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What video editing software would you recommend on Ubuntu (or Linux in general) and why? It can be for either beginners or experienced users.

Please only place one piece of software per response and include details to what makes it great!

Jorge Castro
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Gödel
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  • http://askubuntu.com/questions/60467/alternatives-to-dvd-slideshow – Ringtail Mar 24 '12 at 00:29
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    LightWorks - http://www.lwks.com/ - there's a free version which may cover many of your needs. The professional version is offered in a one-off lifetime price. – therobyouknow Jan 13 '15 at 22:48

9 Answers9

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Openshot

Install via the software center

OpenShot can take your videos, photos, and music files and help you create the film you have always dreamed of. Easily add sub-titles, transitions, and effects, and then export your film to DVD, YouTube, Vimeo, Xbox 360, and many other common formats.

alt text

Community
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    What's so great about it? – badp Oct 11 '10 at 11:48
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    It's much more stable than PiTiVi (in which you simply can't get things done), has transition effects, and easy joining of multiple clips together. Saves much time. – culebrón Feb 07 '13 at 13:48
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    I tried OpenShot based on this answer. For me it crashes on exporting long videos, and is quite cumbersome to align short video fragments exactly. I cannot recommend. – SCBuergel Jul 20 '16 at 08:31
  • Lovely! Looks like nice, simple what used to be called "A/B-Roll" Editing. Just what an editor needs... – Frank N Oct 31 '16 at 00:40
  • Major difficulty with open shot is that it's impossible to select more than one clip section at a time. So if you want to "fill a gap" moving all the later clips back, it's very hard work. A bug has been filed for this since 2009, but nobody has implemented it yet. – Sanjay Manohar Feb 18 '17 at 14:29
  • Kdenlive output video usually has less keyframing artifacts and blur. – Alberto Salvia Novella Mar 23 '17 at 19:21
  • Excellent! Worked perfectly on my MacBook Pro. Great alternative to iMovie, especially for those who don't care about updating to High Sierra. – kas Feb 22 '18 at 18:09
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PiTiVi:

Install via the software center

PiTiVi is an easy-to-use video editor targeted at beginners and intermediate users.

PiTiVi Screenshot

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koushik
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  • Pitivi is really shaping up with more great things (such as video effects) on the horizon. – NightwishFan Oct 11 '10 at 08:19
  • I'd pick Pitivi over Openshot because it just works while Openshot feels really strange to use. If you don't need effects and just need to edit videos, Pitivi is perfect. Otherwise look at Openshot. – mniess Oct 22 '10 at 19:51
  • It's still very basic compared to other tools, and even the latest versions crash all the time. – culebrón Feb 07 '13 at 11:42
  • Much easier interface than Openshot: visible audio waveform, video thumbnails on the timeline, good keyboard shortcuts, copy-paste from timestamp, which is more precise, not a cpu hog. – nealmcb Oct 25 '13 at 04:11
  • Its interface is very well designed, but since it's fully written in Python it can respond terribly slow. – Alberto Salvia Novella Mar 23 '17 at 19:18
  • Pitivi is an absolute worst of all the editors out there. It crashes all the time and the timeline is hard to control. – Rajat Saxena Apr 09 '17 at 09:27
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I have found kdenlive to be very easy to use and serves most editing needs very well:

Install via the software center

I understand it is now available for other desktop environments as well. Hence made it a separate answer so others can vote up their choice.

from their website

Elder Geek
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koushik
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  • Kdenlive reminds me of Sony Vegas, it is quite a good program, though I have not used it in a while. – NightwishFan Oct 11 '10 at 08:19
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    Kdenlive's software dependencies may look too overwhelming for GNOME users though. – Gödel Oct 11 '10 at 08:40
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    You don't have to use KDE to try kdenlive. It's available from the Ubuntu Software Centre and runs great in default Ubuntu Gnome environment. – Mat Tomaszewski Oct 11 '10 at 10:15
  • @Mat: I am well aware of that fact. on my GNOME environment, kdenlive requires 94 additional packages as its dependencies. Without knowing the benefits one might get out of it, it just looks too heavy-weight is the point. – Gödel Oct 11 '10 at 11:42
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    It seems silly to avoid using an otherwise good application because it has KDE-based dependencies. It's perfectly fine to run apps that depend on parts of KDE in gnome, and won't harm you or your desktop environment at all. Linux distros are supposed to be about bringing software together, not segregating it into all GTK/Gnome-based apps for Gnome or all Qt/KDE-based apps for KDE. If your package manager allows it, go ahead and mix-and-match. Gnome even does a fairly good job of integrating (some) KDE apps some of the time. kdenlive looks quite distinctive though. – thomasrutter Apr 22 '12 at 10:28
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    I also use kdenlive on Unity and it is awesome. – Ramon Suarez Jun 16 '12 at 06:49
  • Although the interface could be much simpler, this video editor is the one which provides the better experience overall. The rest are either too slow, or the video output is very bad. – Alberto Salvia Novella Mar 23 '17 at 19:22
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You have quite a few options:

Cinelerra

A non-linear video editor and compositor for Linux. It also allows users to perform common compositing operations such as keying and mattes.

enter image description here

Installation guide for 12.04 & 12.10

Avidemux

Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks.

enter image description here

Kdenlive

Kdenlive is an intuitive and powerful multi-track video editor, including most recent video technologies.

enter image description here

Comparison

enter image description here

Cinelerra is used for professional work. It is very fast, and can handle a heavy load.

