It’s been a very long time since I’ve last thoroughly looked into the state of open source video editing software. And I have good news: FOSS video editing has matured at a professional level. Recently I’ve started a video project once again – the last one was 16 years ago or so. I started with Openshot, which is, for what I’m right now trying to do, a more easy-going hobbyist sort of tool and quickly hit its limits. This surprised me, as it has nothing to do with the tool but a lot to do with how deep I still am connected to motion graphics and quasi-professional video NLE.
Openshot is a very impressive, professional grade video editor, but does fall short on a more fine-grained compositing level. Which is totally fine, as it is not designed as a tool for such work. I switched over to Kdenlive to get a handle on my “transparent video” and “fine grained clip-level transformation” needs. Naturally, that was just a few minutes of installing the software and running it. I was deep into project work less that 10 minutes in. In a nutshell: The video-editing camp has arrived at the same level as open source office software, pixel- and vector-image editing and 3D production. There are more FOSS projects for video editing out there than the two mentioned above, but they’ll get you started and probably be sufficient for just about all your video NLE and compositing needs. Enjoy. And a big salute to the open source community, once again.