Be careful with any serious project, this software most certainly will crash and destroy your work. It crashes since many years and developers do not seem to care or are not able to understand how important stability for media creation software really is. Especially small and independent artists should absolutely avoid any software that introduces additional risk of project failure as one such crash scenario at an advanced project state has a high potential of total destruction.

Choose wisely! Resolve is available for very little money and not only a much safer choice, but you will also learn to use an industry standard tool and might be able to monetise that skill one day.

Kdenlive is a hobbiest project and is probably still ok for occasionally splitting a downloaded YouTube video or converting your OBS recordings, but never should you remotely think about using it for a project where you need to rely on your tools.

The developers are not warning you enough, instead still trying to market this software as kind of a serious competitor to pro software, so I do that as a service for the aspiring video editor, taking your downvotes proudly as the price honest people have to pay.

Yes, obviously I write from experience.

For what it's worth, while I haven't found kdenlive (or shotcut, based on the same underlying toolkit) to be 100% stable, I've had significantly fewer lost-work incidents with kdenlive than I did with Premiere Pro. The frustration of Premiere's instability was the main thing that drove me to open-source software.

I've never used Resolve primarily so I don't have a good feeling of how they compare, but I have experienced a couple of unexpected, mid-work crashes in Resolve as well. I believe these were tied to my working on a machine with an Intel iGPU, which at least at the time seemed to be... discouraged, I'll say, by the Resolve community due to known stability issues. Possibly the root of evil with Premiere as well, but again, doesn't seem to be a major problem for kdenlive.

What I will say is that I personally prefer Shotcut to kdenlive. Both are basically graphical frontends to MLT, the actual media toolkit/editor (driven by XML files). Shotcut has a simpler, more user-friendly UI than kdenlive and also seems to be a bit more stable/performant. kdenlive is more featureful. I think most people should try both because it probably depends on your workflow which is more convenient.

> Especially small and independent artists should absolutely avoid any software that introduces additional risk of project failure as one such crash scenario at an advanced project state has a high potential of total destruction.

I can't really comment on kdenlive, but this sounds kind of overly dramatic to me. I mean, I hope you save and take regular snapshots/backups in case your disk, RAM or just human error destroys anything substantial.

There's already a lot of replies to this comment so it clearly hit a nerve with a lot of people!

All I'll add is that if this was 5 years ago, I'd completely agree with you as I've had my timeline completely screw up before, or other unusual behaviours that ended up causing a project reset. And I'm not the only one[1], I remember this video when it came out.

But while I'm not a regular YouTuber or videomaker, I still use Kdenlive about once a month and anecdotally it hasn't done this in at least 4 years. However, having software that you spend so much time working with ruin a project is legitimately traumatising, so I understand your strong feelings.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9gbsDkzKK8

Based on your comment I guess you have never used Premiere Pro (and never learned ctrl + s)

Arguments like this are much more compelling if you cite specifics rather than giving us your own conclusions.

I agree that this software is not ready for wide adoption in industry. Crashes are 5-10 times more common than premiere, FCP, avid, or resolve. I use it to make short instructional videos with V/O, which it is a godsend for- a massive improvement over the NLE options that existed before kdenlive. It is capable but stability is a major issue.

A bit dramatic for telling us you don't bother to save your work. No matter if it's avid, davinci or premiere they all crash from time to time.

KDE stuff is prone to fixing bugs in both the supporting libraries and software substantially after the versions that end up in stable distros eg n.0 sucks but n.4 ends up substantially improving the prior issues.

I would suggest a self contained version on stable distros or running on a rolling release whichever is practical.left to take advantage of said improvements.

I would also suggest that performance under Windows may be less tested. I personally wouldn't use it there.

Were you using the AppImage / Flatpak of it? Backwards policies of Linux distros that allow them to randomly change the dependencies of kdenlive made it unstable since they were using bad versions of dependencies with it.

Everything you're saying is right, but people hate hearing that an open source project is poorly made in a thread about it. Most of the people who get upset by what you're saying have probably never used it. It is very unstable and should not be relied on.

Meanwhile resolve is fantastic and it's free.

This argument would be a lot more convincing if you linked to issues or something.