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Ask Slashdot: the State of Free Video Editing Tools?
New submitter Shadow99_1 writes I used to do a lot of video editing (a few years ago, at an earlier job) and at that time I used Adobe Premiere. Now a few years later I'm looking to start doing some video editing for my own personal use, but I have a limited budget that pretty well excludes even thinking about buying a copy of Adobe Premiere. So I ask slashdot: What is the state of free (as in beer or as in open source) video editing tools? In my case... I support a windows environment at work and so it's primarily what I use at home. I am also using a camcorder that uses flash cards to record onto, so for me I need a platform that supports reading flash cards. So that is my focus but feel free to discuss video editing on all platforms.
I've been looking forward to the Kickstarted upgrade to OpenShot; based on the project's latest update, early versions of an installer should start appearing soon. Video editing is a big endeavor, though, and ambitious announcements and slipped schedules both seem to be the norm: an open-source version of Lightworks was announced back in 2010. Some lighter open-source options include Pitivi (raising funds to get to version 1.0) and Kdenlive, also in active development (most recent release was in mid-May). Pitiviti's site links to a sobering illustration about many of the shorter- and longer-lived projects in this area.
It's free and pretty powerful.
Unless you have an aversion to closed source or need some features it does not provide, adobe has made CS2 versions of their products available for free for some time. You do need to register and login if you do not have an Adobe account, but presumably that could be done with fake info for the paranoid.
Silence is a state of mime.
Blackmagic has lots of hardware and likely will be supported in the future - davinci is sweet, if this system proves stable it will create a much needed solution. https://www.blackmagicdesign.c...
If you're looking for free but not "libre" check out BlackMagic's "DaVinci Resolve". It started out as a color correction software. Now it's a full fledged editor. It's free unless you need uber advanced noise reduction etc.
i just migrated to it from Adobe Premiere because premiere isn't great for team work.
-S
The first one that springs to mind is Cinelerra:
http://cinelerra.org/1/
There's also the Community Version of Cinelerra:
http://cinelerra-cv.org/
Honestly though no open-source solution is going to come CLOSE to Premiere. And since you can get Creative Cloud for $50/month, it isn't THAT big of an expenditure up-front, and if you're making money from the editing (and, if you're looking at a Premiere-level video editing platform, I would hope this would be something you're monetizing) $50/month isn't much to get all the tools you'd need for editing, compositing, graphic design, etc etc etc.
So, yeah, my suggestion is to find a way to afford $50/month for Creative Cloud, and barring that, check out Cinelerra.
My desktop power user workflow wrt video is:
cat (unix command) to piece together the 2gb splices the camcorder makes (avchd)
ffmpeg to change the container from whatever the camcorder uses to a more editor friendly mkv, you can use the copy option for blazing fast remuxing without reencoding.
kdenlive or cinelerra. They are both prone to crash so save often. Cinelerra has best curves for fading but it's a very peculiar GUI.
If you know your stuff, you can do pretty decent videos.
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I found that Blender has a surprisingly intuitive Video Sequence Editor. It might be worth looking into.
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Blender is mostly for 3d animation, but it does have it's own video editor built in. Added bonus that you can animate things like callouts, thought clouds, etc... Added bonus that the community for Blender seems massive.
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If Adobe Premier is what you know and are most fluent in, why don't you keep using it? Why do you feel the need to reinvent the wheel?
Grab a free copy from TPB and get to work on what you love. You'll not be profiting from your work, so no harm done.
I need a platform that supports reading flash cards.
What are you trying to do? Referring to? It's a completely different technology!
Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time!
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
I've been using KDEnlive a lot, and I find it really nice for my personal use.
It hasn't crashed in about a year either, and uses MELT underneath.
Slightly OT: I've also replaced adobe lightroom with darktable now, and I like it a lot.
AviSynth is extremely versatile and often leads in state-of-the-art filters long before any other video editor gets them, including professional ones. The trick is that there's no UI for it -- to edit videos, you write scripts.
Free software hates patents and most modern camcorders use H.264, hence a free video editing tool is impossible.
Or has Mozilla been bullshitting us all this time about H.264 support in HTML5?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Not many people know that Blender has a Video Editor. Its not the most intuitive, but once you get used to it you find that it is very stable just the the rest of Blender.
A quick search finds this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te9HFQVaSUE
Nothing is really useable and stable enough. Lots of people dabbling, NONE doing feature length or even 30 minute tv episodes.
