Submitted by sudo moderator in freeAsInFreedom (edited )
Last week's thread (non-onion link)
The first week of voting is now finished! OpenShot is the winner, with 5 points. Here is my review of OpenShot 2.3.4:
When I first opened OpenShot, I was greeted by a tutorial. This was, sadly, very buggy - when I tried to click the "next" button, it didn't seem to take my click. I had to spam left-click on the button, and after a few seconds of this, it eventually took it. After a few of these tutorial windows popped up, and all had the same problem, I chose to hide the tutorial - I would just figure things out on my own.
Overall, it looks pretty. I've used a few video editors before, and just by looking at them, I could tell what every window is for, and what each tool is supposed to do. It is quite aesthetically pleasing and intuitive.
The first thing I tried to do was use the razor tool to trim a video. This worked, but not very well. There is no "next frame" button - if you want frame-by-frame control over the video, you have to click and drag the video cursor. Furthermore, you can't use the razor tool to cut the video right where the cursor is, so you have to guess where you want to cut it. I later figured out you could right click on the clip, and "slice" it, which cuts it right on the cursor, so at least you can see what frame you're cutting. I suppose this works if you don't need precise control over your video, but I do like precise control, which is difficult to achieve here.
Next, I sampled some of the video effects. These worked, but one thing I noticed is that OpenShot creates a keyframe whenever you edit an effect's properties, and that keyframe is placed on the frame you're currently viewing. This means if you're editing, say, the saturation effect, but your cursor is in the middle of the video, it will apply the effect at the cursor's current position. This means the video will start at the default saturation, and gradually fade to what you set. Keyframed effects are really useful, and can make some neat visuals, but this probably isn't what the user expected to happen (they probably wanted to edit the saturation for the entire video). As far as the keyframes go, they work as expected, but you cannot move them once you place them (instead, you'd have to delete the keyframe, move the cursor where you want it, then create a new keyframe there with the old one's properties). But other than that, they actually work quite well. What I especially like is that you can have nonlinear transitions between the keyframes. For example, if I want the saturation to be 1 (the default) at the beginning of the video, and I want it to be 4 at the 10 second mark, I can choose to have the transition be linear (think of the graph of y=x), or have it level off near the end (think of the graph of y=sqrt(x)), or have it start off slow and then accelerate near the end (think of the graph of y=x^2). This is a really neat feature.
Then, I tried some of the transitions. There are quite a few of them, but most of them seem to be fade ins/outs with a specific pattern (i.e. certain parts fade in slower than others, creating a temporary pattern). OpenShot seems to have recognized this, as it created a separate tab in the transitions window for only the common transitions. These transitions appear as a translucent blue box that you drag and drop over your clip in the timeline. Each transition creates its own keyframes to go with it, which move when you move the transition (huzzah!). Also, if you drag and drop a second clip on top of the first one, so that they overlap in the timeline, OpenShot automatically creates a fade transition to go between them. That's nice. There's not much to say here, since these work exactly as expected.
Lastly, I experimented with the project profiles (i.e. the resolution, framerate, etc. of the output video). OpenShot has a lot of common profiles, like 1080p @ 60fps, DVD NTSC, etc, and when exporting the video, you can manually change the settings to what you want, by going to the "Advanced" tab in the export video window, in case the settings you want aren't already a preset.
Overall, OpenShot is a pretty nifty program. It looks gorgeous, it's intuitive, and most things work pretty well. My only criticism is that it's not suited for anything more than simple edits to the video. If you need to do complicated editing with lots of effects, you'll probably be frustrated by OpenShot. But if you only need to do some common editing operations, and you're not a stickler for quality, then OpenShot should work for you. It's kind of like the Windows Movie Maker of Linux, but if Windows Movie Maker didn't suck.
So, that's it for the first open source application of the week. What program should I review next week? Make your suggestion, or vote for one somebody's already suggested! Please only vote for one, and don't downvote other people's suggestions.
josefStallman moderator wrote
Great work, sudo! If you put this much effort into every week I think this will go really well.
I'd really like to see a review of ring. It's something I used occasionally in the beta but it just got it's official release and I think it's worth looking into.