State of Kdenlive

Kdenlive hits the perfect sweet spot for me. It's much more capable than basic editors like iMovie, but doesn't have the overwhelming learning curve (or steep hardware requirements) of DaVinci Resolve. Like others have mentioned, pairing it with OBS for screen recording and Audacity for audio makes for an incredibly powerful, 100% FOSS media creation stack. It's amazing to see how far open-source video editing has come.

A couple years ago I did some basic OBS recording of technical stuff and needed a simple, preferably OSS, editing and compositing solution polish up the vids.

The landscape was bonkers. After trying lots of free, freemium, and paid trials I finally landed on Kdenlive. At the time I got the sense that it had just recently, within the past couple(max) years, gotten much better and much more usable than a lot of the internet had caught on to. I'd liken it to the Blender 2.5 release. It was perfectly usable on my system for editing 4k video with my basic needs.

Haven't used it over the past couple years but it's nice to see that they have been pushing it forward even harder. Even based on my 2-3 year old experience with it I'd encourage anyone looking for basic, but comprehensive, video editing needs to give it a go.

Edit: I'm not saying it's limited to basic editing. I just mean that it's perfectly adequate and usable without being overwhelming and "unfriendly". Watch a Youtube Kdenlive 101 intro vid and you're good to go.

I tried it 10 years ago and it was very buggy, crashing and freezing. The main option was Openshot, which was also in development and buggy (something happened then, that Openshot almost stopped development). There was no good foss option, so I settled for Sony Vegas from pirate bay.

Kdenlive has some unfortunate performance regression when working with larger projects with many clips.

I managed to track down a few of them while evaluating Claude Code a while back (mostly certain actions doing O(n) scans over all clips every mouse event needing debouncing), and got it mostly back down to tolerable levels again, but have been holding onto them because unsolicited drive by AI PRs are very annoying from a code project maintenance perspective, as the changes are almost certainly poorly factored.

Was half considering creating a Kdenvibe fork, but that would also be in bad taste. So right now I don't know what to do with the diff.

I wish Kdenlive had 2 things:

1. A way to play back videos at 2x speed while editing in an intuitive way (DaVinci Resolve does this perfectly).

TBH I'm not sure how this isn't a feature since it's straight up a 2x time saver for anyone editing a video since playing back a 10 minute at 2x is only 5 minutes of real life time.

With Resolve I can actively edit / cut / etc. my videos at 2x speed playback but the exported video comes out as 1x. In other words, this isn't a request to adjust the clip speed, it's 100% limited to playback in the editor. Also audio playback is perfect, it sounds exactly like a YouTube video being played at 2x.

With Kdenlive live you have to adjust the playback speed after every time you make a cut (stopping the video) which is very not user friendly and I don't know what algorithm they are using but the audio sounds really poor at 2x. It seems to skip every other frame of audio so it sounds like it's constantly dropping out and not smooth.

2. A revamped title creator so creating titles is as fast and easy as Camtasia.

Glad this project is still going, but have they ever fixed its stability and being able to change the framerate without breaking the whole project? Last I tried, trying to export the video with a different fps just broke all the keyframe timings...

it's been 3 years since I completely gave up on kdenlive.

I put time and effort to get around the dated and unintuitive UI/UX, but it is too convoluted to do even some basic stuff. and the repeated crashes are too much of a pain to be ready for everyday use.

I tried alternatives such as openshot and shotcut, but they too have a lot of room for improvement. it seems there always a flaw of some kind and a lack of usability for this kind of software.

not taking anything for the time, efforts ad good will the devs put into these software, and many thanks to them for everything. but commercial software benefits from the years of having team of full time employees giving them a serious edge on opensource software for video editing.

I recently switched from Shotcut to Kdenlive. Kdenlive's UX is much more intuitive. Lots of features, I still feel like a beginner, which is such a fun feeling!

I'm using it together with OBS to post short demo videos of my side project. I could use Loom I guess, but I prefer to keep my tech stack FOSS when I can.

Creating "non standard" video resolutions is a bit of a pain though. But I've solved that with an ffmpeg oneliner.

