I just finished a video editing project and I’d like to share some thoughts. If you want to use Linux to edit your videos, you are in trouble, there is no perfect solution. But don’t worry, it is still possible.
Most of the editors are awful
I used Pitivi, OpenShot and Kdenlive. I can’t really remember why I ditched Pitivi, perhaps it didn’t read my input files (dv video files). I used OpenShot for a while and managed to edit the first draft with it. But OpenShot is one of the buggiest programs I have ever used, it eventually crashed after every action I made to the timeline. I did some googling on the issue and it seems that the problem is quite wide-spread and the developers are not really doing their worth to fix them. Therefore I dumped OpenShot and moved forward.
After the other editors Kdenlive was a blessing. Finally a editor which acts how it should and didn’t crash all the time. Kdenlive is actually quite good editor and it should be your choice as well.
Rendering video is really slow
On my laptop my 3 hour video took 1-3 hours to render depending on the settings. I ended up rendering H.264/MPEG-4 video because I wanted to have wide playback support (Windows and Linux without additional codecs or software).
Ffmpeg is very versatile tool
I had to do some denoise work because some of my input material was shot in dark conditions. I tried to use Kdenlive effects for it but I ended up handling that task over to ffmpeg instead.
Sample ffmpeg command:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter:v “yadif,hqdn3d=4:4:3:3” -strict -2 output.mp4
Here we are using two filters, yadif and hqdn3d. Yadif is deinterlacing filter and I used it to handle my SD input material. Hqdn3d is the denoise filter and it takes a list of arguments. The arguments specify the level of different filtering algorithms, the values I have here are quite moderate and should provide reasonable picture quality. The quality is always compromised with filters and the actual values depend on the specific input material.
If you want to apply these filters to your project, I suggest creating several test clips with different values.
Conclusion
Video editing in Linux is possible but you have to select your tools properly.
Happy editing!
Fun Programming 