OpenShot 2.4.0
Bobby Moss is ruing the day he subscribed to Adobe Creative Cloud, after discovering this brilliant free video editor that doesn’t crash all the time.
An out-of-pocket Bobby Moss is ruing the day he subscribed to Adobe Creative Cloud, after discovering this brilliant free video editor that doesn’t crash all the time.
There was once a great videoediting divide between the Windows MovieMaker- wielding masses and the Adobe Premier-Prototing professionals, with Linux users left out in the cold. That’s no longer the case and we’re spoilt for choice when it comes to powerful open source alternatives like Avidemux, Kdenlive and OpenShot (as well as zero-cost options like Lightworks and Shotcut).
OpenShot’s worthy of special mention, however, because it used to crash a lot and key features were absent. But thanks to a Kickstarter campaign that raised over $45,000 and its founder Jonathan Thomas’s tenacity, it’s become a much-overlooked gem in the free software world.
In just the past few years we’ve seen an explosion of new features for OpenShot: overlays, watermarking, key frame animation, support for rotoscoping and an interesting array of digital effects that help exported videos look much more professional. We also found that its profile-based system made exporting to 4K, Blu-Ray, DVD and the web very straightforward.
Easy to use
The first thing you notice when you download OpenShot is there are no packages or pre-requisites to install for it to work “out of the box”. Instead, you receive an application image, and after granting it executable permissions the entire program will run quite happily from anywhere on your system. It could be argued that keeping the package updated becomes less straightforward as a result, but fortunately the upgrade process is simple (just download the new version and run it from anywhere), but the project also provides a PPA for those who would prefer to use a package manager.
When you first launch the application you’re presented with tutorial tips that give a quick indication of what the main parts of the application do. This is a nice touch, but it’s a shame there’s no way to jump to more detail from the tooltips. It’s a similar story when you access the online documentation. The user guide is well-written, eye-catching and easy to follow but it never quite strays beyond the bare basics. Hopefully, as the project continues to mature the documentation will evolve with it to show us how to make the most of the cool new features being introduced.
Thankfully, the interface is easy to navigate. All the video and audio clips you import from the file menu will appear in the top-left panel and can simply be clicked and dragged onto multiple overlapping timelines in the lower section. You can then preview progress in the top-right window with simple video player controls. It’s also easy to edit clips on the fly in the timeline window using the sizing handles, and the right-click menu presents a wide array of options such as transforming clips or adding effects to them. You can also do this on-the-fly while you’re previewing a video, but playback will briefly pause to apply your changes before resuming and so this isn’t a seamless feature just yet.
We were a little confused by the Advanced View option. Its main purpose appeared to be to simply display things we could already reach through tabbed windows in the top-left section in Basic View anyway. Even the extra properties window can be found by right-clicking a clip or using Ctrl+I, so it feels like this is a wasted opportunity that could have been better used to expose some of the more niche tasks OpenShot can do for power users.
Strong and stable
The project page proudly boasts in recent versions that its new engine streamed a green screen to multiple devices for an impressive nine hours without crashing at the SCALE 11x conference. We spent a day importing raw files, cutting clips together and exporting 4K videos and didn’t experience a single crash, so we have
little reason to doubt that claim. Even on a mid-range laptop the worst we experienced was the application hanging for a second or two during a particularly demanding export, and the interface still remained snappy and useful, however much punishment we put it through.
Yet even on a souped-up gaming rig using hybrid drives we found video exports weren’t that quick, particularly compared to rival applications. For short videos and clips this isn’t much of an issue, but it would affect your progress if you were an amateur film maker or were working with hours of footage from a family event.
We also noticed some quirky behaviour when we tried to add animated titles from the Title menu. If you don’t have Blender installed you won’t find out you need it until after you select an option, and when the pop-up window does appear it doesn’t always go away when you click OK. It’s not a show-stopping bug, but it’s a reminder that this package can still be a little rough around the edges in places.
Needs more cowbell
One of the more disappointing things we’ve found with OpenShot are missing some power features that can really save you time. For example, you can’t queue multiple export jobs or run them concurrently. This means if you want your work to be viewed in multiple formats you’ll be doing one export at a time and manually triggering each one. While you can script this yourself through the Python API the application exposes, this feels like something that could be supported better. Similarly, kdenlive has in-built screencasting tools and a YouTube upload wizard. OpenShot doesn’t, unfortunately.
However, OpenShot does include essential tools that enable you to crop video content very efficiently and provides some comprehensive text and image overlay templates that you can customise to your heart’s content. While the application doesn’t have as many effects and transitions provided by default as other packages, it’s a simple task to add them yourself.
As you spend more time playing around with OpenShot you’ll find that this is a story you see repeated. What it can do, it does very well and you really could use it as your main video editor. But while the project has made amazing progress and created a package that anyone can pick up and use, it still lacks the kind of refinement and polish you get from more established commercial rivals such as Apple’s iMovie or harder-to-learn tools like Avidemux, and expects you to pick up the slack.
Despite this, we believe that OpenShot has a lot of potential, and with some more community support it will start appearing in a lot more editing studios.