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.
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.
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.