Hello,

Any free open source app to edit videos on my phone here ?

Thank sou 🙏🏼

  • Jimmycrackcrack@lemmy.ml
    8·
    4 hours ago

    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.