I've supported OpenShot financially in the past, but I'm currently leaning towards LosslessCut and Shortcut.
Most people want a video editor to splice and concatenate video files without any loss or transcoding. I believe this behavior (lossless) should be default on all of these editors.
> Most people want a video editor to splice and concatenate video files without any loss or transcoding
You can do this with mpv. It's an open source cross platform media player.
For example, here's how I set up a tiny Lua script extension[0] to be able to visually cut videos in an intuitive way. It does it in seconds without re-rendering the video by shelling out to ffmpeg.
Years ago I did the same thing with a shell script CLI tool[1], but mpv's visual aspect makes it so much faster and easier to make clips out of a longer video.
For that kind of functionality, I would always recommend Avidemux[0]. It's quite a light package (which I like), and it allows you to do that and some other useful things too.
LosslessCut is great, but I've had issues with the final export like timing being off, having cut sequence etc. I think it is very particular about encoding/container.
Shotcut is my default video editor, if anyone's trying it on Linux please use their AppImage as it solved most of my headaches when I was using Flatpak version.
You have to make a lot of sacrifices for lossless editing, so it’ll probably always be a specialized app or at least a separate tool within an all-purpose NLE. For instance, you’re limited to compatible input streams and you can only cut on specific intervals, depending on encoder settings etc.
I guess an NLE could import clips in a locked mode by default that only supports lossless operations, and you’d have to specifically enable the rest. Could be interesting.
Note on the specific intervals: that's where the clever optimization comes in: leave as-is (passthrough) all not affected sections of the video (basically everything) and only recode the tiny fraction that needs recoding due to the cut being set on a non-keyframe.
That one, I do believe should get more research and implementations. Currently I only know of LosslessCut's "Smart" mode, but I'd like to see other big players of the video editing space improving the state of the art in that direction for simple cuts.
I wonder, rather than re-encoding when starting on a B- or P- frame, could you preserve the entire GOP losslessly but make the earlier content "disappear" on playback by shifting PTS, or bundling several frames into a single frame's payload? Maybe it causes too many problems with players.
There is also Blick which launched recently which claims to be very very fast https://blickeditor.com/?lang=en and part of recent wave of fast software (Task Slinger, File Pilot)
I've been working on OpenPost's Video Editor (Svelte-based video editor that runs on your (chromium) browser). If anyone's looking for something they can run on the browser, fully free and OSS as well, check it out https://app.openpost.social/video-editor
Currently really in early Beta but this seems like a great place to mention it.
"open-x" for anything not actually OSS/FOSS should be banned.
Just like "engineer" is a reserved term in many jurisdictions, "open" should be too. At least in our industry.
If a bakery wants to call itself "open", so be it. But if software calls itself "open", it had better be open.
OpenAI, OpenRouter, OpenArt, OpenGov, OpenWeb, OpenText, ... this is all malarkey.
The only instance where "open" isn't trying to pose as open source is when it's a verb or adjective coupled with a noun used in a well-understood colloquial manner, eg. "OpenDoor", "OpenTable".
OpenAI implies open source AI. Look at how hard this "open" company tries to regulate open weights.
OpenRouter implies open source routing. Their platform isn't open source at all, and a lot of the specifics people will grow to care about are entirely proprietary.
Don't even get me started on OpenGov, which is a complete travesty.
Will have to give this a whirl with a screen reader, see how it does. Given the only somewhat working video editor accessibility-wise is currently Clipchamp, competition is sorely needed. Don't have high hopes, but I guess a x.0 release might be the time for me to start fixing it if nobody else is going to -.-
Nice, looks like a great release. UI looks like it got a nice touch up and also cool to see that the project has AI powered object masking using onnx models: https://github.com/OpenShot/openshot-onnx.
I would love OpenShot to update their website. It's not; it's just for me. The current design makes me not use this software. I would love to help make new website for them.
I am quite familiar with Resolve..I am not a pro, and it's probably totally overload for my purpose, but I think it's easy to learn and even quite intuitive
I tried many others, but mostly all others are not stable enough or have an even worse UI/UX... so I wonder... is this different?
AFAIK out of "Record, Edit, and Color", Blender mostly excels at the editing part of video editing. There is no recording at all, and coloring you'd do via the "Post Processing" which can be via nodes or "standard". Coloring is alright, although far cry from Resolve.
If you're already used to the Blender shortcuts though, editing video is a breeze and everything just works as expected, which is really nice. But I wouldn't pick up Blender and its shortcuts just to edit video, then I'd probably go with something more fully meant for video editing.
