Have you ever done any video editing? Which software did you use?

Back in early 2004 my friends and I made a short film in high school. Although we were given access to a fairly powerful computer with Adobe Premiere, we decided on Windows Movie Maker because Premiere was too freakin' complex to figure out. Windows Movie Maker has (or had) some fairly severe flaws though, most notably in the hardcoded number of tracks.

I asked a YouTuber whose work I admire and she uses Illustrator and After Effects. Naturally this is a great combination, but for a one-time affair I don't want to spend any or at least not that kind of money. Besides, my preferred OS is Linux. I won't use Windows if I can help it. But Illustrator is a fantastic piece of software and I'm convinced After Effects makes a great companion to it.

The obvious free and open source alternative for Illustrator is Inkscape, a program with which I have close to a decade of experience (although I only use it intermittently).^[1] but I've also heard good things about Krita. It's After Effects that I don't immediately know the proper alternative for. The Free Software Foundation has even called this a high priority issue.^[2] Some quick testing suggests Kdenlive to be the best fit for my purposes.^[3] Blender is significantly more complicated, while Pitivi is just a touch too simple. OpenShot looks really, really promising as well. In fact I like the GUI design better than Kdenlive, but in Debian I couldn't even get it to work (segmentation fault) while in Xubuntu it crashed on me twice while doing some basic testing, which doesn't exactly instill the trust to use it for real. To top it off, SVG support in OpenShot is fairly abysmal. Something as simple as making a part of some text a different color in an SVG doesn't even show up, so I'd have to export everything to PNG first in order to use it.

tl;dr I'm opting for Kdenlive. Do you think I missed anything or do you want to share some experiences? Let me know!

¹ See my first tests here and my most recent drawing here.↵

² http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/priority-projects/highpriorityprojects#video↵

³ See an introductory video on Kdenlive here.↵

Never done any myself. I simply have not filmed anything that would need editing. But I sometimes enjoy watching tutorials anyway.

There's a moviemaker dude I know. Maybe I will later ask if he uses any software. It may turn out to be some proprietary software.

I simply have not filmed anything that would need editing.

I challenge that. Almost every video needs, e.g., Avidemux^[1] even if it's just for some trimming. But sure, that's not the kind of editing we're talking about.

¹ Or more traditionally VirtualDub.↵

It doesn't need any editing when you film only one-off self-contained bits. But yes, if your ambitions are beyond that, you will need editing.

YouTube is full of one-off, self-contained bits that should've been trimmed.

Video editing needs powerful hardware (and cracked software...).

Between Kdenlive^[1] for relatively simple stuff and Blender for the complicated stuff you really don't need any cracked software.

Regarding a powerful computer, perhaps. I've probably got that covered even though I mostly disagree with you. Provided you've got enough RAM^[2] the rest shouldn't matter too much.

My desktop:

CPU~Quad core Intel Core i7-4790 (-HT-MCP-) speed/max~3600/4000 MHz Kernel~4.7.0-1-amd64 x86_64 Up~4:22 Mem~2405.1/32122.1MB HDD~3256.7GB(74.2% used) Procs~277 Client~Shell inxi~2.3.1

My laptop:

CPU~Dual core Intel Core m3-6Y30 (-HT-MCP-) speed/max~799/2200 MHz Kernel~4.4.0-45-generic x86_64 Up~49 min Mem~1073.4/3851.0MB HDD~128.0GB(10.9% used) Procs~197 Client~Shell inxi~2.2.35

When you're done with the editing, though... then the rendering will profit significantly from my desktop computer.

PS As a fun point of comparison, I got the desktop for €450 in the beginning of the year while the laptop cost me €500... Admittedly, that's not counting all the other desktop-related investments that last much longer than a motherboard+CPU+RAM.

¹ And perhaps an older, more stable version of OpenShot.↵

² About 4 GB should probably suffice for most stuff -- more is better, of course.↵

I'll see what can I do with Kdenlive, Blender is from a different championship.

Incidentally, in 2013 the creators of the defunct video editor Kino recommended you try "other Linux video editors such as Shotcut, Kdenlive, Flowblade, OpenShot, PiTiVi, LiVES, and LightWorks" (source).