What's the Windows Movie Maker equivalent for Linux?
Back in my teenage years I remember making music videos to my favorite songs in WMM. It didn't require any previous knowledge about cutting or other video editing tools. It was just simple and intuitive.
Is there an equivalent for Linux that's as easy as intuitive as WMM was? Something I could put in front of someone without previous knowlegde in editing and they could still wrap their heads around in just a few minutes?
(And please don't say Kdenlive. Have you ever tried to add a simple effect like blur to a part of a video? It's super cumbersome.)
https://www.openshot.org/
https://flathub.org/en/apps/org.pitivi.Pitivi (there is still active development on their git, but for some reason the release is quite old)
https://www.shotcut.org/
https://jliljebl.github.io/flowblade
Did you just list everyone you know or are these specific recommendations?
It's my personal top candidates in the order of my preference (best to worst) from my notes when I was researching this topic for my parents. (funnily enough, they ultimately settled on kdenlive, despite not being very computer proficient, because they found more step by step yt guides for what they wanted to do with it)
All still actively maintained.
I played around with each of those for a bit some time ago and they were quite similar, so you can pick by your personal preference.
OpenShot is great, especially paired with Inkscape and Blender. It's simple and elegant and an old like me can be productive with minimal training.
There's also Kdenlive, for your super fully featured needs.
kdenlive and openshot are my choice. openshot is easier for basic stuff but kinda buggy (at least it was in 2023)
Openshot looks pleasing to the eye and seems easy to use but I didn't use it myself
Shotcut is in my opinion easy to use but is more similar to davinci resolve than to WMM
Good to know, Davinci is awesome!
What is your issue with blur? As long as you understand the intuitive "everything is an effect" methodology that Kdenlive follows, blurring a portion of the screen is straightforward. Note these clips in which I had blurred the credits appearing onscreen so they do not clash with the captions I added. Add a blur effect, then a crop effect.
Woah you can crop a blur? That's pretty neat
Yep! And you should also try blurring a cropped layer instead of cropping a blurred layer. The former is technically what I had actually done with the two GIFs above. The order in which those two effects are stacked can make a significant difference.
I had to rewatch that bottom one a few times, it completely escaped me
Are you saying that the credits were well obscured and that you couldn't even tell that something was blurred? Or that you had a difficult time being able to discern what is even going on in the GIF? I made these from scratch, so I am absolutely open to any constructive criticism to help me improve my technique.
You did a great job obscuring them!
I didn't even get a hint of that credit blurred at all. I saw your comment and watched it with intention looking out for the credits and it was on the 3rd rewatch I caught them. The first one is more obvious because it was in the open space, but the one with Jenna was imperceptible at first and the only I noticed was because it was brought up
Nice work with the OC!! It's very smooth and something I'd expect to see in highqualitygifs
Thanks for the feedback. While creating these, I always felt like I could have put more effort into removing the credits to make them imperceptible. But I am glad to hear that the simple blur job was effective enough.
And it was!
https://quokk.au/c/high_quality_gifs/p/599185/when-you-see-someone-who-actually-puts-time-and-effort-into-practicing-the-same-kind-of-art
For me, I found Kdenlive decently intuitive (at least in comparison to "professional" options like davinci resolve. I haven't ever video edited much and I was able to pick up easily without watching any video tutorials). You add video and audio clips, drag them into the timeline, and use the split tool for cutting. Then you can drag the edge of clips to adjust the length, and you drag an effect from the effects menu. One effect I like to use is the "Freeze" one, so I can freeze a frame of a video for a bit. Pretty neat.
Also, on Kdenlive, you can disable most of the windows that you don't require which is pretty neat.
You may want to look into Avidemux as it's trying to be a simple video editor. But it may too basic and I'm not certain, if it will be intuitive to you.
I only used Window Movie Maker in the 2010s, maybe it used to be better before. But in my experience it was much more cumbersome. I think it was intuitive in the sense that it mostly worked like Microsoft (Office) software, but other than that it still did require some learning effort.
A lot of people sleep on avidemux, but if all you need is cutting and appending this program could save you a ton of time (and maintain the original quality) since it doesn't need to render or encode
But OP did mention a blur effect
Ahhh right. Seems like you can only apply the blur filter to the entire video.
I have experience with many editors from windows and macOS. After switching to Linux I had to find an alternative. I have been using kdenlive. I never needed a tutorial, always figured things out. Very impressive editor. I was able to have 1TB of footage on the time line, and able to make 1 million x speed time lapse using over 60 hours of footage on a laptop. Very impressed by this software!
@Retro_unlimited @Lemmchen This is one of the big things about #foss: there is no cause for restrictions, other than what the hardware can provide. None of this, 'Buy the Pro version to make a longer movie' nonsense. If the software breaks your machine, you get to keep both parts and the author is not liable!
Kdenlive?
Does it need to be free software or just work on Linux? In recent years several web-based video editors became popular such as CapCut and Microsoft Clipchamp. They come with the usual disclaimers of being by companies that don't have your best interest at heart.
Personally, I try to power through Kdenlive and look up tutorials for the little stuff I do.
Edit: https://opencut.app/ but may require running it inside a local Docker container yourself for most stability.
I'd definitely prefer something FLOSS and local, albeit selfhosted in my network.