I go down this road every year and crawl right back to the single Windows box with Sony Vegas and After Effects on it. I really wish I could replace it with a linux system but it will never exist as the open source options are still not as good as even Adobe Premiere in 2004.
All pro and prosumer cameras record in MOV or AVCHD and if your editor can not handle those natively it is a major failure. I have no interest in spending 8 hours converting video and introducing generational losses right off the bat.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I tried the free/open source route on video editing and ended up falling back to a commercial tool (MAGIX Movie Edit Pro). I still use Camtasia at home. For me, the key things that saved me time ($$$) when looking at commercial tools were:
- ability to quickly integrate still shots and movies (without a separate save/load process like some editors - e.g., VSDC)
- ability to see the voice-over waveform (makes it very easy to close up dead spaces, do in-line retakes and edit out "ums" and stumbles)
- ability to control every audio track independently (without an explicit "split the original video" step)
I just took another look out there for a quick project at work and STILL ended up with a non-open-source (but free) editor in VSDC (and CamStudio 2.7 for screen recording), but I'd be embarrassed to put my name on the resulting videos if they weren't just for internal use.
If you are open to using Windows, buy a copy of Sony Vegas Movie studio for fifty bucks. It's a stripped down version of Sony Vegas, which is a very powerful professional editing package, I prefer Vegas to Premiere and Final Cut.
Basically I did not see any limitations with the movie studio edition that would prevent you from making nice, clean HD videos. The editing interface is far better than Premiere's as far as I'm concerned.
Mow 2 lawns and you have enough for Premier.
While I have been using blender here and there for a few years now, the Video Sequence Editor (VSE) in Blender isn't something that I have used often, but I will say that it's not too shabby. It can deal with a decent variety of formats, and when it comes to chopping and slicing video up, it works fine. I don't know that it can demux/mux audio and video together yet, though. You also get a great node based compositing system tossed in for free.
That being, Blender seems to have a very strong community behind it, which is always a good sign of health for any OSS project. Plus you can't beat the price (free! \o/) or the ungodly number of tutorials for it out there.
Well, maybe I am just a tad bias... :)
Yours truly,
THE blender.org administrator ;)
MaximumPC.com recently posted their Best Free Video Editor Roundup. Although, the field of contenders doesn't look too promising considering Windows Movie Maker was the runner-up.
For Windows basic resizing I still use virtualdub32, which is open source. I didn't like Windows Movie Maker which is free. I bought Adobe Elements 10 and am content with it, even though its buggy and really hard to configure 1080p video. If you're really trying to pinch pennies you can buy old software on eBay in the box with a manual, also maybe a student version isn't crippled too badly.
Have you tried Premiere Elements?
It's their cheaper home product but still has a lot of functionality.
For years, I have been looking for a video editor under Linux to enable me to edit MKV video material with specific, single frame accuracy. So far, zilch. In my naivete, I figured that, bearing in mind that this is a digital world, this would be a piece of cake. But it ain't. It is very frustrating.
It's coming soon, it's free, open source, and is shaping up to be a really kickass video editor: http://www.openshotvideo.com/ Kickstarter was here: https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
Just the way it is. Particularly if you want something that can do native, no proxy editing of AVCHD which I presume you do from the "flash card" part.
Best economical solution is Sony's Vegas lineup. The basic Sony Movie Studio 13 can be had for $13. The Platinum version, which is probably worth the extra, can be had for $55. They'll ingest AVCHD and edit it native. Also can ingest lots of other common formats like WMV, MPEG 1/2, MP3, and image files. Very easy to use workflow.
Should you find you need more, you can upgrade to Vegas Pro, it takes the same files, just has more capabilities. Vegas Pro 13 Edit will run you around $300-400 and Sony does offer upgrade options from the Movie Studio version though you don't get a whole lot off.
Not saying don't try the free stuff, but you'll be sorely disappointed coming from a professional program. None of it is very good.
But OBS (open broadcaster software) does a good job of video mixing/overlays greenscreening. https://obsproject.com/
Corel Video Studio isn't quite free, but you can get it for around $50 on sale (or less if you go with a backlevel version 3 or 4) and it is pretty full-featured. It's not designed for full blown professional use because the front-end does more hand-holding than a pro would want, but the key features are all there.
We are the 198 proof..
