Is this possible? Kdenlive has been broke effectively since version 8. Now 8.2 crashes every single time you try to add a clip. I have been waiting since I haven't been able to use kdenlive forever... but to no avail. From working to bad to worse.

I'm in Linux Mint 8 KDE... is that the problem? Is it possible to find and install older pre kdenlive 8 versions? I had it working pretty well and figure this just has to be possible. Any advice seriously appreciated. I am not a pro Linux user even though I've been running it for almost 2 years.

Not having much luck trying to find kdenlive 7.8
Does anyone know if Avidemux is worth a try?

How are you installing? Have you tried from source ( instructions here: http://www.kdenlive.org/user-manual/downloading-and-installing-kdenlive/installing-source )? Might seem a little daunting if you've not done it before, and the first time you may need to install a number of dependencies (mostly source-packages from your repo), but it's worth doing. I only installed MLT and Kdenlive from source, everything else is from normal packages for my system.

Overall, I've found 8.0 to reasonably stable, although I am on Fedora and not Mint.

Kdenlive is by far the most capable NLE on Linux now, you can try others (maybe take a look at OpenShot), but I personally think none compare to Kdenlive.