[BZH314]

OpenShot [1] is another free (also GPLv3 as Olive) video editor for Windows/Linux/Max using the portable AppImage format [2] (AppImage lets you download a single binary and launch the software directly, no install process or super user privileges needed).

It uses ffmpeg behind the scenes.

It seems to have suffered from stability issues in the past (the wikipedia article mentions lots of negative reviews) but seem pretty stable now, so you might want to give it a ... shot.

It has been very useful for its quick install process, intuitive interface and reliability: haven't had a single crash in a very long time, with more than 200 videos on our channel [3] (albeit none required anything fancy editing-wise).

OpenShot's goal might not appear to be as grandiose as Olive's so I would love if there was a comparison of both out there.

Looks like we're off trying Olive to compare. Thanks and good luck to the Olive team.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenShot

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppImage

[3] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgsdHWWQBMHP1plylPrrgpA

[pedrokost]

I have just completed a first project with OpenShot. It worked perfectly fine initially, but as the movie became more complex, everything took much longer. Saving took several seconds, sometimes freezing everything for several minutes. Dragging multiple clips in the timeline would freeze the editor for several seconds. It crashed multiple times. Just to be clear, this was from having about 30 original clips, but cut multiple times (each probably at least 10 times), so over 300 individual clips in the timeline. The bottleneck seems to be related to parsing of the JSON, which is the format in which the data is encoded internally. The final file was about 1.1MB of JSON. I've also encountered strange artifacts when adding a new layer at the bottom of the screen - I couldn't drag clips onto it, they were placed onto another layer instead.

This is on a laptop with an i7 and 12 GB of RAM.

Compared to my experience of using Premiere Pro several years ago on Windows, with just 4GBs of RAM, OpenShot has a long way to go even for basic editing.

But, having said that (and considering that Premier had years of paid development), it's a good tool and it's great that some developers are trying to built video editing tools for Linux. Things are slowly improving.

[app4soft]

> This is on a laptop with an i7 and 12 GB of RAM.

> Compared to my experience of using Premiere Pro several years ago on Windows, with just 4GBs of RAM, OpenShot has a long way to go even for basic editing.

Can you try Olive and compare it with all above?

As for me, I can fully use Olive under Linux (Debian 9.x) on my 10-year-old notebook with just 2GBs of RAM ;)

[snazz]

There continue to be many stability issues in the 1.4.3 branch of OpenShot that Debian ships. Version 2.4.3 is not available from the Debian Stable repos but is much more stable. You might want to use the AppImage to get the most recent version if you’re using Debian.

[BZH314]

This is a very important point that is probably the source of confusion, and people quickly ditching OpenShot because of installing it through apt.

This is exactly what happened to me: started using it from the distro and experienced crashes. Then downloaded the latest AppImage and never had a problem since.

Trying to help break the vicious circle here: Wikipedia mentions stability issues, Debian ships with a crash-happy old version that doesn't do it any favor, but latest AppImage seems stable.

[app4soft]

Olive also is cross-platform app (as use Qt5) for Linux/macOS/Windows/etc.

Olive distributed for Linux as AppImage too[0] ;-)

> OpenShot is another free (also GPLv3 as Olive) video editor for Windows/Linux/Max using the portable AppImage format

FTR, AppImage is portable package only for Linux, in same way as DMG is portable package for macOS, or EXE is portable package for Windows.

[0] https://github.com/olive-editor/olive/releases/tag/continuou...

[BZH314]

Thanks for your hard work and the clarifications.

Indeed from a 10,000ft view the projects share some good stuff.

As @prokoudine pointed out in his other article [1] (linked at the top of this article), Jonathan Thomas from Openshot will be "100% full time working on OpenShot" in 2019, which is exciting with now both Olive and OpenShot working on making great video editing software.

What are your opinions comparing Olive to OpenShot, maybe more in broader terms (history/goals/manpower/roadmap/pro features coming up/...) instead of current feature comparison, since you guys appear to move very fast (but I also expect OpenShot to do some great stuff too in 2019). You must have surveyed the field before starting and have wonderful insights about the two (also @pedrokost comments regarding problems in OpenShot for bigger projects worries me, and Olive seem to beat Openshot there) and seen some shortcomings to decide to make your own.

Maybe @prokoudine will produce another interesting article about that?

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[1] http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/the-quest-for-susta...

[app4soft]

> Thanks for your hard work and the clarifications.

Please, tell all thanks to @OliveTeam (Olive devs) via Twitter[0] and Patreon[1] ;)

I'm NOT developer of Olive; I'm just Olive user & tester.

[0] https://twitter.com/oliveteam

[1] https://www.patreon.com/olivevideoeditor

[prokoudine]

@app4soft is not the Olive developer (nor am I :))

Shotcut development is self-funded since 2018, so that makes three projects.

I don't see myself seriously comparing OpenShot to Olive. They are vastly different, in my opinion. The way I see it, Olive is being streamlined for prosumer/pro work. Hence all the editing tools, advanced keyframes UI, graph editor etc. — things I don't expect OpenShot to have.

[silverdrake11]

I've tried OpenShot, Kdenlive, and Shotcut (not to be confused with OpenShot), and I have to say Shotcut is my favorite.

[mitchtbaum]

Could you please review Shotcut a bit further?

I haven't tried it but have had success with OpenShot. I don't remember why I picked it over Shotcut, but it did what I needed and never crashed; just was slightly lacking in features, like reorganizing the timeline - I think I couldn't multi-select components.

[jimmux]

I have recently settled on Shotcut as well. It's certainly not as powerful as the others, but it doesn't have the bugs they have either. So far all my renders have come out as expected as well, which is more than I can say for Kdenlive.

[Epskampie]

Did you read the article? It mentions openshot, and compares the two a bit.

[BZH314]

It only mentions it at the beginning (not even linking to it), I don't see where the comparison is, did I miss something?

I just confirmed my real-world experience that Openshot is good enough for many quick uses (more than what the Wikipedia article left me to think with the paragraph about stability issues when I first discovered it).

[prokoudine]

I wonder what you understood as a comparison. All I wrote there is that the two applications are for entirely different demographics.