Windows Essentials - Movie Maker
That one is free from Microsoft if you just need very simple, very simple stuff.
I've been thinking about doing a series of videos covering some basic math for a while now, but I'd like to be able to do some (very simple) animations of equations and graphs. How do people do those? I see all these Youtube videos with effects and I have no idea how people are pulling it off.
$30/month if your a student
if you're open to other platforms, check out iMovie on mac. it's cheap like $20, and runs OK on older hardware. Trolls in three, two, one...
http://www.steenbeck.com/
I suppose it depends what you need to do, i've used windows live movie maker for the small project I do and it does the job for me. Theres also Adobe premier elements, a cheeper less advanced version of premier..
for premiere seems pretty low...am i missing something ?
I have bought a lot of software on ebay, mostly MS office 2003 and 2007, and have been 100% happy
ymmv
Is the only editor I've been able to get to even work. It still crashes occasionally and the user interface is not very good.
Pitivi is approaching being a good basic editor. From the pre-releases of 1.0 it is looking good. Gstreamer is getting pretty solid now and picking up things like GPU acceleration. Format support is as wide as the plug-ins you install.
They are also teasing some updates https://twitter.com/Pitivi/sta...
if you read your 2nd list of requirement, you just have 2 tools at your disposal to just do that : Cinelera and Blender... once installed and configured on the right machine, you'll get the most reliable station ever ...
No Libre Software does'nt sucks, on the contrary.
Install the GTK toolkit, and Avidemux, works on Windows
I am not sure what you are working on, The mass majority of editing I do is either removing, segments of time from a long video capture, Time between innings as the coaches work to get 10 little kids out on the field and ready to play... or half time I forgot to turn the camera off during, cleaning pieces I don't want to waste space saving. Or splicing together clips from New Years, Valentines day, Easter, Halloween etc, and saving them as a compilation of the year.
Demux is lacking in more advanced features, like placing, or resizing a video to play inside of another clip, or replacing green screen with a 2nd video, at least it isn't anything I have played with...
Why is that link relevant? Because they were all made using Kdenlive.
When I first started mucking around with digital video, I tried a bunch of free/libre packages, and formed the following opinions of each:
Windows Movie Maker
Yes, $(GOD) help me, I gave it a serious try. To my utter surprise, it mostly worked and did what I wanted without crashing. However, the UI was rather inflexible, and I needed more than the handful of features it offered, so I kept looking.
Cinelerra
Every Google search for free video editing software always turns this up, so I tried it. Then, ten minutes later, I had to stop trying it because it kept crashing and/or hanging at the slightest provocation. It has an impressive-looking array of features, and the editing timeline looks quite powerful. Evidently, you can do some fairly impressive things with Cinelerra, provided you can identify and avoid all its weak spots.
Pitivi
The last time I tried this, it was unreliable, under-featured, and incredibly slow. Just loading a one hour-long video clip into the timeline took several minutes as it tried to generate thumbnails and an audio waveform for the clip.
OpenShot
Assuming I'm remembering this package correctly, all it does is assemble edits -- that is, you can tack together a bunch of clips one after the other to create a larger work. If you want to do any effects or titling, you're SOL. Perhaps the Kickstarter-funded upgrade will yield some improvements.
Lightworks
I had to learn something the hard way with this package: This is a professional package. By that, I don't mean it has a ton of features (although it certainly does). I mean it expects a certain level of media asset before it will operate on it in the manner you expect. Us mere proles are satisfied to use MP4 or MKV or ($(GOD) help us) AVI files. However, in the pro space, you have files that contain not just compressed audio and video, but also timecode. And not just timecode measured relative to when you last pressed the RECORD button, but also a master timecode from an achingly accurate central timecode generator fed to all your cameras and microphones. This not only means all your cameras and mics are in precise sync ('cause otherwise their internal clocks will drift relative to each other), but you can trivially sync all your master footage and then intercut shots without even thinking about it. Also, near as I can tell, there's no such thing as inter-frame compression in professional video. Each frame is atomic, which means you can cleanly cut anywhere, but it doesn't compress anywhere near as small as, say, H.264.
The result is that, if you don't have equipment that generates all this metadata for you, then you need to convert it from the puny consumer format you're likely using. This means having truly monstrous amounts of disk available just to store the working set, and tons of RAM to make it all work. And hopefully your conversion script(s) didn't cough up bogus timecode.
