For video editing, Blender is the best FOSS tool I've tried.

But you now get Davinci Resolve for free on Linux. It blows the FOSS competition out of the water, being a software with probably millions of dev hours funded by Hollywood studios behind it. Blackmagic decided to go the way of providing the basic tool for free in order to build user base amongst hobby video editors, and it's not a bad move IMO.

Wow, thank you for that, I didn't know Resolve. I do use KDEnlive but I can't say I'm satisfied with it.

There's also Olive Editor [1], still in Alpha but shows potential.

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

Lightworks also runs under Linux.

Resolve has a quite steep learning curve, at least it had for me without experience with other NLE. For my simple workflow it was too much and I backed-off.

Happy to see the recommendations here for video editors on Linux, will give some of them a try.

Sorry for piggy-backing on this thread, but is there a simple tool which will let me do a screen capture and annotate it. Something like ScreenFlow on Mac. I use Peek for screen-capture currently.

I wanted to annotate some text and OpenShot doesn't really work well for that as I can't place the text freely and am limited to a few templates.

OBS will probably be able to do what you want[1].

1 - https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio

I had too many headaches with Resolve 16.2 hanging on exports or UI stopping responding on Ubuntu 18.04, I hope it gets better. The camera stabilization filter is amazing.

Kdenlive does support MP4 as source assets, Resolve free only does ProRes MOVs and such. It's just an extra step with ffmpeg but still.

A little out of topic, but which tool would you recommend for just the basic video editing on Linux? Nothing fancy, just cutting and pasting videos together, possibly with some simple transitions? Thanks!

My wife (a music teacher) was a Mac only video editing person. She now uses Open Shot almost exclusively, even though for $40 I bought her Sony Vega (she was complaining about Open Shot at the time). I think Open Shot is a good gateway to Blender or other video editing tools. She does all her stay at home videos on Open Shot now because she can do it so quickly. I would say it took about a week to get really comfortable making simple videos.

Not OP, but I think OpenShot is made exactly for this kind of simpler editing. It's akin to Windows Movie Maker.

ffmpeg - you can do declarative editing combined with a Makefile. Clips can be previewed with `mpv --osd-fracitons` or equivalent.

Avaliability of Davinci on Linux is impressive. I hope other productivity products do the same thing.

The basic version is also free on Windows & Mac.

I have tried many video editors including OpenShot, Cinelerra and Blender to finally arrive to Kdenlive and stay with it! It is still in an active development and getting better and better! I also definitely recommend trying anyone Kdenlive.

"Quirks" is an understatement. Last I checked, you couldn't even have multiple timelines in the same project, every bit of editing had to be in the one same timeline.