Easy, powerful, stable: Pick two with OpenShot 1.3

Posted Feb 21, 2011 22:30 UTC (Mon) by cantsin (guest, #4420)
In reply to: Easy, powerful, stable: Pick two with OpenShot 1.3 by rvfh
Parent article: Easy, powerful, stable: Pick two with OpenShot 1.3

One more thing: Like Kdenlive, OpenShot is just a GUI on top of the MLT engine which provides the actual video editing functionality. (It's very much comparable to how Webkit provides the engine for a number of different web browsers.) Since I have never experienced a program using MLT to be stable, I wonder whether the instability is actually caused by MLT rather than OpenShot itself. MLT has been in an experimental state for many years. Even if OpenShot provides a great GUI, it can only be as mature and reliable as MLT is.

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Kdenlive gets it done... ...with patience.

Posted Feb 28, 2011 8:10 UTC (Mon) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link] (1 responses)

Kdenlive crashes on me often. It reminds me of the bad old days with Windows 98SE and Adobe Photoshop. Save often, reboot often.

Kdenlive does get the job done, though. I launched a TV series last week on local cable (Boise, Idaho USA) + the web:
http://www.tvcycle.com/

That show is all digital, with the video being pulled in from SD cards. Most of the show is three shots, consisting of a main shot and two picture-in-picture shots on the right side. Kdenlive does the composites nicely, but when I load up a saved project, it forgets the track assignments for composites and I have to assign them again! That's probably the second most annoying part of the video process for me. With my Qwest DSL connection, sending 15 minutes of 1080p (30fps) to YouTube takes about 6 hours. That's the biggest annoyance, and more hardware or software won't fix that. They have faster accounts, but I just upload overnight instead

Kdenlive gets it done... ...with patience.

Posted Jun 28, 2011 6:21 UTC (Tue) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link]

Thought I'd update to mention that the Kdenlive I'm running now (0.8) is far more stable. Certainly not perfect, or perfectly stable, but massively improved. Wouldn't recommend it to the world just yet, but for people with tolerance for the bleeding edge, it's not so bad.

I'm editing 1080p video. It (mostly) holds up. The 0.8 designation is reasonably accurate. I'm running low production weekly shows off this software (but they're 1080p... ...I understand the contrast) and it works. With the 0.8 series it works well enough. I was about to kick Kdenlive to the curb with the 0.7 series, and 0.8 came out.

Also, I edited more video with 0.7 from the time of the parent comment, and the timeline bugs with Kdenlive actually ate at me more than my cheap upload speeds and even the real stability issues. Those timeline problems appear to have disappeared 0.8. I haven't seen any.