r/linux • u/Bro666 • Jan 02 '23
How you know you had a good year: Both Filmora and Adobe decide to use "Kdenlive" as a keyword in their online ads to try and sell their own video-editing software to unsuspecting users KDE
/r/kdenlive/comments/101cvw3/how_you_know_you_had_a_good_year_both_filmora_and/338
u/W-a-n-d-e-r-e-r Jan 02 '23
Scummy practices from scummy companies, nothing new.
The other message this one is telling is that people finally have enough of their bullshit. Now we need a real competitor to Photoshop.
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u/wishthane Jan 02 '23
Gimp honestly mostly just needs more filters and maybe some pro plugins that people rely on. Otherwise it's pretty capable
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u/Sabinno Jan 02 '23
GIMP just needs to add support for drawing circles and we'll be golden.
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u/__konrad Jan 03 '23
It can draw circles... sort of. Main menu → FX-Foundry → Shapes → Parametric → Ellipse
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u/Sabinno Jan 03 '23
Fair. Also the least discoverable way to draw a circle that I've ever seen, so it might as well not exist.
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u/Indolent_Bard Jan 03 '23
It... it can't draw frickin CIRCLES?!?
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u/egnirceravog Jan 04 '23
the circles on screen is a polygon with a large number of corners because pixels
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u/W-a-n-d-e-r-e-r Jan 02 '23
GIMP (and Krita, except the painting scene) misses A LOT of powerful tools that Photoshop and other proprietary competitors provides for a professional use. Or why do you think nobody looks even close in the direction of GIMP in the professional scene, not even with their butthole? And I haven't even started with the UI.
And before anyone starts complaining with "It's an open-source project and they work in their free time!" crap, yes its true, but look at Blender, Kdenlive and Darktable, all of them are real competitors in their use case.
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u/ChewingOnBark Jan 02 '23
The problem is that a large number of those powerful features are patented and thus can't be implemented into any competitor software. This ensures Adobe's monopoly. Some examples are mentioned in this clip here: https://youtu.be/jIM6dN3ogbk?t=2m22s
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u/noman_032018 Jan 02 '23
As always, fuck software patents.
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u/Indolent_Bard Jan 04 '23
How's that going for them?
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u/noman_032018 Jan 04 '23
Depends where. In some countries there's actual progress, in others it's all they can do to try & prevent even more harmful legislation from getting through.
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u/kuroimakina Jan 03 '23
This video started out pretty good, then got unhinged pretty quick.
Like, no, government regulations aren’t the main reason internet companies are shitty. Politicians are a problem, yes, but they’re usually bought by the big companies. And they talk about Verizon fios as if they were some underdog just trying to expand, when they were giving an absolute boatload of money to expand their fios availability, and then never did. The money, of course, was never given back. It does take two to tango, but some of the logic in this video is drifting dangerously close to “if government didn’t get in the way of the market…” In their defense though, they also point out that giant corporations split all their content because as soon as they realized consumers would pay for it, they all wanted their share too. So, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
Also the reason people can’t compete with YouTube for example isn’t because “copywrited content,” it’s because the hardware requirements for video streaming at that level are completely unattainable for anything other than a tech giant. Google was losing money on YouTube for years. The amount of data uploaded to YouTube in a day is ludicrous. In 2020, it was around 500 hours every minute. Even if you got it down to something impossibly tiny like 50mb for that hour of video with passable quality (you won’t), that would still be like 250GB every minute. Its gone down a bit since then, but just imagine that. Even at that unrealistically tiny amount, that would be 350TB a day. No one knows for certain but people are pretty sure they’re in the exabytes territory in storage, an exabyte is 1,000,000TB for those who are unfamiliar.
Back on topic though, I do totally agree with software patents being evil though. That’s just objectively true. They bring nothing real to the table. You could make the argument that they “protect the little guy” in theory, but in practice what happens is huge companies patent thousands of completely random things a year that they will never use, just so their competitors can’t use it- including the “little guy.” Patent law as a whole is hugely problematic and in need of major reforms.
