Hello,
Any free open source app to edit videos on my phone here ?
Thank sou 🙏🏼
I had a go testing out what FOSS had to offer in this space a few years ago. I tried KDEnlive, Olive and Blender (well not really, I read about it).
At the time KDEnlive seemed to be everyone’s favourite in this space. As an editor, I can’t say I loved it, and at the time the interface was just plain awful, I looked at some screenshots just before this comment and it looks like it’s come a very long way.
I really liked Olive. At the time it was for some reason restricted to something like 720p exports and weirder still it would ONLY work with h264 MP4 files. That was enough to make it functionally useless which was a shame because it was the first FOSS app I’d tried or looked at for editing that actually seemed to work like one would expect a video editor to work. Maybe I was just set in my ways but when you train on the commercial offerings which all kind of adhere to a sort of unofficial standard way of doing things that coalesced over decades, you really don’t want to reinvent that wheel. From what I could see before this post it looks like it’s only gone from strength to strength because it based on pictures alone it looks really cool. I guess pictures don’t tell you much about what it’s like to use and apparently it used to be very unstable. Hopefully it’s better now.
Blender, from what I read, was a surprisingly popular choice for editing which is baffling to me because, just because you COULD edit in it, doesn’t mean you should. It’s not built for it at all, it’s 3d modelling and animation software, I reckon you’d have an awful time trying to use it for editing and that’s what people at the time said when I saw forum posts asking if you could use it for this purpose but strangely I came across a few who did nonetheless. I can only assume they had extremely basic needs.
Bonus points: (not FOSS) I also tried LightWorks, which at the time was closed source but said they were about to open source. Nobody believed them and indeed they didn’t and to this day haven’t. It’s uhh… fine. If it was FOSS I’d be impressed but given the competition in the commercial market, it didn’t seem worth bothering. Ironic since I believe they were one of the first computer based editing platforms.
Resolve isn’t FOSS but it has a very good very richly featured free version that would likely beat out anything currently offered in the FOSS world, at least that was the case when I was looking in to this around 2017 or so. Worth a mention because it’s really good. Personal if it’s commercial software and a big project I’d probably still use premiere or avid for the editing part and resolve for the rest but the editing gets better ever day rapidly and they’re by far the least scummy company for this kind of software. It’s a one time purchase too. Own it forever.
No Shotcut love? I found it pretty easy to use ot after Premiere.
Actually I totally forgot about it. I thought I remembered trying a 3rd but since I couldn’t remember what it was I had to exclude it from the list. I remember almost nothing of it. I think I recall liking it slightly more than KDEnlive because I seemed to just plain hate that but everything else has long since left me. I think that probably doesn’t bode well for what I might have thought of it, or maybe it means there fewer notable problems. Nevertheless at the time I definitely decided that I ever had to go FOSS, I’d look to Olive.
Trouble is, with the FOSS offerings, I’m definitely grading on a curve. At the time absolutely nothing available FOSS stood even a chance of being useful form serious work, the lack of professional codec support already crippled most things right out the gate and the number of problems would be too big to overcome. I can’t speak from experience but I suspect that’s probably still the case even now. That said if you literally only have to edit some things together, you’re not dealing with deadlines, you don’t need a particularly collaborative workflow, you don’t have to deal with broadcast or cinema standards and you don’t have many terabyte of footage, probably almost any FOSS app would do the job well enough when you get used to it.
Haven’t tried it myself but there’s https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.github.devhyper.openvideoeditor/
Open Video Editor lets you edit your videos. It supports HDR and allows to apply filters. With this app you also can trim, scale, and rotate your videos or even grayscale them. It is also possible to use this app to extract audio from a video, to convert a HDR video to SDR, or to convert it to a different format.
Bunny media editor is one option.
As far as “professional” goes, Kdenlive is miles and miles ahead of other FOSS programs. It’s the only one with the feature set and the development commitment to come within shouting distance of it’s proprietary competitors. It’s not quite there, of course, but it’s the only one that gets somewhat close.
If you’re not fully militant about it having to be FOSS, Resolve is of course the GOAT on Linux.
I’ve used Kdenlive for both personal projects and professional ones and it gets the job done admirably. But I’ve gone to DaVinci resolve when I had projects that needed more complex motion graphics rather than bringing a separate FOSS app into the mix to do it (Natron or synfig depending).
Resolve’s strength is that it puts audio, motion graphics, editing and effects all in one program instead of having to use multiple programs.
Can you use resolve for free?
Yes.
There are a couple of limitations in the number of filters/effects you can use. And on Linux, the free version won’t edit MP4 natively. But the reality is you shouldn’t be editing on MP4s anyway. It’s a dreadfully inefficient format for doing actual editing as far as scrubbing through the timeline, etc… MP4 is a final product format. For editing you should be transcoding your clips into something like Apple Pro-res or DNxHD.
When I was editing a movie with lightworks I had something called eyeframe-converter that would convert your video into a low-res editing proxy for ease of use, and then swaps them out with the full quality mpeg2 or whatever the proper editing format was for the full render, and then outputs to H.264 or whatever.
Hopefully resolve can do something like that too?
Resolve does indeed have a proxy mode, as does Kdenlive.
Kdenlive is a good one, and I’ve used that when editing for CoculesNation. Olive, Shotcut, OpenShot, Blender, and DaVinci Resolve (proprietary) seem to be decent options too.
This, Kdenlive is probably the best bet for FOSS and has gone a long way these past years.
From what I tried, Olive was good some 5 years ago, but development was abandoned, and Blender works, but it’s not really made for it.
If OP doesn’t care about proprietary, DaVinci Resolve is the best on the list IMO.
Been using resolve for years after I ditched kdenlive. All on Linux. Works great.
Depending on what exactly you want to do, termux with ffmpeg might be an option. No GUI, though
I’m sorry but how tf you edit videos without a gui?
With the CLI! ;-)
f.e. this would rotate the video 90 degrees:
ffmpeg -i in.mov -vf “transpose=1” out.mov
How do you add a text overlay that follows an object in the video?
I can imagine som LLM coming up with an absolute nonsense step by step guide on how to do it with the terminal.
carefully.
It would definitely be a hassle to combine several clips.
But if all you want to do is cut a small clip from a smaller one, or transcode to a different format, it is sufficient.
Oh yh don’t get me wrong ive done transcoding and shortening vids but cutting and colouring sounds a lot of hassle
LaTex tribe expands to video eh?
I first learned computers by sneaking onto campus and borrowing an account to layout a book using Tex. It’s convolute. I can see a certain masochistic thrill in command line video editing.
Blender works great. Disclaimer: I have no basis for comparison, it’s all I use
great for turning videos into gifs
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Yes, but they’re all really bad. I’m sorry, but 99% of times, you need to do it on a computer. I’ve tried. All interfaces are shit.
There’s also Blender.
