Creating titles is also not difficult, although it took me a few minutes to realize that the tool for doing so is under the “Project” menu in the main toolbar. Video clips are easy to string together, and adding transitions and effects is as simple as a drag-and-drop. It took only about fifteen minutes for me to master the basics of OpenShot, which offers an intuitive, well organized interface: OpenShot on Ubuntuįor the most part, that’s what I found. It took me hours to figure out how to do very basic stuff.Īll this is to say that in testing OpenShot, I was looking for an intuitive, simple editor that would allow me to perform basic tasks without having to read through lots of documentation.

The last time I tried editing videos in Linux, which was a couple years ago, I used Cinelerra, an extremely powerful application that’s a bit more complicated than the average user needs or wants. The extent of my work in this realm has mostly been limited to stringing clips together in Windows Movie Maker back when I was still using XP. I should also make clear that I’m no video-editing professional.

I wouldn’t bet any money on this decision changing before April, but I’ve read good things about OpenShot and thought it would be worth a try, even if won’t be included in Lucid by default. With this in mind, I decided to test drive OpenShot, an open-source, nonlinear editor that reached its 1.0 release very recently.Ĭurrently, Ubuntu developers are planning to ship Ubuntu 10.04 with PiTiVi, a different editor. When Lucid Lynx ships in April, it will come with a video editor installed by default, which will be a first for Ubuntu.

Video editor open shot