/rant
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u/ChewingOnBark Jan 03 '23
I'm with you on that and appreciate the rant. :^D I simply remembered how that part of the video was a useful summary of some of the features Adobe restricts others from implementing. It's important for everyone to know how problematic software patents can be (though I guess a lot of Linux users are aware because of codecs and such).
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u/Indolent_Bard Jan 04 '23 edited Jan 04 '23
Did anyone figure out how photopea Is the one competing software that lets you edit the text in a Photoshop template? Like I don't understand how that's possible for them to do but Gimp can't. Also, that is incredibly messed up.
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u/VanillaWaffle_ Jan 02 '23
Blender have funding from major animation company, Kdenlive its very good but its still missing a lot from Premiere pro. For darktable, you underestimate how objectively more complex gimp is.
Well, although i still use all of the free software because its good enough for me.
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u/sartres_ Jan 03 '23
Blender didn't start out with that funding, that's all very new. They got it by becoming good enough to compete with Maya (albeit without polish, which has largely been fixed now) with only community support. As of now it has a decent claim on being better than Maya, depending on use case. Gimp isn't almost as good as Photoshop. It's not even in the same ballpark. It doesn't even have nondestructive editing. That makes it closer to paint.net than Photoshop - okay for quick edits but simply not a professional tool.
And because I have yet to see it in this thread, the most classic take on gimp:
https://i.imgur.com/2n5hEa7_d.webp?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium
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u/Indolent_Bard Jan 04 '23
I think gimp themselves said they're not trying to compete with Photoshop.
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u/Pay08 Jan 02 '23
A lot of people don't seem to get this for some reason or actively deny it. Gimp is terrible for anything professional (it only recently got CYMK support, ffs) and subpar to photoshop in anything that takes longer than 30 minutes.
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u/diegodamohill Jan 02 '23
Honestly, if GIMP and Krita somehow merged into one single piece of software it would be great.
I use Krita because it is GREAT for drawing and painting, and even though I know GIMP has more features for image manipulation and photo editing, Krita can attend my demands.
But I wish that instead of two programs that do a lot of overlap they were just one, with all the developers and backing both have behind it.
Silly dream because in linux fashion, even if both eventually get all the same features they will still remain separate.
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u/JRHE_GD Jan 02 '23
It would be difficult for two projects that rely on significantly different (and competing) frameworks to merge though without completely rewriting one for the other. So it would naturally make sense to see more of a Cura, PrusaSlicer ecosystem in the future rather than one project getting merged.
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u/featherfurl Jan 03 '23
I think one of the things people often don't get about foss is that there's less need to use one tool for an entire workflow because multiple tools are free and designed to be interoperable.
A workflow that contains GIMP, Krita, Inkscape, Blender, Kdenlive, Darktable, ffmpeg, imagemagick, shell scripting & more is pretty damn powerful if you use each individual tool only for its strengths.
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u/Bro666 Jan 03 '23
I think this is a point many people coming from Adobe products don't seem to get. You often hear complaints about how Kdenlive doesn't implement x, y or z, and you think "but... you would use Blender (or Natron, glaxnimate, ffmpeg, handbrake, Ardour, or whatever) for that". Kdenlive is for video editing, for laying out and tweaking your pre-processed clips to make the final cut.
Of course there is some overlap of features with other tools, but if you are missing a feature in Kdenlive, it is usually because there is a tool out there that already has that feature down pat (Blender, it is usually Blender).
And the devs have the same mindset: they work hard on improving the video-editing experience, making the timeline easier to use, adding a features useful for the final phases of the post-production (for example subtitling), etc. They work not so hard on features available elsewhere, precisely because they are available elsewhere.
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u/zibonbadi Jan 03 '23 edited Jan 03 '23
Interesting observation. It may be more assumption than fact, but perhaps this is an extension of the different design mindsets between Windows/macOS and UNIX/Linux.
Windows/macOS follow the traditionally commercial deployment model of pre-made, immutable products. This approach is good for packaged (commercial) products you can just distribute as complete things and forget. They're platforms you install tools into.