A Video editor landing pages with still screenshots doesn't do any justice for new comer. The power can only be shown with smal 10-30s in-inline videos.
I know, but we're talking about some free & open-source software funded by donations, not a for-profit company.
Funnily enough their not (fully) free and not open source competitor DaVinci Resolve doesn't have a cookie banner and doesn't set any cookies on your browser.
I feel like the only way to have this many "partners" as is to inherit them, at least if you're 'trivial'. Like, they probably chose some ad or tracking script that has so many partners.
Since the announcement is, frustratingly, low on details, did they implement the usual hue vs hue, hue vs sat, etc. controls? I don't do much color grading but my line of work requires using multiple cameras, thus I enjoy using a color chart to match the video clips. With a vectorscope and with the color chart I could quickly do basically everthing I need with this software instead of relying in Resolve, if only it offered those controls
In general, DaVinci Resolve on Linux desktops handles Dlog/HDR camera and drone LUTs like a champ (KDE plasma handles HDR10.) When they run the budget speed-editor promos you get the studio license card for free. If you needed gyroflow because your cameraman has a thorazine stomp, there are few completely FOSS options around.
That was the first question that popped into my head as well. We’re now in the age of “AI all the things,” so it seems like every app needs an API or CLI of some sort. Everything needs to be machine accessible.
shouldn't we focus on human accessibility first? it also makes things more "machine accessible" as a byproduct, but at least humans remain the main focus
also, openshot is foss. can't you just give the source code to your clanker and let it mod itself in the app?
> shouldn't we focus on human accessibility first?
This is the big question for designers, how much of the future of software will be human-oriented UIs vs a human typing into a chat window (or as a temporary bridge, telling an agent to operate existing GUIs).
For now I believe agent-driven software is still pretty niche, something for highly technical users, but that will change as it mainstreams. Early adopters demand early adopter software features.
Yes we should. Still UI is for telling the software to do meaningful work. Which means that every well designed UI software will have ready to expose api lurking just benath the surface.
I have an adblocker. You don't see the cookie banner because you're likely outside the EU and your data is silently being shared with the aforementioned adtech vendors. The EU requires "informed consent" for this within their jurisdiction, hence the cookie banner.
I am pretty sure you haven't tried it yourself. I am also pretty sure the software you mention is significantly more expensive or at least not open source.
Which makes me pretty sure yours was a useless comment.
I use and pay for DaVinci Resolve Studio on Linux myself, so yes I have tried them and yes, they're obviously more feature packed and polished than OpenShot is.
OpenShot is however significantly easier to use and does what you need for casual editing. If you want a step above that and still FLOSS then Kdenlive is a better choice.
What makes your original comment useless is that it reads like an American saying, 'I bet our GDP is bigger than Nauru's' - like what is the point? You know the answer already. An open source video editor is unlikely to be as good as DaVinci Resolve. DaVinci has multiplicity of the resources OpenShot/Kdenlive etc. do.
I've had great experienced with it. It's almost certainly not as full-featered as premiere pro, but it runs buttery smooth and robust, while Premiere Pro kept crashing frequently and was a bit tedious to use for simple tasks.
Kdenlive has improved remarkably over the last few years and in many ways not in a way you'd visibly notice, they had a period where it was very unstable/crash prone so they spent a good chunk of time really focusing just on that and as a result it's now incredibly stable, I can't remember the last time it crashed.
For basic video editing it's quite user friendly and you can do some fairly prosumer level things with it (it's not going to match a studio grade NLE but for most people it doesn't need to).
This does not answer my question, I need something that can do thing, not how it is licensed. I have used Kdenlive, and it's nowhere near either of these functionality-wise, and struggles with big files.
Unlikely to be near that polish and feature completeness. If you ask "then what's the point?", for now the answer is the license and the source availability.
Honestly, it sounds like you’re going to end up asking a ton of very specific functionality questions that Da Vinci Resolve and co do in their own ways.
Does OpenShot? For your specific use cases? I dunno, but it’s free, so give it half an hour or an hour and see? You’ll get more info than from many of us that probably don’t use this kind of software often.
"how does this small open source tool developed from the good will of developers in their free time compare to the juggernauts of the fields, with millions in revenues ?"
You know it very well, why do you pretend to ask ?
I've supported OpenShot financially in the past, but I'm currently leaning towards LosslessCut and Shortcut.
Most people want a video editor to splice and concatenate video files without any loss or transcoding. I believe this behavior (lossless) should be default on all of these editors.
> Most people want a video editor to splice and concatenate video files without any loss or transcoding
You can do this with mpv. It's an open source cross platform media player.
