It would be nice to see an active group of moderators helping to answer questions, but I appreciate just how much time this takes up. The forum is just this subreddit and not a lot of people seem to answer questions, so often users may just find themselves stuck. That's fine for getting you started, but not much use when you encounter a problem or want to do something that isn't obvious. The user manual is pretty basic and only really explains what the main features do. I can't see much evidence of this and it makes me shudder to think what earlier versions were like. What does concern me is that OpenShot has been in development for ten years. Overall, I'd say it's about one step up from using Windows Movie Maker. I do particularly commend it for keeping the interface clean and simple - which allows for a large enough preview that you don't need a second monitor (not that it supports that). It's nice to see the integration of Blender and Inkscape in some features, but you have to install those separately - it might have been nice to include options to download them in the installer. There are a lot of features that are missing (no real text-handling, no voiceover recording, no dedicated audio tracks), but it makes a reasonable fist of what it can do. It's not a high quality video editor by any means, but it's good enough for any user who wants to join and split a bunch of clips to make a short video. So yeah, as a basic video editor, it does okay. I tried it out on Linux as well and found similar rendering performance. It's not great either, but the programming required to make it render quicker is very difficult and especially difficult to do across Windows, Mac and Linux. So a 20 minute video took about an hour to render. In my tests of 1080p 60fps clips, it rendered them in about three times the length of the video, even with multiple complex cuts across multiple tracks. Its rendering performance was on a par with Vegas (a mid-level pro-sumer video editor) prior to its incorporation of GPU rendering. ![]() When it came to rendering, it actually performed quite well. I'd appreciate better performance when previewing and editing clips, but it's not bad enough to put me off completely. Not great, but there are high bit-rate files in a high resolution. They would start off fine, but begin to skip and stutter after a few seconds. OpenShot loaded the clips just fine, though it did have difficulty playing them. ![]() This produces large files that some low-end editors really struggle with. I guess they're easy to code and attractive to complete beginners.īut how does it perform? I captured some video from a game using Nvidia Shadowplay. I never understand why so many video editors want to include all these features: cross-fades, fade-outs and fade-ins are generally all you will ever need. There's also a whole pile of transitions, but unless you want to recreate Homer Simpson's use of star wipes, then you're better off never touching any of them. The effects are equally useless, with only one or two having any utility. The included presets are mostly unusable amateur rubbish that no one in their right mind would want to use. There's a titler, which is okay, but not terribly flexible and that's all there is when it comes to captions, titles, etc. ![]() What's not so good is that you very quickly come up against the limitations of the program. Drag some clips into the bin, drag them onto the timeline and arrange them to make your video. ![]() This is a good thing as you'll be able to transfer what you've learned to another editing program should you choose to do so. There's the timeline at the bottom, a clip bin on the left and a preview pane on the right. When you start OpenShot, you'll notice it's laid out in pretty much the same way every video editor is. In short, OpenShot uses Qt to make it easy to support multiple platforms - in this case Windows, Mac and Linux. Qt is a a toolkit that allows easy development for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and embedded systems without having to recode interfaces for each of these platforms. If you're a casual user, this won't mean anything to you. The first thing to note is that OpenShot uses Qt. Whilst I may have used high-end editors for professional work, I don't use an Avid suite to make simple YouTube videos, so I'm also interested in something simple for my own use. I'm forever being asked to recommend video editing software, so I'm always on the look-out for something that is simple, light on system resources and flexible enough to produce decent results. I worked in the film and video industry for over ten years and have used lots of different video editing software.
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