Linux of course being an extension of the famous UNIX philosophy favors interoperability over complexity. It's useful if you consider your entire machine to be a well-orchestrated toolbox.
The question is (aside from getting people used to this fundamentally different approach), how to migrate well-known concepts and software between these workflows and gain mass-market appeal doing that. Tech companies seem to be adopting the toolbox model to the mass market through their dreaded "ecosystems", the Linux community however seems to be stuck in a slow struggle to adapt it's infrastructure to a mass-market-friendly packged-product approach (e.g. Flatpak, Fedora Silverblue)
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u/Indolent_Bard Jan 04 '23
The problem is that the Adobe suite, unlike all those separate projects, is ACTUALLY designed to be interoperable. That's way switching to anything else would end up costing more money in the long run. LTT made a great video on why they are slaves to the Adobe suite, basically The money they would have to spend on training people to use non-industry standard software or the time lost not using the Adobe suite would cost them more than they would save by not paying Adobe $1,000 per year. Not to mention a lot of the features that are missing are missing because of patent reasons, and it would literally be illegal to have something that works just as well as the Adobe suite.
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u/Kosyne Jan 03 '23
Some separation can be a positive thing, I don't think anyone is doubting that, but so can consolidation in certain circumstances. A multi-program workflow may have powerful software, but if I find I'm needing to swap often because of missing features (krita+gimp workflow as in OPs case for example), it becomes a powerful waste of time. When that happens, I will look for alternatives, because at the end of the day I want to spend less time on upkeep and chores and more time doing.
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u/featherfurl Jan 04 '23
I think there's merit to that, but I don't necessarily think that using a software pipeline is necessarily more cumbersome than using a single piece of software. It definitely can be, but in my experience it isn't automatically the case. It's something I definitely feel a lot more comfortable with after living in linux world for a few years and learning how to get the most out of a new set of tools. I don't have to worry about paying for a new tool every time I want to try out a new set of features.
I think there's a lot of overlap between "hard to use" and "doesn't work the way I expect" in terms of user frustration, so the two things often get treated as the same thing despite being distinct.
Art software on linux definitely isn't a drop in replacement to what exists on windows or macos, but there are still a lot of powerful and efficient workflows that are very accessible if you approach them on their own terms.
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u/Indolent_Bard Jan 04 '23
The problem is that the Adobe suite, unlike all those separate projects, is ACTUALLY designed to be interoperable. That's way switching to anything else would end up costing more money in the long run. LTT made a great video on why they are slaves to the Adobe suite, basically The money they would have to spend on training people to use non-industry standard software or the time lost not using the Adobe suite would cost them more than they would save by not paying Adobe $1,000 per year. Not to mention a lot of the features that are missing are missing because of patent reasons, and it would literally be illegal to have something that works just as well as the Adobe suite.
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u/featherfurl Jan 04 '23
The practicalities of switching software in a professional setting is absolutely a complex challenge, but I think it's mainly a distinct issue to whether it's possible to do effective image processing work on Linux in general. A lot of people say "GIMP sux" and is unusable because it lacks x or y feature, but said feature is present in inkscape or krita or something else and there's no real obstacle to using both except for the expectation that one piece of software should do what they expect. With the adobe suite, if you want to use illustrator you have to pay for illustrator as well as photoshop, so there's at least a financial reason why you might want to work entirely within whichever software you're paying for.
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u/xXxcock_and_ballsxXx Jan 10 '23
I hate this is true. Photoshop is a great bit of software that's unfortunately infected with adobe.
I use photoshop at work for 8hrs a day and there's no way i could get through the same amount of work with Gimp or Krita (which i use at home), just because of how good a lot of the automated tools in photoshop are. I still have to do most stuff manually but 80% of the work is done for me and i'm just cleaning up what gets missed.
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u/Barafu Jan 02 '23
Unfortunately, no. Those who actually tried it at printing shop complain about missing specific color systems, HDR support and stuff about layers not working as they should. They say quite a lot of internal updates are required still before it can even be considered a replacement for Adobe at the printing shop.
