Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Shotcut is a free, open-source, cross-platform video editor

shotcut.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 99 posts

Re: Shotcut is a free, open-source, cross-platform video editor

#21

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

registeredcorn wrote: post #18

Here's a bit of feedback, in the event anyone who manages the site reads this comment section: 1) I checked the FAQ and the 2nd and 3rd question in the FAQ were about crashing on Windows. I get the impression that this software is extremely unstable across OSes. This is a really bad foot to start off on. Can anyone speak to the stability of Shotcut? I see a few comments below mentioning crashes, I just can't tell if…

I had it crash consistently on linux on startup, which as IIRC was something to do with the initial splash screen and was fixed by manually setting an option. Other than that, I've had it crash a couple of times when exporting, but I think that was the OS desperately reclaiming memory on an under-powered machine.

Can't help with comparing it to kdenlive.

Re: Shotcut is a free, open-source, cross-platform video editor

#22

Post by Diris »

mrdonbrown wrote: post #12

Shotcut has this one cool feature [1] - drop a bunch of pictures into it and it'll create an animated slide show automatically. I've looked for ways to automate that via something like ffmpeg, but haven't found any better options. [1] https://forum.shotcut.org/t/slideshow-generator/19162

So basically this[0] with a crossfade[1] between frames? Which would be (by stitching examples together)

  ffmpeg -framerate 1/5 -pattern_type glob -i '\*.jpg' -pix_fmt yuv420p -filter_complex xfade=transition=fade:duration=2:offset=2 out.mp4
(1 jpg image per 5 seconds with a 2 seconds crossfade in between)

[0] https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Slideshow

[1] https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#xfade (only available in >4.3)

Re: Shotcut is a free, open-source, cross-platform video editor

#24

Post by ghostly_s »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #5
kristopolous wrote: post #2

Anyone use this? Opinions?

I've only used it for splicing together bike cam videos and then cutting them to 2 minutes before and after the incident for submitting to police (that's quite common for police forces in the UK when dealing with close-pass etc footage). It was easy enough to figure out how to use it and I've got about zero knowledge of video editing. To be honest, I should really change to using ffmpeg instead as OpenShot can be a b…

Wow, the police actually care about stuff like that over there? what a world.

Re: Shotcut is a free, open-source, cross-platform video editor

#25

Post by _gabe_ »

kristopolous wrote: post #2

Anyone use this? Opinions?

I used it for awhile, but there are a lot of short comings. It's very unintuitive and I would often spend more time trying to figure out how to do a thing than doing a thing. I switched to DaVinci Resolve (also free), and never looked back. I eventually spent the one time payment of around $300 for access to GPU accelerated encoding and a few additional filters and stuff.

Re: Shotcut is a free, open-source, cross-platform video editor

#28

Post by linsomniac »

rchaud wrote: post #11
kristopolous wrote: post #2

Anyone use this? Opinions?

I used both Shotcut and Davinci Resolve on MacOS. Shotcut provided the perfect amount of middle ground between iMovie and all the power user stuff in Davinci. More importantly, Shotcut worked well on my 2014 Macbook Pro with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage. Davinci is probably the better software but it ran very slowly once you added a couple of video/audio/photo layers. And the storage it ate up inside project files to st…

Reluctant to say "throw hardware at it", but I got one of the new M1 MBPs, my first Mac ever, and I can throw multi-cam 4K30 2/3 cams around with no optimized media, and it basically always runs without dropped frames, just using the H264/265 media generated by the cameras. I got the 2TB storage, because on my previous laptop I always was eating up so much space with optimized media, but it's way overkill now that I don't need that. But I didn't know that going into it.

Re: Shotcut is a free, open-source, cross-platform video editor

#29

Post by _gabe_ »

rchaud wrote: post #11
kristopolous wrote: post #2

Anyone use this? Opinions?

I used both Shotcut and Davinci Resolve on MacOS. Shotcut provided the perfect amount of middle ground between iMovie and all the power user stuff in Davinci. More importantly, Shotcut worked well on my 2014 Macbook Pro with 8GB RAM and 128GB storage. Davinci is probably the better software but it ran very slowly once you added a couple of video/audio/photo layers. And the storage it ate up inside project files to st…

When did you last use DaVinci? I've been using it for the past year and a half, and my project files are all under 10MB. I just checked my most recent video (around 30 minutes of 4K video), and the project file was 5.77MB

Edit: I just opened the project up because I was curious about the RAM and vRAM. When it's idle it took 1.5GB of RAM and 1GB of vRAM. Scrolling through the project very quickly pushed the RAM up to 4.5GB and vRAM up to 2GB.

Re: Shotcut is a free, open-source, cross-platform video editor

#30

Post by simbas »

hjek wrote: post #14
kristopolous wrote: post #2

Anyone use this? Opinions?

For me, Shotcut, Openshot, Flowblade, Olive and Pitivi have been crashing to often to be worth using. Openshot used to be less flaky when I used it a few years ago when it was in GTK but the Qt version has not been stable to me. Kdenlive is amazing though, especially the timegraphs for applying effects, and the clip proxying which makes it amazingly smooth for large projects on old laptops. I don't think any of the o…

We use kdenlive at work with the same results. Sometimes crashes but Auto save saves the day
Post reply on HN