For example, here's how I set up a tiny Lua script extension[0] to be able to visually cut videos in an intuitive way. It does it in seconds without re-rendering the video by shelling out to ffmpeg.
Years ago I did the same thing with a shell script CLI tool[1], but mpv's visual aspect makes it so much faster and easier to make clips out of a longer video.
[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/visually-create-video-clips-w...
[1]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/create-video-clips-with-ffmpe...
For that kind of functionality, I would always recommend Avidemux[0]. It's quite a light package (which I like), and it allows you to do that and some other useful things too.
[0] http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/
I absolutely love Avidemux but it doesn't preserve subtitles when removing a middle clip like lossless cut can.
Dunno if it’s just me, but I tried to download it the other day and couldn’t. The windows download link just punts you right back to their own site.
LosslessCut is great, but I've had issues with the final export like timing being off, having cut sequence etc. I think it is very particular about encoding/container.
Shotcut is my default video editor, if anyone's trying it on Linux please use their AppImage as it solved most of my headaches when I was using Flatpak version.
You have to make a lot of sacrifices for lossless editing, so it’ll probably always be a specialized app or at least a separate tool within an all-purpose NLE. For instance, you’re limited to compatible input streams and you can only cut on specific intervals, depending on encoder settings etc.
I guess an NLE could import clips in a locked mode by default that only supports lossless operations, and you’d have to specifically enable the rest. Could be interesting.
Note on the specific intervals: that's where the clever optimization comes in: leave as-is (passthrough) all not affected sections of the video (basically everything) and only recode the tiny fraction that needs recoding due to the cut being set on a non-keyframe.
That one, I do believe should get more research and implementations. Currently I only know of LosslessCut's "Smart" mode, but I'd like to see other big players of the video editing space improving the state of the art in that direction for simple cuts.
I wonder, rather than re-encoding when starting on a B- or P- frame, could you preserve the entire GOP losslessly but make the earlier content "disappear" on playback by shifting PTS, or bundling several frames into a single frame's payload? Maybe it causes too many problems with players.
There is also Blick which launched recently which claims to be very very fast https://blickeditor.com/?lang=en and part of recent wave of fast software (Task Slinger, File Pilot)
Neither open source nor free however.
You will save so much time and energy using the free/shareware DaVinci Resolve instead of OpenShot.
I have hope for OpenShot, but it's still not there.
(self promotion)
I've been working on OpenPost's Video Editor (Svelte-based video editor that runs on your (chromium) browser). If anyone's looking for something they can run on the browser, fully free and OSS as well, check it out https://app.openpost.social/video-editor
Currently really in early Beta but this seems like a great place to mention it.
Here is the repo if you want to give it a star
https://github.com/getopenpost/openpost
The "open-x" product name inflation - how did that happen
"open-x" for anything not actually OSS/FOSS should be banned.
Just like "engineer" is a reserved term in many jurisdictions, "open" should be too. At least in our industry.
If a bakery wants to call itself "open", so be it. But if software calls itself "open", it had better be open.
OpenAI, OpenRouter, OpenArt, OpenGov, OpenWeb, OpenText, ... this is all malarkey.
The only instance where "open" isn't trying to pose as open source is when it's a verb or adjective coupled with a noun used in a well-understood colloquial manner, eg. "OpenDoor", "OpenTable".
OpenAI implies open source AI. Look at how hard this "open" company tries to regulate open weights.
OpenRouter implies open source routing. Their platform isn't open source at all, and a lot of the specifics people will grow to care about are entirely proprietary.
Don't even get me started on OpenGov, which is a complete travesty.
These are such bold-faced lies.
Will have to give this a whirl with a screen reader, see how it does. Given the only somewhat working video editor accessibility-wise is currently Clipchamp, competition is sorely needed. Don't have high hopes, but I guess a x.0 release might be the time for me to start fixing it if nobody else is going to -.-
Nice, looks like a great release. UI looks like it got a nice touch up and also cool to see that the project has AI powered object masking using onnx models: https://github.com/OpenShot/openshot-onnx.
Who knew a QT app could look this good? Congratulations on the release.
I would love OpenShot to update their website. It's not; it's just for me. The current design makes me not use this software. I would love to help make new website for them.
I am quite familiar with Resolve..I am not a pro, and it's probably totally overload for my purpose, but I think it's easy to learn and even quite intuitive
I tried many others, but mostly all others are not stable enough or have an even worse UI/UX... so I wonder... is this different?
This is one of those occasions where a video would be appropriate.
They have videos for 3.0, 3.3 and 3.4, maybe check back on their channel in a few days or weeks: https://www.youtube.com/@OpenShotOfficial/videos
Is this effectively a leaner more basic, record, cut, colour version of Resolve?
