When Lucid Lynx ships in April, it will come with a video editor installed by default, which will be a first for Ubuntu. With this in mind, I decided to test drive OpenShot, an open-source, nonlinear editor that reached its 1.0 release very recently.
Currently, Ubuntu developers are planning to ship Ubuntu 10.04 with PiTiVi, a different editor. I wouldn’t bet any money on this decision changing before April, but I’ve read good things about OpenShot and thought it would be worth a try, even if won’t be included in Lucid by default.
I should also make clear that I’m no video-editing professional. The extent of my work in this realm has mostly been limited to stringing clips together in Windows Movie Maker back when I was still using XP.
The last time I tried editing videos in Linux, which was a couple years ago, I used Cinelerra, an extremely powerful application that’s a bit more complicated than the average user needs or wants. It took me hours to figure out how to do very basic stuff.
All this is to say that in testing OpenShot, I was looking for an intuitive, simple editor that would allow me to perform basic tasks without having to read through lots of documentation.
OpenShot on Ubuntu
For the most part, that’s what I found. It took only about fifteen minutes for me to master the basics of OpenShot, which offers an intuitive, well organized interface:
Video clips are easy to string together, and adding transitions and effects is as simple as a drag-and-drop. Creating titles is also not difficult, although it took me a few minutes to realize that the tool for doing so is under the “Project” menu in the main toolbar.
In terms of stability and performance, OpenShot was solid for me. Even on my netbook, which is no CPU or GPU powerhouse, it was very responsive.
On the downside, some aspects of OpenShot’s interface could be improved. It’s well designed overall, but the video preview section was confusing because it was less than obvious that the play button both started and paused video playback.
On another interface note, only three tracks are visible at once under the timeline section of the application, and I couldn’t find a way to zoom out in order to bring others into view.
OpenShot also doesn’t appear to be up to the task of heavy-duty video editing. It works great for normal users like me whose needs are limited to stringing clips together and adding some titles and effects, but people interested in professional-quality productions will need to look elsewhere, as OpenShot doesn’t offer many advanced features.
That’s not necessarily a weakness, however. There’s nothing wrong with focusing on perfecting basic functionality instead of trying to make an application that caters to both amateurs and professionals at the same time, which is not always possible.
Overall, OpenShot is a highly usable and stable application for basic video editing. I’ve yet to try PiTiVi to see how it measures up, but hope to do so in the near future.
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Does it capture video over Firewire?
It’s a nice editor, but I’ve had quite a few problems with crashes while trying to export videos in any number of formats – and this after playing with my libraries.
This seems like a nice editor and I figured it out fairly quickly, but have spent several frustrating hours trying to get something out of it.
You will find pitivi is a much better friend.
Openshot 1.0 crashed on me (and not just me). It didn’t appear to have an ‘undo’ of any kind. I could not position effects properly nor make them longer or shorter in duration.
Maybe I didn’t give it enough time (it crashed pretty soon, that’s where I draw the line), but as far as ‘intuitive’ goes it didn’t seem up to much.
Few features and big buttons that look infantile do not necessarily make an application user friendly.
I’ve tried OpenShot on a couple different occasions. One feature that I love is that, on export, if I know I’m going to upload the video to Flickr, I just select “Flickr” from the target list and the correct codecs and settings are picked for me. This makes it so much easier for users like myself who really know very little about codecs.
That said, I was disappointed with its handling of my videos. My source was a 20-second .mp4 from one of those Flip HD cameras. In the preview, the audio and video were noticeably out of sync and this was carried over into the exported video.
I tried the same source video in Pitivi and, other than the confusing interface and options, ended up with exactly the results I’d hoped to achieve.
dragonbite: I don’t own a firewire camera so I can’t test that, but according to https://blueprints.launchpad.net/openshot/+spec/capture-firewire-dv it looks like this feature has yet to be implemented.
@mths
yes, but pitivi doesn’t let you do anything.. you can cut videos, and what more?
I need to amend my comment above; with a little more work on my repositories and packages, it seems to be exporting everything wonderfully.
After playing with it, I’d suggest it’s a more user-friendly editor than pitivi – especially if what you want is to create a Ken Burns style slide show from still photographs.
In any case, it’s nice to see some choices in a part of the Linux world that’s long been lacking…
[...] Testing OpenShot Video Editor Currently, Ubuntu developers are planning to ship Ubuntu 10.04 with PiTiVi, a different editor. I wouldn’t bet any money on this decision changing before April, but I’ve read good things about OpenShot and thought it would be worth a try, even if won’t be included in Lucid by default. [...]
You should try out Kino, the KDE video editor. I’ve used the 3.5 branch in Lenny and Etch. It is stable and easy to use. Simple transitions, subtitles and effects are easy. Exporting to various file formats is not as straight forward because this is an area filled with secrets and patent restrictions. Ogg Theora export works well as does mpeg and a few other formats.
Adding clips to the timeline is as simple as dragging them from a file manager. A dialog asks you if you want to transcode them to the native HD work format. This takes some time but reduces quality loss in the final export.
It also does firewire capture, for the guy who asked. GNU/Linux is good with firewire in general.
It’s great to see so many editors on Linux now. Also check out http://vlmc.org/ as it is being written by many of the programmers who also work on VLC Media Player, dare I say the most popular movie player ever.
[...] Testing OpenShot Video Editor [...]
Thanks for the writeup on OpenShot. I downloaded and installed it on Ubuntu 9.10 and I’m really happy with the results. I had been using Kino and it was okay, but OpenShot is much better and easier to use.
I finally got around to uploading my xmas videos and last year I used MS Movie Maker, it was easier to use than what’s on linux (it was just cinderella, kino and avidemux). This year I decided to retry some linux options. I downloaded live and kdenlive and I have to admit that kdenlive looks really polished (it is kde and needs a bunch of depedencies but very nice). Will try openshot and pitivi but video on linux has come really far – Thanks