System requirements

Nobody enjoys a slow-motion car chase through rush-hour traffic.

Video editing is resource-intensive work. As you grow accustomed to these tools and begin to work with it to process your home videos, you’re going to want to put their batch processing abilities to use, to save time. Although you don’t need oodles of disk space or RAM, you can’t get very far with these tools on low-spec machines. While you don’t need a dedicated high-end rig to get started with these tools, you can’t expect to go very far with a repurposed netbook, brought back to life with a lightweight Linux distribution.

Kdenlive and Flowblade don’t provide minimum system requirements on their respective websites. This is perhaps because of their proxy editing feature. When enabled, proxy editing replaces your original clips with lower-resolution alternative. Because these low-spec proxy clips hardly require any computer power, you can carry out all the operations and enjoy fluent playback. This feature isn’t available in the other applications, and so

Openshot and Shotcut both recommend at least 4GB of RAM to be installed in your machine. For optimum performance, a 64-bit multi-core machine with at least 2GHz process is ideal. Although

LiVES only recommends 512MB RAM, it was the slowest of all the tools to launch on our quad-core 2GHz test machine which was fitted with 12GB RAM.

Because the requirements depend on the source video files that you work with, Shotcut provides a guide on choosing hardware. It recommends at least 4GB for SD, 8GB for HD, and 16GB of RAM for 4K videos. You’re also advised to get at least one 2GHz core for SD, two cores for HD, and four cores for 4K videos.