How far is blender off this nowadays?
AFAIK out of "Record, Edit, and Color", Blender mostly excels at the editing part of video editing. There is no recording at all, and coloring you'd do via the "Post Processing" which can be via nodes or "standard". Coloring is alright, although far cry from Resolve.
If you're already used to the Blender shortcuts though, editing video is a breeze and everything just works as expected, which is really nice. But I wouldn't pick up Blender and its shortcuts just to edit video, then I'd probably go with something more fully meant for video editing.
- ...but is the video encoding fast? - Does it often break while encoding?
That was my experience some years ago and I decided I will skip a decade to see it all working.
A Video editor landing pages with still screenshots doesn't do any justice for new comer. The power can only be shown with smal 10-30s in-inline videos.
Like the animated GIF on the landing page?
[1] https://www.openshot.org/
Yes!
Adtech cookie banner on a .org domain for a thing whose name starts with „Open“? No thanks. Won‘t look further.
Your loss then. Although I prefer KDEnlive, OpenShot is not a bad video editor.
And I don't think it's a terrible thing for an open source developer to try to earn a few coins.
Its name starts with Open because it's open-source / free software (GNU GPLv3).
FWIW you can just install it from your distro's software repos or as a flatpak[1] and never ever visit the official website.
[1] https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.openshot.OpenShot
Easy to say. What did you accomplish for FOSS?
Typical FOSS hypocrite.
Mad that “free” software has to be paid by someone.
Oh come on, they only have 210 "partners" they give your data to!
You jest, but with even trivial sites having 900+ so-called partners, "only" does indeed seem apt.
I know, but we're talking about some free & open-source software funded by donations, not a for-profit company.
Funnily enough their not (fully) free and not open source competitor DaVinci Resolve doesn't have a cookie banner and doesn't set any cookies on your browser.
I feel like the only way to have this many "partners" as is to inherit them, at least if you're 'trivial'. Like, they probably chose some ad or tracking script that has so many partners.
That seems excellent.
I wonder if they finally change the caption editing with the weird timing reference, probably not.
edit: this is what I'm talking about: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenShot/comments/1s27wre/the_way_c...
edit: can't really try as it crashes on my M1 Sequoia (maybe the install being named OpenShot-v4.0.0-x86_64.dmg was not a good sign ;))
So it runs on ?
I really wish all s/w had the platform and price in line 1.
Their homepage features a download button, with all the platforms listed, as the first thing when you open it.
Ok, all the usuals.
TBF, it is on their home screen, https://www.openshot.org/download/
Linux, Mac, Windows, Chrome. $0
Since the announcement is, frustratingly, low on details, did they implement the usual hue vs hue, hue vs sat, etc. controls? I don't do much color grading but my line of work requires using multiple cameras, thus I enjoy using a color chart to match the video clips. With a vectorscope and with the color chart I could quickly do basically everthing I need with this software instead of relying in Resolve, if only it offered those controls
Just check the documentation: https://zh.openshot.org/files/user-guide/color.html
In general, DaVinci Resolve on Linux desktops handles Dlog/HDR camera and drone LUTs like a champ (KDE plasma handles HDR10.) When they run the budget speed-editor promos you get the studio license card for free. If you needed gyroflow because your cameraman has a thorazine stomp, there are few completely FOSS options around.
For old or no GPU, there are a few other options:
OpenShot is simple, Shotcut works everywhere, and https://www.cinelerra-gg.org/en can handle >4k footage for free.
Depends how much time you have to dig through manuals. =3
Is this a bot reply?
Just a hobby filled with a lot of anecdotal nonsense on the web.
If you fly a platform that stores D-log M video and RAW images... there are very few options to share great looking content. =3
Not to be confused with OpenCut, which is a completely different FLOSS video editor.
Has anyone tried having a local agent (like Qwen) use this? I wonder how good the API is for programmatic / CLI usage.
That was the first question that popped into my head as well. We’re now in the age of “AI all the things,” so it seems like every app needs an API or CLI of some sort. Everything needs to be machine accessible.
shouldn't we focus on human accessibility first? it also makes things more "machine accessible" as a byproduct, but at least humans remain the main focus
also, openshot is foss. can't you just give the source code to your clanker and let it mod itself in the app?
Of course the human UI should be first. Did anyone say anything different?
> shouldn't we focus on human accessibility first?
This is the big question for designers, how much of the future of software will be human-oriented UIs vs a human typing into a chat window (or as a temporary bridge, telling an agent to operate existing GUIs).
