I think one also needs to clearly define the term "edit video." This list concentrates on Non-Linear Editors (NLE), but, for example, it is possible to "edit video" with ffmpeg.
Thanks god KDenLive is catching up. Cinelerra[1] (and the cinelerra-cv community fork) was/is more advanced, but its interface is stuck in the 90's, it manage to crash twice per CPU cycle due to horrible code and is resealed without warning in big code dump every year or so. I lost -so- much time in this back in high-school (10-12 years ago) because it was the only high end editor on Linux. Back then the early KDenLive version were not so much better stability wise. However they came a long, long way. Too bad I don't need Video editor anymore, but I still compile KDenLive to see the new features.
Heh, this year is the first time I've actually been able to get Cinelerra to run. I think the worst time I ever had with it was trying to compile it on Slackware a few years ago. Hours of compilation and nothing to show except insta-crash.
See my comment below, I don't think it has the same use case as kdenlive. But I will be trying out kdenlive this year to see how it stacks up for my simple use case.
How does kdenlive stack up against Cinelerra? I thought that was the most advanced video editor?
Next week I will be testing kdenlive, Openshot, Cinelerra and Blender Video Sequence Editor to see what works quickly and easily for my use case. One of the problems I face is that I have to make 3 compilation videos in one evening, using a weeks worth of footage. When I used Premiere one year it took me from 8pm until 5am to get it all done (mainly because I was learning how to use the software at the same time).
With the curve editing enabled by default, it will come close to Cinelerra. They have mostly the same feature set at this point. Blender curve editing is unbeatable, but as a general purpose Video Editor, it has some drawbacks of its own. They are talking about maybe removing the feature, but I don't think it will happen. Blender is everything at once and does surprisingly well at most of them. For video, it inherit the node editor too, a big plus. But at its core it is not a video editor. KDenLive is not a movie maker clone, it is much more than that and it may impact some simple workflow. I think it is the most promising one, as it is already quite far ahead of its (FLOSS) "competition".
The best movie maker imitator was KinoDV. It is however just as dead of the DV/firewire standard itself. It's still in most distributions.
I tried a couple of times, but I never could wrap my brain around the Blender video editor. I was completely lost, wasn't even sure if I was doing something video-related or drawing polygons which I think is something you can do with Blender? Never managed to find a decent tutorial, either. I'm sure the interface is great once you figure it out, though.
The most immediate oddness is that rather than left-clicking and dragging things, you right click to select things, and press 'g' to move them. Once you grok that it's not too hard to get started. I miss Blender's UI in other products now.
With respect to Free Software video editing on Linux, I am currently team Blender but I can't say I've tested the other options exhaustively.
The authors decided to redo the underlying library. And change the user interface. And go cross platform. That amounts to a virtual rewrite from scratch.
And it's a base for other video editor, which is getting stronger each year, seems more stable than the others and already looks IMHO the best among FOSS video editors:
I do some video recording, with separate audio and then I use a video editor to multiplex the video/audio. And then of course, some nice titles, video fade in/out, brightness adjustment, etc.
Over the past 3 years, I've gone through Cinelerra, OpenShot, Kdenlive, and some I can't even remember. Very frustrated over the state of video editing on Linux, I unfortunately once had to use the editor on Windows. :(
But now, I'm using Kdenlive each time, and I'm very happy with it. There are some tutorials out there on YouTube which help too.
Blender seems to be a very good video editor BUT having tried it and many other ones, Blender is not as easy to start working with as most other editors. Still, given its features -- yes, I believe it's worth putting the lime to learn it.
I think a better comparison would be to Windows Movie Maker or iMovie. It is ridiculously easy to use, but I don't think it has the work flow of professional editing software.
I used it a few times to make simple compilation videos - every year I teach a summer camp for kids, and I collect videos throughout the week, put them together and add a song which the kids choose. All I need are just a few transitions, and ability to add titles. With Openshot it was simple.
One year I used Adobe premiere, and it was like shooting a mouse with a bazooka. A lot of time and effort, for just basic stuff.
* http://www.shotcut.org/
* https://kdenlive.org/
* http://www.pitivi.org/
* http://www.openshotvideo.com/
* http://cinelerra.org/2015/
* https://www.blender.org/
It would be great to have a place comparing the feature of all the open source video editors...