Which small video editor do you use?

You're looking for kdenlive.

Blender is alright. It's cool that it has a video editor but it feels a little bolted on.

Davinci Resolve is not actually free for highest quality.

Kdenlive is essentially just a front-end for ffmpeg. Highest quality render settings don't cost anything but like much open source software the interface leaves something to be desired.

If you're open to something more powerful, there is DaVinci Resolve [0]. It's free but proprietary.

For fully open + browser based there is mebm [1]

[0] https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/

[1] https://github.com/bwasti/mebm

This looks promising https://www.openshot.org/

I've dabbled with Kdenlive[0] and Shotcut[1]. They're cross platform desktop apps. I'm not sure how they would handle stickers/giphys, might be worth a try though.

[0] https://kdenlive.org/

[1] https://www.shotcut.org/

I used Shotcut[0] once to execute on one of my worst ideas: editing an FMV game's video files into a movie. I recall that it was a little finicky, but worked well enough for the kind of thing I was doing. I've since used it a bunch of times for small things like you've described simply because I was familiar with it.

[0]https://shotcut.org/

I use KDenLive. I don't really do small simple tools.

Eventually you always wind up wanting one or two more advanced features. The simple tools don't prevent needing to learn more complex ones, nor are they significantly faster to use in most cases, so I tend to not really use lightweight apps.

Plus, with some categories, the small simple tools are actually harder to use and slightly dangerous(See dd vs Etcher).

A video editor won't overwrite a whole disk, but if you're concerned with malware, I would generally trust something I've already heard of rather than something obscure enough that you have to ask on HN to find it.

I’m sure people will hate on this because it’s Adobe but their Premier Rush is great for extremely simple editing purposes. It does constantly feel like you’re being scammed though because there are some checkboxes labelled with a little star that require you to pay.

I like Losslesscut for quick video editing, but not sure if it has text/sticker layers:

https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

Don't forget Blender! (non-browser, but very powerful!)

https://www.blender.org/features/video-editing/

MS Windows 10 and 11 has Video Editor

I don't know about layers and stickers, but it does text and fx and add music and so on. It's there already. Click on the magnifying glass and type Video Editor.

Openshot. FOSS with GPL v3 license. Really simple to use. You add video tracks, audio tracks, picture, text and them mix them together. Don't think it runs on the browser though.

DaVinci Resolve is free-as-in-beer but not Free-as-in-Speech, and it's a pretty serious bit of software. In Linux, it lacks some of the codec support and "nice-to-haves" like automatically exporting to Youtube etc, but if you use Linux already you probably use ffmpeg already and you probably know what you're doing with it.

You will need a fairly modern graphics card, but a low-end NVidia GT1030 will work perfectly well.

iMovie on my iPhone.

And Garage Band on my iPhone if I need to fiddle with sound.

Otherwise kDen Live on the laptop and just live with the complexity by accepting it will take a few hours over a few days to understand what I need to do by watching YouTube and reading forum posts and a manual.

It is sometimes hard to accept that learning is going to take time. And picking a standard tool with a non-trivial learning curve is faster and easier in most timeframes longer than five hours or so.

Because the five hours pales compared to all the “shopping” and “research” looking for a silver bullet.

There are people with more than a decade of Garage Band experience and nobody with a decade of TikTok experience.

I'm using kdenlive mostly.

If I wanted to automate it, I'd use ffmpeg with its filters for it, it's not super easy to get into, but it's very rewarding if you're going to do a lot of similarish videos.

I drop by HN almost every day, mostly just to learn some new thing during a break. This discussion has been very helpful to me.

I work a lot with Final Cut but it is tedious when you need short little cuts on many videos. I tried Shotcut and ffmpeg but they don't scan fast and smooth enough to be a help. This discussion has led me to some editors I did't know about. Tried a few and found one that will do the trick. Thanks.

I've recorded video presentations with OBS Studio. It might not be for post editing, but it worked for my needs. It was in my Linux distro's repositories too.

https://vidmix.app checks all the boxes: in the browser, layers, no watermark, captions, giphy integration, mp4 in and out

I use ffmpeg on command line most of the time for conversions, removing audio tracks, trimming. If I only need to trim I use the windows Photos app which suprisingly lets you trim videos!

The Photos app sometimes crashes when I try to trim large video files but it usually works on the second attempt, it's good enough for me.

No idea if this is on spec, but i use Youcut to make clips from films i watch, it works with Chrome, maybe others?

Are there any lightweight keyboard-driven video editors? Something like Vim but for video editing

iMovie on Mac or iPad could do all of this. If you are against Apple the GoPro editor is also pretty good and allows for this functionality. You don't have to actually use GoPro videos and is completely free (but they try to push you hard on their cloud storage )

I really like clipchamp.com and have used it with kids to make great short videos (you pay for longer/bigger), but it has been bought recently so may have changed since I last used it anger.

Go take a look... it's great (I have no affiliation)

Kdenlive for Linux

Checkout the free and opensource AviDemux - does everything you want and a little bit more, and it is simple and easy to use.

KDEnlive, Blender, and Da Vinci Resolve(very rarely).

Kapwing for quick demos, bug-reporting videos and such.

iMovie is perfect for your needs, it’s free. (If you have a Mac or iPhone.)

I use camtasia from tech Smith. Really easy and still powerful.

VSDC Video Editor

ScreenFlow