
Linux/Live CD/DVD: It's one of the five features we desperately want in Ubuntu: a video editor that the average user can stitch together simple movies with. OpenShot 1.0 is mostly there.


That's not to say the interface has much polish, or that you don't have to install non-free multimedia codecs in your Linux system beforehand. Then again, unless you're a FLAC/OGG music purist, you probably already installed your MP3 and other file supports.

I had a video project to assemble over the weekend—combining a recorded audio file and still pictures into a video file that could be imported into iMovie, or watched on a standard PC laptop. I dropped an audio file into the left-hand sidebar, and it automatically dropped into one of the two default tracks. I dragged in a batch of pictures, and I could then drop them onto the timeline. From there, you can use the really simple tools—resize, razor, marker, and moving tool—to adjust and arrange the clips. For my purposes, that was perfect. It was a return to earlier versions of iMovie, a basic non-linear video editor for the rest of us.

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If you're looking to make very complex transitions or pull precise transformations on your video, you're still better off with a more advanced suite on another platform—one of our six best video editing applications, perhaps. If you're a Linux user and looking to stitch together a small-scale video project, OpenShot is definitely worth a look.

Six Best Video Editing Applications You want to be the supreme ruler of your own virtual cutting room? Better break out the… Read more


OpenShot is a free download, available as a live CD or DVD, as an Ubuntu/Debian repository, and pre-compiled for Ubuntu and Fedora systems. If you've given OpenShot a try and like it, or find it lacking a certain something, tell us about it in the comments.

OpenShot 1.0 Has Arrived! [OpenShot Video Editor]