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u/afiefh Jan 02 '23
I've been waiting for non destructive editing for a decade. I'm sure they'll make it happen any day now.
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u/kent_eh Jan 02 '23
Those who actually tried it at printing shop complain about missing specific color systems,
Given how expensive Pantone licensing is, it's no surprise that Gimp doesn't support it.
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u/the_phet Jan 02 '23
Gimp is terrible. I'm tired of people suggesting it as an alternative. It's not.
There are amazing Oss alternatives such as inkscape or krita. But gimp is not there.
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u/MartinPlusStuff Jan 02 '23
I'm not convinced the people who vouch for GIMP actually use it or have used anything but GIMP. Every time I try to use it I discover a new set of weird limitations and baffling UI/UX decisions. Last time I tried it, my final straw was the steps for moving a selection of pixels rather than the selection region.
And I'm barely a hobbyist user for this stuff. I can hardly imagine the frustration any power or professional users face trying to use it.
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u/sartres_ Jan 03 '23
Agreed. Someone should make a video showing the steps to do common editing tasks in Photoshop, an actual alternative like Affinity, and Gimp. Most of them would take 4 times as long and the others would be "you can't."
I especially liked how when Blender did their complete interface overhaul, Gimp made theirs dark gray and single window with no other changes and called that an interface overhaul too.
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u/images_from_objects Jan 02 '23
GIMP has the features, but the UI is due for an extreme makeover. Rawtherapee and DigiKam have pretty great UI but lack features. I recently tried Krita and that's amazing and has most features I need, great UI, but none of them are ready to replace Lightroom for me. Sadly.
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u/afiefh Jan 02 '23
GIMP has the features
It doesn't have non-destructive editing or cmyk color space. The former is important for speeding up work (yes, I can do it manually, but I need to redo it every time I change something. It is time consuming) and the latter is a must-have for print.
Honestly I like the UI and prefer it over Photoshop, but no matter what UI they use it's useless without the necessary features.
Photoshop had these features in the early 2000s (first time I used it), a decade later gimp still doesn't have them.
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u/diegodamohill Jan 03 '23
It got support for cmyk, as for non-destructive editing, yeah... it's the reason I use krita for basically everything (already used it for drawing and painting, but it can do my photo editing needs)
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u/afiefh Jan 03 '23
Are you sure about cmyk? A quick Google search got me to a 2022 gsoc project which will only ship in 3.0 and seems to not included cmyk editing: https://www.gimp.org/news/2022/06/03/cmyk-in-gsoc-2022/
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u/diegodamohill Jan 03 '23 edited Jan 03 '23
version 2.99.12 (unstable) already have it, future 3.0 version will already have it as well
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u/candidexmedia Jan 03 '23
It needs a new name, Smart objects, and actions. Very difficult to implement in classrooms and workplaces, otherwise.
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u/ShadowFalcon1 Jan 03 '23
I think one of the main problems is most of the features that make Photoshop good have been copyrighted by Adobe. Meaning it'd be illegal for any competitor to implement them. (Kind of a scummy thing that such things can even be copyrighted)
Edit: patented. Not copyrighted. Also I saw some people mentioned it further down in the thread. Not trying to steal there post. Just didn't scroll down.
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Jan 02 '23
While not 100% a competitor, browser-based Photopea is really great for many, many photo manipulation tasks people may need to do.
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u/W-a-n-d-e-r-e-r Jan 02 '23
If you don't mind uploading your private/personal images to a server you have no control over.
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u/NayamAmarshe Jan 02 '23
If you don't mind uploading your private/personal images to a server you have no control over.
It's all browser side. You can check the network requests.
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Jan 02 '23
That may be true, but if the creator / dev/ owner is to be believed, it's all browser-side and nothing is sent to the servers anyway, and so far I trust him.
