of course, I can't speak too much for the compositing parts of Blender because I haven't used it that much. I mainly work with the modeling and rendering parts of Blender.
Bob_Robertson ·
> It's almost "user-hostile," from what I can see.

Sounds like the rumors about Linux, to me.
azerthoth ·
I had no real issues with Pitivi, other than it being a resource hog, but any video editor is going to be. My system though was easily outperformed yours though. amd64x2 4200 (2.4 Ghz ea) and 2 gig mem and another 3 gig for swap.

From playing with pretty much any video editor I could get my hands on, memory memory memory, then a decent CPU.
gus3 ·
Linux is user-friendly. It's just choosy about its friends.

Post a comment

A free account is needed to post. Write your comment here first: your text is kept in this browser while you sign up or log in, and is waiting for you when you come back.

Your message:
|||||
10
Markdown: **bold**, *italic*, [text](https://link), - lists, > quotes, $x^2$ for math. Formatting help

Sign up and post (it is free)  or  Log in and post