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

41–50 of 141 posts

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

#41

Post by Joeboy »

alok-g wrote: post #21
rwx------ wrote: post #13

For short video editing it is perfect. For large projects I prefer Blender.

Interesting. I had not realized Blender could be used for video editing too.

For a decade or so the situation seemed to be that there were dozens of FOSS editors, all of which claimed to work perfectly but none of which was usable in reality. Blender was the first thing I found that actually worked properly. Having found something that works I'm a bit reluctant to return to the historically infuriating task of evaluating FOSS video editors, but maybe it's time to check out some of the other options again.

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

#42

Post by pjc50 »

nickjj wrote: post #38

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…

> At this point price isn't an issue for people in a position to create videos

There's an awful lot of people who want to break into Youtube with no money.

There's also a small but well-represented on HN market of people who want to have an OSS/Free Software only workflow.

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

#43

Post by zacharygrafton »

rajaravivarma_r wrote: post #37

It uses both GTK and Qt, someone knows why? And what different purpose they solve?

I could be wrong, but it looks like it is an optional dependency that adds additional image format support to MLT, which is a dependency of Shotcut. Also, some Qt builds require at least glib for event loop integration and some even require GTK as dependency to enable GTK styling in Qt apps. The build script for Shotcut appears to have an option to disable this dependency.

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

#44

Post by tjoff »

pjc50 wrote: post #42
nickjj wrote: post #38

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…

> At this point price isn't an issue for people in a position to create videos There's an awful lot of people who want to break into Youtube with no money. There's also a small but well-represented on HN market of people who want to have an OSS/Free Software only workflow.

And there are way more video recorders than people on earth, lots of people want to create videos from their children, family gatherings, vacations etc. if only they knew how.

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

#45

Post by beojan »

nickjj wrote: post #38

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…

Where would you rate Movie Maker, and where would you rate Premiere Pro?

Shotcut and Kdenlive are fundamentally video editors, which happen to be able to do screen recording. Camtasia is specifically a screen recorder.

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

#47

Post by bringtheaction »

Joeboy wrote: post #41
alok-g wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I had not realized Blender could be used for video editing too.

For a decade or so the situation seemed to be that there were dozens of FOSS editors, all of which claimed to work perfectly but none of which was usable in reality. Blender was the first thing I found that actually worked properly. Having found something that works I'm a bit reluctant to return to the historically infuriating task of evaluating FOSS video editors, but maybe it's time to check out some of the other o…

Same here, except I gave up on video editing all together because all of the FOSS video editors I tried were trash (I don't use that word lightly but they really were -- completely unusable). Never tried video editing with Blender, have only used it for 3D modeling and rendering.

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

#48

Post by nickjj »

pjc50 wrote: post #42
nickjj wrote: post #38

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…

> At this point price isn't an issue for people in a position to create videos There's an awful lot of people who want to break into Youtube with no money. There's also a small but well-represented on HN market of people who want to have an OSS/Free Software only workflow.

I'm all for OSS too but when it comes down to it, if you're serious about video editing, this isn't really a tool you can make compromises on (and trust me, I spent a lot of time trying before pulling the trigger on buying Camtasia).

This is after having recorded about 50 hours of real-time video over a few years. There's just so many things you absolutely need to be happy and productive when recording -- especially if you plan to do this for a living.

Using a bad video editor (and I'm not saying Shotcut is bad because I haven't installed it yet) is just a really draining and time wasting experience.

It takes me around 70 minutes of real life time to produce 10 minutes of video after years of work flow optimizations and using what I think is one of the best tools available to make screencasts. Almost all of that time is spent editing in Camtasia (stopping and starting the recording, correcting mistakes, adding post-production effects, etc.).

I would love to switch to an open source tool (for many reasons) but the reality of the situation is, I wouldn't switch unless it was remarkable because it's such an important tool if you're livelihood depends on making videos.

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

#49

Post by nickjj »

beojan wrote: post #45
nickjj wrote: post #38

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…

Where would you rate Movie Maker, and where would you rate Premiere Pro? Shotcut and Kdenlive are fundamentally video editors, which happen to be able to do screen recording. Camtasia is specifically a screen recorder.

Camtasia is much more than a screen recorder.

Look at a couple of Youtube videos on Camtasia 9. It is a full fledged editor (and also does audio / video recording too). That's the winning property of it.

You just click a button to start recording, deliver your video content, press stop and then you can immediately start editing your content. Then you export and you're done.

With something like premiere you would have to record your audio and / or video with a different tool and spend a lot of time importing. I also found premier's UI to be crazy complex (in a very non-intuitive way). I haven't tried movie maker.

Camtasia's editing effects are just enough to make really nice screencast style videos without being overwhelming. I've gotten hundreds of positive reviews on my tech courses that were related to the production quality of the videos.

For example, the video on this course page[0] was made fully with Camtasia 9. All of the animations and even the slides / tooltips.

That whale animation and text dropping effect took around 5 minutes to make from scratch once I figured out what I wanted to do. All I had to do was pick some things from a few drop down boxes and drag 2 or 3 sliders around.

[0]: https://diveintodocker.com/

Post reply on HN