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State of Kdenlive

kdenlive.org

71–80 of 162 posts

Re: State of Kdenlive

#71

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 u…

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.

Re: State of Kdenlive

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I love it at tinker with it regularly. But power comes with complexity. It's always a trade off.

Re: State of Kdenlive

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 experien…

Comparing usability/stability of premiere against anything is kind of putting your finger on the scale lol

Right, but it is the SOTA and the sort of poster boy of everything kdenlive competes with.

Re: State of Kdenlive

#74
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kdenlive being crash prone is a known thing, but for the parent to say the devs don't care goes too far.

Would it be any better if they cared but still couldn't tame them in a 25 year old project?

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.

Re: State of Kdenlive

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing usability/stability of premiere against anything is kind of putting your finger on the scale lol

Right, but it is the SOTA and the sort of poster boy of everything kdenlive competes with.

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.

Re: State of Kdenlive

#76

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 co…

> much more capable than basic editors like iMovie, but doesn't have the overwhelming learning curve

Kate/Kdevelop also feels the same way, but for editors. Just the right amount of features.

Re: State of Kdenlive

#77

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…

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.

Re: State of Kdenlive

#78
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be any better if they cared but still couldn't tame them in a 25 year old project?

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 tale…

Some very talented engineers work at Microsoft, that much is clear. Whether any of them work on the new parts of Windows 11 is less clear...

Re: State of Kdenlive

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tale…

Some very talented engineers work at Microsoft, that much is clear. Whether any of them work on the new parts of Windows 11 is less clear...

AI will vibecode it to Windows Vista quality!

Re: State of Kdenlive

#80

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 co…

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 ad…

A bit dramatic for telling us you don't bother to save your work. No matter if it's avid, davinci or premiere they all crash from time to time.
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