For now I believe agent-driven software is still pretty niche, something for highly technical users, but that will change as it mainstreams. Early adopters demand early adopter software features.
a chat window is actually HORRIBLE for many tasks. i really strongly hope this isn't what the future of software looks like
there is just no way a chat interface could replace a non-linear video editor gui
I would assume it would be for driving via agentic means, more AI video slop.
Yes we should. Still UI is for telling the software to do meaningful work. Which means that every well designed UI software will have ready to expose api lurking just benath the surface.
If it had VST support I could use it instead of DaVinci Resolve.
If you publish to platforms like YT, DaVinci Resolve can actually prepare your audio so it remains intact during their compression shenanigans.
I don't know of any FOSS programs that can automatically handle it cleanly. =3
I have dream that Oneday Oneday these surpass Cinelerra, written in 1996. Thirty Years Ago.
It is not like Cinerella's current release is thirty years old though. You are talking thirty years of development.
nice
The cookie banner and the list of 209 adtech vendors they share user data with is so repulsive.
Try AdGuard DNS or an adblocker. I didn't see any ads on the site.
I have an adblocker. You don't see the cookie banner because you're likely outside the EU and your data is silently being shared with the aforementioned adtech vendors. The EU requires "informed consent" for this within their jurisdiction, hence the cookie banner.
I have cookie banner blockers, too. We get plenty of those banners in the US.
How does this compare to After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Davinci Resolve?
I am pretty sure, this thing solves half of the problems the above solve, and it does it half-good.
I am pretty sure you haven't tried it yourself. I am also pretty sure the software you mention is significantly more expensive or at least not open source.
Which makes me pretty sure yours was a useless comment.
I have tried the ones I have mentioned, and I hadn't tried this one, - which is precisely why I am asking!
No need for snarky "but ours is foss smugface" comments.
Not to say, your comment make me pretty sure you hadn't tried either of mentioned by me, and does not take video editing seriously.
I use and pay for DaVinci Resolve Studio on Linux myself, so yes I have tried them and yes, they're obviously more feature packed and polished than OpenShot is.
OpenShot is however significantly easier to use and does what you need for casual editing. If you want a step above that and still FLOSS then Kdenlive is a better choice.
What makes your original comment useless is that it reads like an American saying, 'I bet our GDP is bigger than Nauru's' - like what is the point? You know the answer already. An open source video editor is unlikely to be as good as DaVinci Resolve. DaVinci has multiplicity of the resources OpenShot/Kdenlive etc. do.
So again, what is your point?
At least we can agree in our mutual disdain towards american way of thinking *shaking hands*
I can’t help but laugh at this, it’s like a comedy skit with two people with different European accents accusing each other of being American.
Meanwhile, the brightest engineer they know left to work for a startup in San Francisco.
I've had great experienced with it. It's almost certainly not as full-featered as premiere pro, but it runs buttery smooth and robust, while Premiere Pro kept crashing frequently and was a bit tedious to use for simple tasks.
> I am pretty sure, this thing solves half of the problems the above solve, and it does it half-good.
What makes you pretty sure?
With enough time, love and leadership direction, any art-focused OSS can be the next Blender or Krita :)
It's FLOSS (GPLv3). There are very few free software video editors. Another good one is kdenlive, which a few years back I liked better that OpenShot.
Kdenlive has improved remarkably over the last few years and in many ways not in a way you'd visibly notice, they had a period where it was very unstable/crash prone so they spent a good chunk of time really focusing just on that and as a result it's now incredibly stable, I can't remember the last time it crashed.
For basic video editing it's quite user friendly and you can do some fairly prosumer level things with it (it's not going to match a studio grade NLE but for most people it doesn't need to).
This does not answer my question, I need something that can do thing, not how it is licensed. I have used Kdenlive, and it's nowhere near either of these functionality-wise, and struggles with big files.
Unlikely to be near that polish and feature completeness. If you ask "then what's the point?", for now the answer is the license and the source availability.
I've asked "how it compares", not "what's the point" -__-
Honestly, it sounds like you’re going to end up asking a ton of very specific functionality questions that Da Vinci Resolve and co do in their own ways.
Does OpenShot? For your specific use cases? I dunno, but it’s free, so give it half an hour or an hour and see? You’ll get more info than from many of us that probably don’t use this kind of software often.
And then you can report back your findings! :D
You'll not get any sense from open source abdolutionists. Your question will not compute.
"how does this small open source tool developed from the good will of developers in their free time compare to the juggernauts of the fields, with millions in revenues ?"
You know it very well, why do you pretend to ask ?