So, yes, Lightworks is very very nice, if you have the proper resources to feed it. I don't, so I've set it aside for that glorious day when I get some proper equipment :-).
Kdenlive
Kdenlive is built on top of the MLT framework, and is about the best and most reliable thing I've found out there that doesn't cost actual money (either directly or indirectly). It has a non-linear timeline editor, it supports a wide variety of media formats, and it has a modest collection of audio and video effects (almost none of which you will use).
One of the more amazing things Kdenlive does is transparently convert sample and frame rate
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
for quick and dirty editing WMM doesn't suck. The UI is fairly intuitive and I haven't crashed it yet. Features are pretty limited of course, but it's not bad for what it is.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
I have been using Premiere since CS5 and now have a subscription to CC. Since I take classes at the local community college the subscription is $20 for the first year and $30 for subsequent years. I just need to keep taking at least one class a year. CC has its annoyances but it is extremely fully featured. I use several types of cameras and it uses everything I take without preconversion.
I use the bundled capture software that came with my KWorld composite dongle, it's pretty damn nice, though if I'm in a hurry and/or just want to stream through, I use VirtualDub. Either one will use the SVideo/composite/component/1394 inputs of my dongle or my Pinnacle card/jump box (I don't use Pinnacle, never liked it, I just like the hardware). For editing I'll generally fire up a frameserver in VirtualDub for TMPGEnc DVD Author or import directly into Movie Maker (which does what I want it to do, so why fix what ain't broke?), I used to use Nero but always found that to be limited in ability and a bit of a hog.
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I realise that it is not free, but it is offered at an accessible price and it is smooth and rich enough for non-professional movie editing. More stable and less hassle than any of the open source editors that I experimented with previously. Also a product wih a future.
Avid had a free DV editor package but that was discontinued. Perhaps you can still find it. Roughly similar in features as a previous generation iMovie.
Currently I simply use the current iMovie on my Mac, I realise that the OP doesn't have a Mac though I must say that it produces excellent results smoothly and its features are largely good enough for non-professional use. I did briefly use Final Cut Express in the past but realised it was too much of a good thing for me.
It's $50 a month and you get every tool adobe has. If you can't afford that, what are you doing trying to get into video production?
Premiere alone is worth that and you get after effects, illustrator, photoshop, etc...
Don't reinvent this wheel.
Just because software is 'free' as in money, does not mean it doesn't come with a cost.
Seriously.
I can walk to work for 'free' but it means I pay by getting up at 4:00am each morning just to get to work by 8:30am. It also means I pay if it rains. I pay for my health because 50km a day is a pretty big distance to walk. So the $3.80 each way a day for public transport seems pretty much free in the end.
In this case, you have a reasonably expensive video camera, possibly a fairly good PC, you already experience with video editing, if you want super basic video editing then how hard is it to google some freeware app.
- But it seems you want MORE than just this and really as others suggested should just pay the $80 or so for the Vegas light editor and the other various commercial 'lite' programs that are cheap, no time wasting, modern interfaces, good stability, works with modern cameras and codecs etc etc. Surley your time is more precious than mucking around with some half ass beta open source program that's clunky and old fashion with no support, won't work with your camera easily, needs video to be converted before hand, performs poorly and gives poor results... and has already wasted days on end.
Otherwise if its just to screw around a few times a year with a few videos for personal use, seriously just download a 'copy' from the net and move on. If you feel guilty for some reason, then just get the lite versions or student deals etc. Again available pretty cheap.
AVS Video Editor. It's not free (although $39 is pretty close to that) and may not be suitable for your needs you didn't give much details about, but as I was looking for a free video editing tool a couple of years ago, I couldn't find anything which would a) support AVCHD; b) play Full HD without dropping frames; c) not crash every five minutes;
Flowblade is a nice Python-based movie editor for Linux. I have been using it mostly to compose small video clips from my GoPro camera (read: slicing, adding audio tracks, creating transitions, setting encoder options, etc.) Definitely worth taking a look.
I know you're focusing on open source due to the high cost of Premiere, but these days you can get every Adobe app for $50/mo.
If in the past you had their products and upgraded when the new versions came out, you were looking at several hundred dollars or more depending on what you had; now that's all rolled into a much smaller monthly fee.
You can also get any single app for $20/mo.
Having used various Adobe apps for well over a decade, am used to the cost (which by going monthly is a smaller bite), and the tools (which keep improving).
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