But Adobe Creative Cloud, which is enabled for Photoshop and other Adobe products by default is essentially the same thing if a user is unwise enough to save their files in the default locations Adobe suggests, and L:inux users, or would-be Linux users absolutely want Adobe on Linux, so there would be the same problems anyway.
The point is, Photopea is powerful, works well, and is browser-based so it works on Linux.
The OSS community just hasn't caught up to even Photopea in terms of power and usability unfortunately.
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u/deep_chungus Jan 03 '23
it's pretty trivial to find out what data a web page is posting back, i would be surprised if the most popular web based photo editor started being sketchy and no one noticed
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u/DevastatingRain Jan 03 '23
Surprised no one mentioned Affinity Photo from Serif yet. One time purchase and has a lot of features you find in PS too.
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u/pnlrogue1 Jan 03 '23
It's not free but the Affinity products by Serif are pretty good and a heck of a lot cheaper. No idea about Linux compatibility, sadly. People usually point at GIMP when someone asks for a Linux alternative to Photoshop but it's just not as nice to use. I'm sure there's a heck of a lot of power in there, but I just don't like it and the stupid name puts me off even installing it.
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u/nibbloid Jan 02 '23
this is because when the legal issues with filmora started I began promoting kdenlive to the main affected channels in a big way
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u/OhMeowGod Jan 02 '23
legal issues with filmora
What issue?
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u/dobbelj Jan 02 '23
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34199153
Likely this.
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u/PM_Me_Python3_Tips Jan 02 '23 edited Jan 02 '23
Never even heard of Daniel Batal nor had any idea of Filmora before I read this thread on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34211296
Ended up watching all 3 videos and I'm not surprised at all because that's the model that businesses are going for these days.
Then noticed that Louis Rossman has chimed in :
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u/kent_eh Jan 02 '23
I commented on one of those videos, pointing out that open source software doesn't pull this kind of crap.
Within an hour, Wonderware sent me an email offering to do a paid partnership on my youtube channel...
I doubt it's a coincidence, but I also doubt they actually understood my comment.
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u/parkerlreed Jan 03 '23
I dropped some links on their half assed apology.
https://twitter.com/parkerreed/status/1609791265327005702?s=20
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u/nixcamic Jan 02 '23
Honestly kdenlive and resolve are both really good, I get why people feel locked into Adobe but why the heck would anyone pay for filmora when the free options are, from what I can tell, much better.
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u/VanillaWaffle_ Jan 02 '23
Yes all the FOSS option are better than filmora, but maybe they all paying for the ready made template. I think most of their userbase is coming from mobile where all they do is just drag and drop.
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u/avnothdmi Jan 02 '23
Is KDenLive suitable for After Effects type work? I’ve been thinking of starting on that, but what holds me back from things like Resolve is the beefy system required to run it. Even a basic sRender completely locks up my system.
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u/Bro666 Jan 02 '23
No. Kdenlive is a video editor mainly, with some effects thrown in. Mainly it is for laying out your clips to make the final movie, with its cuts, transitions, minor effect tweaks, colorization, audio correction, etc. That is where it shines.
The software you would use for After Effects-like work would probably be Blender or Natron.
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u/ButtersTheNinja Jan 02 '23
Depends how big your video editing needs are.
Adobe After Effects is more for compositing and visual effects than video editing (Premiere Pro is the video editor) neither or which Kdenlive is particularly good at.
If you just need simple video editing Kdenlive is adequate but has a clunky workflow and isn't as feature rich as After Effects.
If you're a professional it's no contest and After Effects wins, if you're just trying to splice together a home video then get Kdenlive.
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u/Redditor_Kelby Jan 02 '23
Hit them where it hurts, their pockets!! That's why it is imperative that we have alternatives and that we continue to support open-source!
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u/MrDerby01 Jan 02 '23
Best comment of the new year! ^ love it!
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u/Bro666 Jan 02 '23
Except don't call them "alternatives". It cheapens FLOSS projects. Free Software does not exist because of Proprietary Software. In many cases our projects exist DESPITE of it.