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abhshkdz
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7

Excellent question, because at this time it has not been addressed. I know exactly what you are going through. I've been down that road of frustration. I tried everything in the repos and everything I could manage to successfully compile. One app stood out above them all: OpenShot. Try it out.

  • It's in the repos, No confusing compiling necessary.
  • It has an intuitive interface.
  • It's stable.
  • Decent package of features.

There is one small dependency you might need for some hd wide-screen output but that's it.

I would suggest:

  • Vlc to make your clips
  • Audacity to edit your audio
  • Gnome-subtitles to add subtitles if you need
  • OpenShot to build your audio/video project

That's the real aspiring Directors package right there, when the professional stuff is out of reach, or for the hobbiest.

OpenShot also has a forum where you can showcase what you've done.

If you need any help getting vlc to make clips, just ask me, it can be a little confusing the first clip. OpenShot is so intuitive, I'd be surprised if you asked a question. I tried all the others, and finally found OpenShot last. OpenShot is what you want. Beat the others hands down.

This is just one fan vid I did. Check out what you can do: (Beware I Am A Vampire Fan!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_7iZfd63y4

Helpfull things To Know About OpenShot:

  • Save your project and videos in the same folder.
  • Save often, and save using Number, i.e., projectSave#1, projectSave#2, etc. You can go back to a previous state if you change your mind or have a strange issue.
  • Do not use an exported video as a source to build another video, every time you convert, quality will degrade. Use only direct source if possible with clips.
  • Do not use clips that are too long.
  • Do not move clips outside of you project folder, or you will disable your project.
  • Buy some RAM if you've been putting it off. It will smooth things out.
  • If you notice something out of the ordinary with the program itself, save then, and see if the bug goes away, or to go back to your last save. Otherwise if you continue to work, there is a potential for loss of work.
  • Keep a processor monitor up while you work, and if you apply an operation that consume lots of processor percentage, wait till it's done. I'm impatient and multi-task and crashed OpenShot because I tried to apply too many operations that had a heavy load all too close to one another.
  • Make sure you are up to date on your codecs!

With that in mind, some of the other editors would not even start or crash once a clip was added, or just flat out not work. OpenShot will get the project done if you take those things in mind.

bambuntu
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blender is a very capable option. It's essentially a 3D-modelling and animation platform, but also has video editing capabilities (which I haven't tested yet). It's worth giving a go, but I'd recommend watching some tutorials first, as the UI has an unusual logic, which takes a while to get used to. The interaction model is very consistent though, and optimised for productivity. Overall, it's one of the most mature and impressive graphic design packages with an open license Blender

Elder Geek
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    You didn't answer fully: what's so great about it? Add a link maybe? :) – badp Oct 11 '10 at 11:48
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    Blender is a very powerful tool, I've worked with it recently and was very impressed. It's essentially a 3D-modelling and animation platform, but also has video editing capabilities (which I haven't tested yet). It's worth giving a go, but I'd recommend watching some tutorials first, as the UI has an unusual logic, which takes a while to get used to. The interaction model is very consistent though, and optimised for productivity. Overall, it's one of the most mature and impressive graphic design packages with an open license. Check http://www.blender.org/ – Mat Tomaszewski Oct 11 '10 at 13:25
  • Too hard for just cutting a few videos. – Alberto Salvia Novella Mar 23 '17 at 19:25
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DVBcut

Install via the software center

DVBcut is a Qt application that allows you to select certain parts of an MPEG transport stream (as received via Digital Video Broadcasting, DVB) and save these parts into a single MPEG output file. It follows a "keyhole surgery" approach where the input video and audio data is mostly kept unchanged, and only very few frames at the beginning and/or end of the selected range are re-encoded in order to obtain a valid MPEG file.

dvbcut

If you have a DVB recorder or a digital TV card and want to cut off some parts from your recordings (like commercials) frame-exactly without re-encoding the whole file, use DVBcut. Not suitable for most other purposes.

Documentation about how to use it you can find on it's homepage.

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dorfbewohner
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Other option that seems to be a professional option is novacut.

Find more info to install it here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Novacut/HowToInstall

And here you go the official website for novacut:
http://novacut.com/
http://blog.novacut.com/

Kesymaru
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"really good" is of course subjective and it depends on what you think of the interface and features.

Personally I like Openshot. Easy to use, nice itnerface, all the features I have ever needed.

enter image description here

sudo apt-get install openshot

Alternates include Cinelerra (not in the Ubuntu repos), Avidemux, Kdenlive, and Kino.

Panther
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  • here´s how to install Cinelerra http://handytutorial.com/install-cinelerra-in-ubuntu-12-04-12-10/ I think it´s the most powerful video-editing software for Linux, but it´s a little bit harder to use... – makim Mar 04 '13 at 20:08
  • I was looking for one that is comparable to Premiere Pro or Imovie. – DogLover Mar 04 '13 at 20:10