Editing software journey so far

I’ve been making YouTube videos for fun for eight years now & over that period I’ve tried out many video editing programs. I’m going to skip over the “wild west” era where I was trying out every program I could to find out which one I liked.

1: VideoPad Video Editor (2016?-2024) 

VideoPad has been my primary editing software for most of my time making YouTube videos because of it was beginner-friendly & pretty powerful as an editing program. The feature that kept me hooked to VideoPad was its powerful keyframing features: I have yet to come across a free program with keyframe interpolation as customizable (Final Cut Pro 7 might have been a little better, I never used it).

However, while I stuck with VideoPad due to its powerful keyframing & relative ease, I began to outgrow it this year. I remember VideoPad being much better in 2016 than it is now—now it’s plagued with multiple annoying quirks that threw off my flow: depending on your scale, audio waveforms & video clips are slightly off from where they appear & you have to zoom in to make accurate cuts; exporting videos is highly unreliable & often breaks, forcing you to render a video five to six times; & you must click on every individual clip for them to render in your timeline (play smoothly). I tolerated this for thirteen videos, but I’ve had enough after my last video.

2: kdenlive (06.18.2024-06.25.2024) 

I tried out kdenlive for a bit because it was free & open-sourced, but kdenlive does not use GPU hardware acceleration & nothing ran well. It also had dire audio issues that forced me off it.

3: Olive (today) 

I recently stumbled upon Olive & I’ve been enjoying my experience with it so far! It runs well on my laptop & has Videopad’s versatility.

The latter two I found out about because they were GNU/Linux compatible.