[shard]

Two years ago, I tried video editing for the first time. It was a small project, a 15 second video with multiple video and audio tracks, some basic white balance and color correction, and minor animations. I tried the 3 major FOSS video editors at the time, OpenShot, ShotCut, and KdenLive, in order to figure out which one was more appropriate for me. I also watched some tutorial videos on each of the video editors. My conclusion was that OpenShot was too basic for even such a small project, KdenLive was usable but lacked some tools which made editing somewhat burdensome, and ShotCut was the winner with its toolset and UI, although it crashed the most out of the three.

However, even with such a simple project, none of the three FOSS tools were easy to use, and all were barriers to my efficiency and creativity. I then searched for commercial offerings, and have been using Davinci Resolve, where even the free basic version was light years beyond the FOSS choices in terms of speed, ease of use, and features. As someone who uses FOSS tools (GIMP, Inkscape) for ideological reasons, I was a bit disappointed by how large of a gap there was between FOSS and commercial video editors. I haven't looked at the FOSS versions since then, perhaps they have improved.