@ArtInvent - You wrote:

"I'm a Kdenlive booster because it's pretty clearly the most advanced video editor on Linux..."

I think it *could* be the most advanced, but at the moment LiVES has a somewhat richer feature set. However, IMO Kdenlive is clearly the superior UI. I'm very impressed with its design, I work twice as fast in Kdenlive as I do with LiVES.

But it's fair to note that LiVES is already past its 1.0 marker, and Kdenlive is still coming on strong. Frankly, I don't mind having the choice. :) And I've learned a few things here that bring Kdenlive up a notch or two in my regard.

Btw, I've also been looking at Open Shot, PiTiVi, and OpenMovieEditor. AFAICT none are nearly so evolved as Kdenlive or LiVES. I'll also be considering Cinelerra, probably the publicly maintained version.

Article still not on-line yet, sorry. :(

Technically, no, Kdenlive doesn't have the most advanced feature set quite yet. But great features don't count for much if you can't actually use them with ease and power.

I used Cinelerra for quite a while, and it can do some pretty cool things. The concept of 'camera' and 'projector' as used to composite is quite powerful. But there are so many problems throughout Cinelerra from licensing to programming framework to UI concepts to format and stability problems - that even their own community has set out to rewrite the thing from scratch. I will love to see what the Lumiera project comes up with, because the concept of a Cinelerra that's completely fixed and friendly is compelling - but of course we've seen not even an alpha release from them yet.

The sequence editor of Blender can do unbelievable things, and many people who are really into it swear it's a fantastic video editor. But as with everything Blender, the UI is unlike anything most people have ever seen. Up is down and left is right and black is white. If you live and breathe Blender, you get used to it and come to appreciate it, certainly for 3D creation. But that is one mind bogglingly complex app, and I've been using Blender for some years now and using the sequence editor is still like fingernails grinding on a blackboard, if I can manage to remember how to do the most simple things at all.

LiVES, hmm. The app may be nominally past 1.0 for whatever that's worth, but the UI is the same it was at 0.3 and I'm afraid I don't mean that in a good way. Frankly, the UI makes Cinelerra look like a revelation. I've just never really been able to give it a chance. I hate to be dogmatic, but this is not what an NLE is supposed to look and act like. At all. They must be trying to do something else, and I'm not exactly sure what it is. You need to approach something like LiVES on it's own terms I guess. But I know what I need, and I'm not really in the mood for apps to start trying to rewire me. What I really want to tell LiVES is: look, go open up a copy of Final Cut or Kdenlive; when you can approach something that generally looks and acts like that, we'll talk.

The Non Linear Video Editor is actually a very well established genre of application. There's a reason why Premiere and Final Cut and Vegas and all the others look the way they do. There are long established conventions of UI such as a timeline, clip manager, tracks window, effects manager, transition management, title creation, rendering management. These conventions have evolved because, well, that's the way a human being editing video by and large needs them to be. If these things are absent or non-intuitive, it gets in the way, and badly. Video editing is complex and time consuming at best. If you have to learn a new way of doing things for each app, it will just kill the whole experience.

And this is what Kdenlive is doing right. They have an uncommonly clear idea of how a great NLE OUGHT to work both at the UI level and with basic editing operations, and are zeroing in on that. What's on screen is what you need to be seeing and nothing more and nothing less. And yet the UI is extremely flexible, you can open other windows and resize everything and move things around to your hearts content. They have created a robust yet flexible framework on which to build features and functionality. They haven't done all the finish carpentry yet, but the framework is there and you can certainly tell it's a building well architected and with plenty of room for it's intended purpose. With this approach you can build and improve on modules like the title creator or compositor or DVD creator . . . People can submit plugins for effects and rendering profiles etc.

And this is probably why Kdenlive continues to advance at an enviable clip. It's structured the way a good FOSS project ought to be structured. Good bones, good planning, clear goal, the right approach. This fosters community, contributions, good packaging, helpful forums. And that's a virtuous circle that will probably keep feeding itself. I've hung around the periphery of a lot of FOSS projects and the more I think about it the more I would hold up Kdenlive as a one of the best models of such a project I've seen. That might be worth an article right there.

@ArtInvent - You wrote re: LiVES:

"You need to approach something like LiVES on it's own terms I guess. But I know what I need, and I'm not really in the mood for apps to start trying to rewire me."

It seems that you have the same mentism as I do. I'm a professional musician, I've done a fair amount of recording in professional studios, and I've come to expect a certain toolchain and workflow in the software I use to record my work. Call it bias or prejudice, it does make trying a new approach somewhat difficult. For example, I can't abide the UI for Traverso (though it is a fine app) but many people like it just fine. As you know, Pro Tools is the reigning system for pro-audio production, and I find it hard to work with UIs that depart too greatly from the PT model, so I'm far happier with Ardour.

OTOH I have almost 0 experience and/or expectations wrt a NLE for video, so LiVES seemed fine to me as I was learning it. With nothing to compare it to I slipped into its workflow fairly quickly. However, I say again that I'm totally convinced now that Kdenlive's UI presents a far better way of working, and I'm starting lose patience with the LiVES approach (also, it doesn't help that it's crashing continuously in Multitrack mode).

Btw, I want to note here that I recently discovered a bug in the latest & greatest Kdenlive/MLT. I followed JBM's advice, registered the bug yesterday in Mantis, and this morning ddennedy had posted a fix. The fix does indeed resolve my issue, and I'm now running my previous projects with no problems (so far). Kudos to the devs for their attention to the problem and its repair.

One thing more: Since I wrote my article I've discovered that 1) I *can* use LADSPA plugins, 2) I *can* call out to an external editor, and 3) my webcam now works in Kdenlive (after upgrading my FFmpeg installation). I'd like to see a few more features that I like in LiVES make their way into Kdenlive, but I haven't looked at the TODO list yet, my wishes might already be listed.

> This fosters community, contributions, good packaging, helpful forums.

I'd agree if someone would kindly answer my question at my http://kdenlive.org/forum/newbies-first-impressions ... I'm still none the wiser about the light green bars on the timelines :)

(UPDATE : this has been answered and solved at http://kdenlive.org/forum/newbies-first-impressions#comment-5399 )