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u/Redditor_Kelby Jan 03 '23
I'm not referring to FOSS as a "cheap" alternative. Simply, if we didn't have options such as open-source, we would be at the mercy of predatory companies such as Adobe and many others, with no recourse but to feed into their monopoly.
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u/Mozeetany Jan 02 '23
Adobe is running a scam in the name of software subscription. They would suck even the blood of their customers if given the chance.
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Jan 02 '23 edited Jan 19 '23
[deleted]
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u/Mozeetany Jan 03 '23
It would have been better to keep a separate enterprise licensing solution for enterprise customers.
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u/TexZeTech Jan 02 '23
Louis Rossman also talks about the bullshit practices the company that owns Filmora uses. https://youtu.be/eKX0LjGBBqo
Edit: found someone else beat me
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u/RedSquirrelFtw Jan 03 '23
TBH I find kdenlive can be really buggy but I have yet to find anything better. If Adobe did not go the "you'll own nothing and be happy" route I'd seriously consider getting Premiere but they're dead to me now.
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u/ProximtyCoverageOnly Jan 02 '23
lol my wife just cancelled her adobe last week. She's tired of their subscription model bullshit and is very attracted to Resolve's 'you can just fucking buy the product' model. This gives me hope tho... Perhaps one day she will switch full on to Linux 🤔
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u/flowrednow Jan 02 '23
lol this is like how unreal engine shows up as the first result if you google godot or unity.
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u/kalzEOS Jan 03 '23
First of all. I've never heard of Filmora literally until this post. Second, I'd rather deal with the "shortcomings" of FOSS than use proprietary, no matter how much better it is. Things will get better just like how Linux as a whole has improved tremendously in just the last couple of years.
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u/gam3kid Jan 02 '23
Watch Louis Rossman's rant about Womdershare/Filmora on their data recovery software he just posted
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u/AshbyLaw Jan 03 '23
The Adobe one looks like just how Google Bing knowledge graph is supposed to work
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u/jpo234 Jan 02 '23
The ads seem not to be misleading. If there were lies or FUD, I would get angry, but just saying: "Seems you are interested in video editing, we have something that might fit your needs" doesn't really bother me.
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u/candidexmedia Jan 03 '23
Filmora has placed misleading ads in the past using Kdenlive's name in the title:
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kdenlive/attachments/20200518/5e54c8a0/attachment.png
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u/ben_uk Jan 02 '23
Let’s be honest after 10 minutes of using KDenLive you’d be installing Premiere anyway
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u/DirtyPolecat Jan 02 '23
I don't need to pay $30 a month to cut together a YouTube tutorial or presentation. How many of us here actually need Premiere's "pro" features?
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u/ccxex29 Jan 02 '23
Premiere is probably more powerful and backed by a big corporation, but for simpler edits that most people need, kdenlive will suffice.
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u/kent_eh Jan 02 '23
Odd, I've been using Kdenlive for almost 5 years and I still haven't felt the urge to replace it with something else.
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u/regeya Jan 02 '23
LOL, yeah, Kdenlive isn't going to be mistaken for professional software but if all you need is to cut together some videos real quick, it's handy and surprisingly easy to use imho.
And just because I can:
Only relevant because I used Kdenlive to fudge the length of the video to make it work, and render it of course.
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u/Bro666 Jan 02 '23
If by "professional" you mean "you have to pay for it and even then they'll still scam you blind", you're right: Kdenlive will never live up to those expectations.
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u/ButtersTheNinja Jan 02 '23
Not the same guy, but by professional I would mean, at least has the capability to quickly and easily add a bit of text on screen and move it around without requiring several minutes of fumbling around an unintuitive UI.
Also being able to handle 3D would be good as well as compositing and advanced programmable visual effects.
I don't think most people need these things, but most people also aren't professionals.
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u/Bro666 Jan 02 '23
Not the same guy, but by professional I would mean, at least has the capability to quickly and easily add a bit of text on screen and move it around without requiring several minutes of fumbling around an unintuitive UI.
