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

Shotcut: Free, open source, cross-platform video editor

shotcutapp.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 141 posts

Re: Shotcut: Free, open source, cross-platform video editor

#31

Post by ggambetta »

baldfat wrote: post #28
alok-g wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the video editing programs I have used (Sony, Corel, Cyberlink, Panasonic) crash often. On this HN, it looks the same for FOSS also. Is there some specific reason behind this?

I do some video editing contract work from time to time. I never know what I will have to use so I have pretty much used all of them. They are unstable because they require huge amount of resources, especially if your looking for 4k source material. You must have a very powerful machine. I don't have many crashes when working on high end custom built machines, but they do happen. From most stable to least stable for…

> Lightworks [...is] basically free

I've looked at Lightworks before, but it looks like the free version only exports up to 720p? If that's the case, that's an immediate deal-breaker :(

Re: Shotcut: Free, open source, cross-platform video editor

#32

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

Ciantic wrote: post #27

I would like to have a simple free video editor that can cut and append files together without re-encoding. It's doable with avidemux, but it is just pain to manage.

I'm surprised that that's technically possible, actually. Does it just shove the streams into a container format that allows both?

Re: Shotcut: Free, open source, cross-platform video editor

#33

Post by phillc73 »

baldfat wrote: post #28
alok-g wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the video editing programs I have used (Sony, Corel, Cyberlink, Panasonic) crash often. On this HN, it looks the same for FOSS also. Is there some specific reason behind this?

I do some video editing contract work from time to time. I never know what I will have to use so I have pretty much used all of them. They are unstable because they require huge amount of resources, especially if your looking for 4k source material. You must have a very powerful machine. I don't have many crashes when working on high end custom built machines, but they do happen. From most stable to least stable for…

> Adobe Premier - This thing is a BEAST but it is the defacto standard.

I must admit, I've not really heard of Adobe being used in professional editing contexts. With a little research I've found some articles suggesting the BBC was standardising on Adobe Premiere[1]. Article is from 2010, but I can't confirm that happened though. I left that organisation in 2011 and at that time, I was managing a number of Mac based editing suites with Final Cut Pro (FCP).

I then ran a post-production company in London. We had suites full of Avid Media Composer and one solitary FCP, because some people refused to use anything else. (Also had a Baselight grading suite and Avid ProTools in the audio suites). We never considered Adobe Premiere and I can't, off the top of my head, recall any other post- house using it either.

[1] http://www.tvtechnology.com/news/0002/bbc-adopts-adobe-premi...

Re: Shotcut: Free, open source, cross-platform video editor

#34

Post by Aissen »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #32
Ciantic wrote: post #27

I would like to have a simple free video editor that can cut and append files together without re-encoding. It's doable with avidemux, but it is just pain to manage.

I'm surprised that that's technically possible, actually. Does it just shove the streams into a container format that allows both?

If you cut at I-frames, you don't need to reencode:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression_picture_type...

If you need more resolution, you can apply more tricks, recompose i-frames from the same data, etc.

Re: Shotcut: Free, open source, cross-platform video editor

#35

Post by ygra »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #32
Ciantic wrote: post #27

I would like to have a simple free video editor that can cut and append files together without re-encoding. It's doable with avidemux, but it is just pain to manage.

I'm surprised that that's technically possible, actually. Does it just shove the streams into a container format that allows both?

I think the usual assumption is that both files have the same codec. In that case you can sometimes actually append the streams, or, with things like cuts, only re-encode a few frames until things line up again.

Re: Shotcut: Free, open source, cross-platform video editor

#36

Post by mrec »

Ciantic wrote: post #27

I would like to have a simple free video editor that can cut and append files together without re-encoding. It's doable with avidemux, but it is just pain to manage.

There's an app called Machete that can do this, but it has obvious constraints - can only cut/paste at keyframe boundaries, video/audio streams must be compatible. In practice it's useful for editing one source video, but not for combining separate vids from different sources.

Not free but cheap.

Re: Shotcut: Free, open source, cross-platform video editor

#38

Post by nickjj »

How does it compare directly to Camtasia in a real world comparison?

For example with Camtasia, you can click 1 button and have your desktop + audio + optional webcam all being recorded to your video project, and then you can hop in and edit it with a bunch of great tools and presets. This includes complex animations and tooltips with doing nothing more than dragging around a few sliders.

Basically you can get up and going with an excellent work flow as 1 single person who isn't a video editing god.

Where does Shotcut stand compared to that?

At this point price isn't an issue for people in a position to create videos. It's all about how fast it is to go from an empty folder to a high production quality video.

Camtasia is one of the only reasons why I run Windows so if your project can solve all of those problems, that would be an incredible feat since Camtasia seems to have no intent on supporting anything but Mac / Windows.

Also if it helps gauge the comparison I have tried kdenlive about 6 months ago and compared to Camtasia I would rate kdenlive a 0.001 and Camtasia a 9.5 on the sole task of "quickly create a nice looking screencast".

Re: Shotcut: Free, open source, cross-platform video editor

#40

Post by phaemon »

Daviey wrote: post #3

Please could you make the Linux version easier to consume? Either a deb/rpm package and perhaps a docker image? :) At the moment, it is pretty unclear of the exact install process!

You just unzip the bz2 file and then double click the Shotcut.desktop icon. There isn't an install procedure as such.

If you're on Ubuntu or similar, then once you're running it you can right click on the Icon and choose "Lock to launcher"

Post reply on HN