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by wakeupcall 887 days ago
I rarely edit videos, so my needs are very basic.

I tested a few such as openshot, flowblade, ... about 10 months ago.

flowblade has the best UI IMHO (more streamlined), but it was annoyingly restrictive for quick edits such as opening a clip, apply just a trim and maybe add 1 filter (usually crop).

It also wasn't very stable.

I ended up with shotcut for most of my needs. It's very flexible and has a good balance in ui/features: intuitive enough that I had to spend zero time learning it, yet has more than what I will ever need. Although it's not as smooth performance-wise as flowblade. It never crashed on me yet.

I didn't like the UI of openshot, but this is a subjective thing. Felt space-wasting and oversimplified, which might be a plus to some. It also did crash a lot for me.

I use avidemux a lot for cuts. It's the fastest editor for this by FAR. UI is minimal. I would say underrated, although it's a pretty well-known tool, just in a different class (not a NLE).

I was a big fan of "cinelerra" some years ago. It's blazingly fast, but very restrictive in the formats it accepts, which is why I stopped using it. I mostly cut random videos coming from random cameras/phones/etc, so I value free-form over standardized workflows.

Don't forget Blender. For some more complex stuff, I successfully used blender's NLE to track/mask clips. Worked perfectly, absolutely stable even for complex videos, although it needed slight more RTFM than the other options and noticeably heaver in terms of system requirements.