Interesting that they went to visit the Blender offices, considering Blender still has it's own video editor (that seems to be ramping up on receiving improvements as of late too) which is basically a "competitor" (as far as FOSS has competitors) to Kdenlive.

I'd love to know more what actually went down there, is there plans about sharing of code or something similar, considering the two applications serve similar use cases when it comes to video editing?

I've used Kdenlive for years. I'm someone who only needs video editing every once in a while, but even then I definitely recommend learning it.

Kdenlive is great. With zero video-editing experience, I was able to easily edit a demo video, cutting portions, clipping pauses, etc.

Kdenlive is amazing. As someone that learned basic video editing through cracked versions of Premiere growing up, I love that a completely free tool can do everything I need for editing without the nonsense of basic editors or tools like Clipchamp that lock ffmpeg flags like 4k rendering behind paid gates. My only issue with the tool right now is crashing and corrupted backups which happened a few times on the video I edited a few weeks ago.

Related: Niccolò Venerandi (a KDE developer) criticizes Kdenlive and proposes a proof of concept of a QML-based node-based video editor using shaders to achieve full GPU acceleration for everything (Kdenlive doesn't use GPU/is unstable and hiccups)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlgrCqgnk-M

Very thankful for this video editor.

Every KDE app I try (and the Plasma desktop) seems so good on paper, and they promise me the world! Then, wen I actually try them out, they always end up crashing or doing something weird. Like I cannot stand GIMP, so I've tried using Krita, but I don't think I've ever managed to finish something in it before it crashes. It's the same with Kdenlive.

Damn shame.

That's quite the impressive feature set. I do want to use Kdenlive but coming from Shotcut I didn't find the UI as easy to use, especially when it comes to handling the timeline... Maybe I'll try it again one day.

After trying all the alternatives I can say that Kdenlive has become my goto for video editing. It's so great to see the team adding amazing new features and optimizing sub-systems. Well done.

Holy! When I moved over to Linux (2018ish) video and photo editing was still the thing, where I was still moving back to Windows or macOS But apparently I should really take another look at Kdenlive, looks like a lot of things have improved heavily, that it could hit the sweet spot between my love hate relationship with Resolve and the ease of use of Sony Vegas back in the day. Thanks for posting !

Projects like this is why making languages like C++ safer is also relevant, we're not rewriting the world.

Kudos for keeping improving Kdelive.

I can confirm that it got more stable for me in 2025. Good job!

has someone here moved from DaVinci Resolve to Kdenlive? how was that experience?

i just was a bit shocked to find out Resolve didn't support h.264 on their free tier on Linux, and i don't want to re-encode all my footage to AV1

Other options for Mac/Win/Linux =3

Davinci Resolve

* CorridorKey plugin (cutting edge green/blue screen "AI" masking)

* Blender EXR workflows

* Paid (unless buying a really expensive camera)

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve

https://github.com/alexandremendoncaalvaro/CorridorKey-Runti...

Cinelerra GG

* less popular, but had GPU cluster acceleration at one point

* FOSS

https://download.cinelerra-gg.org/?path=%2Fimages

Shotcut

* simple to learn

* compatible with most platforms, but slow

* FOSS

https://www.shotcut.org/download/

Good progress but kdenlive still cannot handle HDR videos

It will be a beautiful day when I can finally lose all my Adobe accounts and software. Kdenlive is definitely on the right track BUT having a real risk to lose my project after days and weeks of work is not something I am able to afford. I am following this with great interest and waiting for the right time to jump on board.

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Is Kdenlive owned/part of KDE?

What's the story with KDE?

How is KDE doing with respect to QT, given that QT is commercial (with LGPL licensing) and has passed through several ownership changes?

Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes?

How are they doing with respect to the GTK/Gnome folks? (Did Gnome ever get over their issues? I tuned out around the time of Gnome 3 and the headaches everyone was having with Ubuntu vs. Gnome with respect to the desktop compositor.)

Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? (This is not a moral question! No religious fights. I'm seriously curious.)

Which distro(s) have the best KDE? I've been stuck on Mac for a bit and want to dive in again soon.