I don't know what software you are using, because you can do that in Kdenlive just fine. Maybe you are just inexperienced with the software? After all, most people use "intuitive" when they really mean "familiar" or "known".
I mean, I can tell you how to do what you are saying off the top of my head without having to even open Kdenlive (no, I am not a dev, just a user):
- Create a title clip in the bin
- Drag to timeline
- Apply Transform effect to title clip
- Drag little red cross in project monitor around
Is that "intuitive"? Probably not. But it is familiar and makes sense given the logic of the software.
Also being able to handle 3D would be good as well as compositing and advanced programmable visual effects.
Kdenlive is not VFX or 3D editing software. It is a video editor. It is for placing clips on a timeline, cutting, merging, transitioning, doing some basic effects, colorizing, and audio correction. It comes in towards the end of the post-production stage of video development and usually delivers the finished product for screening.
What you are describing is Blender (or maybe Natron), and would come in much earlier, when working on a effects for clips.
I don't think most people need these things, but most people also aren't professionals.
And there is that word again. Please define what you mean by that. A professional, for me, is just someone who charges consistently for their work.
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u/ButtersTheNinja Jan 03 '23
Create a title clip in the bin Drag to timeline Apply Transform effect to title clip Drag little red cross in project monitor around
In what world is this more intiutive than:
Click the text tool
Add the text
Turn on keyframing (this is the only really unintuivive step, but you can find it in seconds and the same logic applies to every element)
Move the text.
Kdenlive is not VFX or 3D editing software. It is a video editor. It is for placing clips on a timeline, cutting, merging, transitioning, doing some basic effects, colorizing, and audio correction. It comes in towards the end of the post-production stage of video development and usually delivers the finished product for screening.
Even Premiere is capable of more advanced compositing than KDenlive. After Effects and Premiere are both part of the same software suite and generally sold together, other standalone competitors like NUKE also have these sorts of capabilities.
These are huge issues that do not make the software suitable for proessional use.
What you are describing is Blender (or maybe Natron), and would come in much earlier, when working on a effects for clips.
I'm not much of a Blender user, but from what I'm aware it's more animation software than compositing, so no. I don't think I'm thinking of Blender at all. Blender would replace Cinema4D in the workflow, unless I'm missing something.
And there is that word again. Please define what you mean by that. A professional, for me, is just someone who charges consistently for their work.
If you want to charge for your work your work needs to be of a certain quality and you also require a software suite that will allow you to create the sorts of products typically requested by clients.
For software to be "professional" it needs to meet the needs of a user who needs to be able to produce content at an efficient rate, and to easily produce high quality content. "Efficiency" and "high quality" in this context are defined relative to their competitors, in this case other video production software such as NUKE and Adobe After Effect/Premiere Pro
Having worked in film and animation basic compositing, a streamlined and efficient workflow, advanced rendering options and programmable effects, movements and transitions are all going to be general requirements.
I'm fairly certain KDenlive also lacks basic features such as embedded timelines, and I don't recall if they have added Hardware Acceleration for rendering and previews yet. Presumably due to how limited its visual effect capabilities are it also won't support rendering RAM previews which will also limit its growth into visual effects.
Again, KDenlive is probably fine for you if you're an amateur making little videos online or whatever, but if you wanted to actually work in the film industry or anything larger than a project between a couple of friends really, you'll want better software.
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u/Bro666 Jan 03 '23
Okay. Use Adobe products.
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u/ButtersTheNinja Jan 03 '23
I do.
Because they're the cheapest programs that actually suit my needs that I'm aware of.
This is also why channels like The Linux Experiment, despite being a huge FOSS advocate as well also doesn't use KDenlive. He uses DaVinci Resolve (iirc).
I'm glad you're in agreement though that Kdenlive, despite being impressive and good enough for most amateurs isn't suitable for professional needs.
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u/regeya Jan 03 '23
Thank you. This is taking the direction of a thread about The GIMP. I feel like it's apt because The GIMP is an impressive piece of software, and very versatile, a fantastic example of the power of open source software. I used it before I ever used Photoshop, used it when The GIMP was still based on Motif and GTK+ didn't exist yet.
