The developer of OpenShot must optimize his interface to not take unnecessary space.Īnother gripe is the fact that you can’t set the aspect ratio of your footage and de-interlacing project-wide.
On an XGA monitor, the preview screen gets reduced to a stamp-size video, while PiTiVi fairs way better in that department. Additionally, the “Video Preview” tab, the preview and timeline toolbar icons, and the “Timeline – Sequence 1” tabs take way too much space. Transitions are working properly if you put the clips on different tracks, but they didn’t do what I needed when I overlapped two clips and placed a transition on top. Right-clicking on the clips in the timeline will load a dialog where you can control speed, plugins, and more. When I loaded the app, I was provided with a pretty traditional and easy to understand video editing playground: files, transitions, effects on one side, a preview window on the right, and the timeline on the bottom with tools such as “cutting”. Given that I’m longing for a usable Linux video editor since 2003, and given that OpenShot version 1.0 had just been released, I naturally gave it a go, by also downloading its provided dependencies on my Ubuntu Linux 9.10. I followed the hype: Reddit, Slashdot’s front page, months of thumbs up on my blog and various video forums by Linux users for OpenShot.