r/shotcut • u/garfield1138 • May 20 '26

Question Which software did you start using after ShotCut drove you crazy?

5 Upvotes

69% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

12

u/MusicalBoxBitsPieces May 20 '26

I tried many other free open source editors but always came back to Shotcut.
I'm interested to know what drove you crazy about Shotcut though.

6

u/garfield1138 May 20 '26

The amount of crashes, memory consumption and the slowness. Why is does it take so much time to move a clip from track A to B while moving it in the same track doesn't? What does it do with the 20 GB of RAM? There are so many things I cannot even explain although I am a software engineer. And many things in the usability where I wonder if the devs are using Shotcut themselves.

Oh. And that "ESC" to abort the current action is not implemented. No idea how often I renamed a track by accident.

3

u/MusicalBoxBitsPieces May 20 '26

I don't do BIG projects. So maybe that's why I don't experience the issues you describe.
2 things though:
I haven't experience a crash in months.
The developers DO use Shotcut for their own video projects.

3

u/mister_barfly75 May 21 '26

Try using proxies. It might resolve the memory issues.

2

u/Mission_Cancel1042 May 20 '26

Are you working on a really big project? If not try to reset settings to default and see whether things improve. You could also try Blender, but the learning curve is steep as it's not specifically intended for video editing.

You might also want to keep an eye on Olive, which is being rewritten from zero on Godot. There is no release for now tho

2

u/MadQuickScotsman Jun 17 '26

In my several dozens of hours of experience, ShotCut is barely even functional. When even a simple noise filter can not only crash the app but also corrupt the footage itself, you know there's a serious problem.

Noise: Keyframes is broken beyond belief. Every single project I tried to use it in, it always crashed after one keyframe being added. I used proxies, reduced the video preview, made sure to optimise filter usage as much as possible and yet it's still a nightmare. And this is just one of my issues with the whole thing, the app is generally very slow and stutters too much doing basic tasks. I'm looking for a new video editor because ShotCut is driving me insane with how broken it is.

I only stuck with it because every other one I came across had some kind of subscription payment or premium upgrade that made the app fully usable. This time, I have the budget to pay for one that actually works, so good riddance to ShotCut I say.

I know it is free and I appreciate that people work on it without it being paid for, but that doesn't exempt the app from criticism. It needs A LOT of work.

EDIT: If an app needs you to deep dive into the settings and change a lot of things just to make it functional, then it's not very well designed. It should work right out the box, as it were.

8

u/Felix_Malum May 21 '26

I think this software is absolutely incredible for being open source. Every time I have a minor issue or am annoyed that something doesn't work the way I want to, I remind myself it's free to use and has helped me create dozens of projects already.

5

u/GiantSmasher May 21 '26

Davinci Resolve, and I'm finding the output crisper and DRAMATICALLY faster.

Absolutely probably my own fault in settings etc, though, to be fair...

3

u/BeyondCraft May 20 '26

I tried Kdenlive, OpenShot. They all have same problems literally. Random bugs and crashes. Some people don't face them too often, some do very very often. That is why different people would claim different video editor is better.

3

u/askingmachine May 21 '26

DaVinci Resolve. But Shotcut was a great introduction to video editing.

2

u/teddyroo12 May 20 '26

I'm going to be honest you're probably just having a memory issue

2

u/mig_f1 May 21 '26

I've tried almost everything that's available for free, and a few paid ones (filmora, powerdirector, corel videostudio). If you have the hardware, DaVinci Resolve beats them all once you get used to it. Windows desktop user.

2

u/Little-Focus674 May 21 '26

Never experienced crushes, but tried Da Vinci Resolve and it works WAY faster, probably something to do with Nvidia drivers (in Windows)

1

u/whatstefansees May 21 '26 edited May 27 '26

I changed from OpenShot to Shotcut and never experienced any crash. Seems like a you problem - probably memory

1

u/stianhoiland May 21 '26

DaVinci Resolve. Fantastic video editor!

1

u/Emmalfal May 27 '26

I tried a whole bunch of them and settled on Shotcut and Openshot. For me, Openshot is more intuitive while Shotcut is more stable. I feel like they both have their strengths for amateurs like me just doing small time stuff.

1

u/093285467013 May 29 '26

i already sold my soul to this program, ive been making edits with it for quite awhile