Exclusive Linux gets my pick as the best multi-media production platform because it is flexible, efficient, and secure. Your system resources are going to your work, rather than in supporting a bloaty operating system further bogged down by marginally-effective anti-malware software. In our previous installment we covered a range of excellent drawing and painting, photography, 3D rendering, and desktop publishing applications for Linux. And my favorite Linux distros for serious multi-media production.
Today we're going to enjoy a tasty sampling of the high-quality video creation and editing software for Linux. You oldtimers are probably familiar with these, but there are more Linux newcomers than ever, so let's start with...
OpenShot
I really really really like OpenShot. It probably won't impress professional videographers who like having a million bells and whistles (or maybe it will), but it impresses me for its useful feature set and excellent user interface. This is my #1 choice for beginning video editors because of its ease-of-use, and its well-chosen feature set.
The Power of Love, Gabrielle Aplin, created with OpenShot and Ardour
It supports high-definition video, Blu-Ray, 3D, tethered shooting, integration of video, audio, and still images, all the usual effects such as scrolling titles, pans, and fades, animations, speed changes, audio mixing, export to multiple formats and quality levels including YouTube and Vimeo, and tons more. It is under active development and has great community support. This may be the only video program you'll ever need.
Blender
Blender is a fabulously sophisticated 3D computer graphics and animation creator. Check out the Blender gallery for a sampling of movies created with Blender. It supports a large range of high-end abilities such as ray-tracing, key-frame animation tools, object tracking, super nice character modeling, realistic physics for great liquid and smoke/mist/gas effects, and realistic movements of objects and characters, and excellent realistic light effects.
The main learning curve with Blender is developing a grasp of all of these concepts; once you get that part down it's like a light goes on and everything makes sense. It also has a nice game-creation module, and superior compositing.
Cinelarra
Cinelarra is for video producers who need more than OpenShot, and who want a native Linux professional-quality video editor that supports high-resolution audio and video, and advanced features such as hue and saturation, overlays, denoising, compression, normalization, time stretching, realtime effects, nested sequences, color balance, image flipping, text-to-movie, batch render and batch capture, compositing, and much more. Cinelarra has nice integration between audio and video, and makes it easy to control synchronization. Blender and Cinelarra work well together; create your splendid animations in Blender and then integrate them into a movie in Cinelarra.
Cinelarra has two versions: the unsupported community version and a commercial edition. Every six months the nice Cinelarra developers release the latest source code. It's not widely available in the usual distro repositories, but the good Cinelerra-CV folks bundle it up into Arch, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and other distro packages. There is a Cinelarra PPA-- Personal Package Archive-- for Ubuntu users. PPAs are user-supported repositories for specific applications, like Cinelarra. They're not official repos, but they allow you to use your normal Ubuntu package manager to install and remove third-party software.
Of course there are many more good video editors for Linux such as Kdenlive, PiTiVi, Avidemux, and Lightworks for Linux keeps getting a lot of attention even though it's still vapor. It is a feast of riches, so enjoy!
Comments
Subscribe to Comments FeedMichael Brown Said:
Kdenlive on the KDE desktop is very good, deseves a mention.
Erinn Said:
Why does Kdenlive deserve a mention? Some details would be nice.
David Said:
Hi Erinn, Kdenlive is the closest you will find to Adobe Premier. While it's not flawless is has made impressive progress in the last couple of years and can be considered stable. The feature set is one most extensive in open-source nonlinear video editors. Plus, Kdenlive can use the frei0r plug-ins making it one of the most versatile video editors on Linux. It's not as easy to use than Openshot and Pitivi, but so muh better than the dreadful Cinelerra. BTW, there's a repeating typo in the article: It's Cinelerra not Cinelarra
Erinn Said:
Thank you, I appreciate the information.
Steffinger Said:
I absolutely share your love for kdenlive. I did lots of small video projects over the past 3 years using kdenlive and i really appreciate how they developed this software. While it was really very buggy some years ago und crashed a lot, it works like a charm nowadays. And even if a lot people will call me fanboy, i prefer kdenlive over adobe premiere, because in my eyes it is easier to use and delivers very good results. The good results are of course in line with the great development in ffmpeg and mlt, but stll.... ok. i'm a kdenlive fanboy
Chris WEre Said:
I love Kdenlive too. It's got all the features I need for my professional video editing. The only problem I have with it is the bugginess. If Kdenlive stopped working on new features and focused all their efforts on bug fixnig, it would be up to professional class in no time. Unfortunately the nature with projects like this is that no-one wants to be the guy who fixes bugs. Hence why so many open-sources bugs hang around for so long.
Fateh Slavitskaya Said:
Libre Graphics World considers Bassam Kurdali (dir. Elephants Dream + Tube Open Movie) one of the best "evangelists" of Blender’s video sequencer, for his occasional talks about Blender’s somewhat stealth role as a general purpose video editor. His 2009 talk from Libre Graphics Meeting, 'Video Editing with Blender for Non-3D Artists, Using Examples from Real Projects' still works as a good introduction, despite the many evolutions of Blender since. http://urchn.org/post/video-editing-in-blender
Armando Said:
Glad that you mentioned Lightworks.
William Said:
Kdenlive, Blender and Cinelerra are my 3 Options. Kdenlive is so good as Sony Vegas pro.
Piotr Said:
I am using Kdenlive and OpenShot and I need nothing more...
bluetak Said:
The author should have worked a little, and should have mentionned kdenlive, which is better and better.
syncdram Said:
I stopped using openshot because with every ubuntu update it brakes openshot, never able to open it again. Kdenlive hasn't failed once. If the developer of openshot would stay in touch with ubuntus updates then i could use it again.
Joseph Said:
It sounds like Ubuntu is the problem, not Openshot. Maybe you should ditch a poorly maintained distro that breaks things or doesn't package Openshot properly. Canonical should be testing every package in their main repository before release.
me Said:
It's Cinelerra, not Cinelarra
Chris Said:
OpenShot is great, though I agree with the commenter who said kdenlive deserves a mention. IMHO, those are the two best Linux video editors. I've never tried Cinelerra and I've never tried Blender's video editing functions. (I've done modeling with it, but not video editing)
joker Said:
it's not ready for prime time yet, but NOVACUT, deserve to be mentioned, it has a very interresting cutting workflow, I think the best that we can have, it's always in active devellopment .
Michael Glasser Said:
What I would like to see is a good screencasting solution... a tool that combines the features of, say, Cinelarra but also allows not just for video capture of the screen but post production showing / hiding of the cursor, changing the size or even image of the cursor, focusing on the foremost window, etc. There are solutions like this for other OSs... would be great to see something like this come to Linux.
Vital Said:
I thought when I saw the headline on Linux Today - "I need to see who is that idiot"... And sure enough, it is Carla - a disgrace and disservice to Open Source in a form of zealotry, misinformation and hate. Nothing new to see here...
Beatnink Said:
It takes one to recognise one? Just about any article written on the web can be flamed depending on one's personal views and feelings. That's why the value in an article is in the constructive feedback / discussion that it invokes. There's some very useful comments here by various people. Sorry @Vital, but yours is the one that stands out as unconstructive.
Beatnink Said:
So far I've only used Openshot and its ok. Exporting a project seems to take too long. What is other's peoples experience with that? Which of the video editors discussed here would beat Openshot for video conversion processing performance?
Cinelerra user Said:
Minor correction: you've misspelled cinelerra