Yesterday I found out about Flowblade and today I tried doing the same simple project in both Flowblade 1.2 and Kdenlive 15.08.3.

Video:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=BK1LGv0HGI8

Screenshots:


Table comparison:
This is mostly subjective feature listing.

Code: Select all

                               Kdenlive           Flowblade
Backend                        MLT                MLT
Programming language/UI Kit    C++/Qt5            Python/GTK3
Change profile later           yes                no
Add/remove audio/video tracks  yes                no
Transition between clips       yes                yes
Fade from/to black             yes                yes (only render?)
Render script generation       yes                no
Render queue                   yes                yes
Drag & drop import             yes                no
Minimum resolution             759x528 (approx.)  1324x888
Audio thumbnails in Timeline   yes                yes
Video thumbnails in Timeline   yes                no
Crash recovery                 yes                yes
Bugtracker                     bugs.kde.org       GitHub
Community                      forums.kde.org     Google+ group

Subjective impressions

• Kdenlive looks more consistent although Flowblade does look pretty cool on the right and bottom side (the GKT parts are too large).
• Flowblade seems more stable
• Kdenlive seems to have more features
• Not being able to change the project profile makes me feel strangely uneasy about Flowblade.
• There is way less Flowblade documentation.
• In my test run, Kdenlive took 3 times as long to render. I don't know why.

Most annoying glitch during test:

• Flowblade: Timeline dragging of clips randomly fails
• Kdenlive: Composite transition would preview incorrectly unless I restart Kdenlive

Disclaimers:
I have used Kdenlive for years. I have used Flowblade for a day but never made a project except for a test run before recording this video.
I used Kdenlive to edit this versus video and experienced problems where cutting a clip, removing a piece would not allow me to move a clip into the now-free space and saving/restarting would move and resize clips.


Anyways, has anybody tried Flowblade? Do you use one for some projects and the other for other projects? Does Flowblade have features that Kdenlive doesn't?

What I like in Flowblade and also OpenShot (I think so) is the way how transitions show with which other track they interact. This is a timeline feature I miss alot in Kdenlive.

qubodup wrote:I used Kdenlive to edit this versus video and experienced problems where cutting a clip, removing a piece would not allow me to move a clip into the now-free space and saving/restarting would move and resize clips.

Yes, that is biting me recently quite often, albeit I did not manage it to nail down precisely yet. In my cases, if I look closely, it seems to be a off-by-two frames error. I see this bug often as I currently work on screencasting projects where I need to cut raw footage from a tablet down into final footage. This involves a lot of extracting stills and inserting them in between the animated whiteboard drawing.

I've tried flowblade (been trying everything since kdenlive took a stumble recently) and the thing I cannot get to grips with is how it deals with clips,- you cannot free-position them, they always want to jump to the end of a clip somewhere.

I found it very un-intuitive so am back using kdenlive again.

We are nearly there though I do feel like video editing on linux is very much on the brink of being a pleasant experience

I do worry about if we're gonna have to deal with this again with KDE 6, or whatever it's called....

EDIT - I think the one to watch at the moment is shotcut by the way....