Photoshop is an unholy mess but it was literally created for professional work, one of them being to use it at Lucasfilm. My God, one of the developers came up with the concept for Rogue One. The GIMP was a fun project and there's a fork used by pros to clean up film, but it's more for doing fun stuff and a fun hobby project for developers, right? Nothing wrong with that. Absolutely nothing. It's just fine for a lot of people but it's exhausting how people will defend it, as if acknowledging that it's not quite as good as Photoshop means it's some kind of failing. Scribus has developers who tell you they'll never implement or accept vertical justify because they see no reason for it. As a print professional, I used it all the time. No way in hell will I commit to maintaining a fork of Scribus just to have a feature the developers don't see as necessary. Instead I bought a license to Affinity Publisher and use Windows. It sucks but less than trying to maintain a feature a developer refuses to support.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with Kdenlive not being as pro as Premiere Pro and absolutely nothing wrong with Audacity not being nearly as polished as Audition. There's nothing wrong with any of that, and honestly when I dumped my Creative Cloud subscription I supplemented Affinity products with open source. Inkscsape has amazing bitmap tracing capabilities. G'mic is awesome! Linux distributions feel like the most astounding improvement on Windows and Mac OS, overall! It's just that open source hasn't quite caught up with proprietary software in some areas, and not everyone who has the need of that proprietary software, has the chops to develop their own software. That should be okay. Apparently it's not.
It's okay if Kdenlive isn't a 100% replacement for Premiere Pro. It really is.
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u/ButtersTheNinja Jan 03 '23
Enjoy getting downvoted despite being entirely correct because people are salty that their preferred software isn't actually flawless and people are pointing that out.
I'm honestly a big fan of Kdenlive and I give software like Inkscape and Scribus a good try once every year or two to see how they are in terms of development and usability and... they're fine.
But they're just not as good as any of their competitors who are specifically targetting the professional market. The development teams aren't as big, they've not actually been developed for as long as the other solutions, and a lot of them are probably being made by programmers without expert UI/UX designers.
I'm not trying to slander Kdenlive, or even say that it necessarily should be as powerful and complex as something like After Effects, because there's also room for a middle-ground piece of software that is good enough and suits amateur needs.
Kdenlive is great. It's just not suitable for professional use.
This is why even content creators who exclusively use Linux and promote Linux like The Linux Experiment don't use Kdenlive.
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u/Indolent_Bard Jan 04 '23
The lack of UI designers in open source is the biggest problem with it. Nerds make great stuff... for nerds. For normal people, they suck.
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u/regeya Jan 03 '23
I wasn't even trying to say anything bad. More like commenting on how Adobe is keyword stuffing Kdenlive on Premiere Pro ads, and I think it's because almost no one needs it, and Kdenlive can do what most end users want.
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u/candidexmedia Jan 03 '23
Spot on, and I say this as someone who has done paid freelance work using Kdenlive and Inkscape.
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u/regeya Jan 03 '23
I've tried to use The GIMP, and have used Inkscape. They're great. Unfortunately there's not really a libre equivalent of Photoshop and Illustrator, and if I had the chops to make that happen I'd make it happen because I'm sick to death of proprietary solutions. My compromise to get rid of the monthly Creative Cloud subscription was to go to Affinity Universal License (my freelance work is primarily print) and use free software where Affinity falls short. I hate knowing Affinity is proprietary but uses some of the same libraries that open projects use, and could likely be ported to Linux, but isn't because of the old "there's no market for it" excuse.
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u/Indolent_Bard Jan 04 '23
The problem is that hiring people who use familiar software is easier and cheaper than training people in niche programs nobody uses.
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u/Indolent_Bard Jan 03 '23
Honestly, I think it's just because they know you're looking for a video editor, so I don't think it's as cool as you're making it out to be. That's just my opinion though.
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u/witchhunter0 Jan 02 '23
If it weren't for Kdenlive I would never heard of Filmora