Well working video editor for Linux with proper feature palette

Question

I want to edit videos, including cutting, cropping, moving, rotating, resizing, overlaying text, changing speed and volume, the usual stuff. Maybe also trapezoidal correction. Keyframes are also pretty much needed. Now the problem: All video editors I found either don't have these features or are one of these:

• I used DaVinci Resolve on my Windows PC, but now I use Linux. Resolve is available for Linux, but it seems to require extra hardware for things like hearing sound and might not even work on Debian (I didn't manage to properly install it).
• KDEnlive freezes when clicking "play" after clicking in an empty area of the timeline, which makes it pretty much unusable.
• OpenShot was my best choice, until I actually tried to use it: I can't scroll past 18 hours, I can't get moving and resizing to work (it uses some percentages that I don't understand and that automatically round), I can't select multiple elements to move them or do other things with all of them, it's generally not nice to use and, in the case of what I tried to do today, it has many problems with image sequences (but that can likely be resolved differently).

Is there a video editing program with a proper feature palette (not just putting a few clips together) that actually works on Linux?

Update: DaVinci Resolve is now available for Linux, but it's not playing back any media for me. I'll report that bug and update again here once I get an answer.

Answer 1

I'd recommend taking a look at Shotcut – which seems to be the candidate coming closest to your requirements:

• edit videos: that's what a video editor is for :smile_cat:
• including cutting, cropping, moving, rotating, resizing: Yes.
• overlaying text: within limits. It's implemented as video effect, so it sticks to the entire clip it gets appended to. Simply place cuts were it should start and end is a work-around. Two effects offered for this: plain text (with formatting), and an HTML overlay.
• changing speed and volume: Yes.
• trapezoidal correction: haven't checked for that; but your "maybe" makes this an optional feature, right?
• Keyframes: Yes, available.

For Linux, I recommend downloading the AppImage – make it executable, and you can start it right away from the shell (that's how I use it). As you experienced, the "portable" version seems to be a bit tricky.

^{Shotcut (source: Shotcut)}

Also, Shotcut needs a little "getting used to" – it was for me, coming from OpenShot. But then, in my experience it is much more fluent than OpenShot (with which I had permanent stutters, so no chanced for a decent preview). When you found the correct export format, that also seems to produce comparable results at smaller size.

Note that, while Shotcut (as well as OpenShot, Flowblade and others) is available from the standard repositories of most Linux distributions, that version is often outaged (on some distris by years) – as they stick to the (major) version available when the current release of the distribution was published (to avoid the mess coming with each app requiring different library versions and the like). Hence the recommendation for the AppImage.

I also strongly recommend you to watch at least the introductional video tutorial ("Getting Started") linked from / embedded into their tutorial page. It's some 20 minutes, but will save you a lot of headaches (see: "getting used to") as it saves you from "figuring out" how things work.

Answer 2

Kdenlive is the best video editor that I know for linux. It has many advanced features and goes beyond the basic tools of a video editor. But you can face some problems if you're not using a KDE based distribution.

Alternatively you can try PiTiVi or Cinelerra. Both are featured rich video editors programs, but I think they lack features compared with Kdenlive.

As a last resource you can try a distro focused on content creators like Ubuntu Studio. It comes with Kdenlive and Openshot pre installed but have all the necessary packages to deal with them as well.