I’m not sure if this should be on the official Openshot forum but I thought I would try here first if that’s ok
Recently I’ve been trying out Openshot, I started by trying to make a film clip consisting of still Images of my Grand-daughter to music and trying various transitions etc.
Anyway to start with Openshot couldn’t be considered fast and crashing wasn’t exactly infrequent but it was useable but as the project has grown it’s became almost unusable, at the moment the project consists of approximately 60 still images, 3 songs and a few transitions lasting 11 minutes, I don’t have a particularly powerful PC (2gb ram & a 1.6 ghz dual core processor) so I didn’t expect it to be greased lightening but I did expect it to be usable. as it is now it takes almost 6 minutes just to open the project, and trying to edit anything can take a similar time
“top” shows cpu usage for openshot ranging from 11% to 105% (dont know how it works that out) and memory usage fairly light at around 33% and according to a sysinfo screenlet it appears to be using both cores.
It could well be that my PC just isn’t up to it, but I watched a you tube video tutorial where the guy demonstrated it on a laptop with a single core processor running Linux ( he expressed the point that it would be a bit slow because of this) and it was way faster than mine.
Any suggestions or advice would be much appreciated
I started with v 1.4.0 which i installed from synaptic, when I started having the serious problems I completely uninstalled and then installed the latest version (v1.4.3) from the official PPA, but it hasn’t made any noticeable difference, in fact the first attempt to edit crashed the program, the problem could be the way I’ve compiled the video but I suppose the only answer to that would be to start the project over again and I’ve put quite a lot of work into it.
It’s not really a big deal I am getting by the way it is, I just wondered if it could be a problem with my PC or some setting I can change or package I could install, that would help
If this is to be a simple slideshow with music for a DVD .. have you looked at imagination
I’ve never heard of Imagination but i can have a look.
I chose Openshot because I wanted to try to learn video editing, I just started with a photo slideshow, but ultimately i want to get a bit more ambitious with some video I have that I shot myself and try to use various effects etc
I have used Openshot last year for a while but found that it did have an issue with the MLT libraries it used.
Although my problem was general slowness but not as bad as yours (on a single core and 1gb memory).
Eventually moved over onto Kdenlive and never looked back.
Also tried Lives that worked ok.
Something else to considere, does it haveto transcode the clips you are using? That would slow it down too.
I thought about Kdenlive ( I’ve read quite a lot of good things about it) but I didn’t want all the the KDE libraries that would install with it, i did download cinelerra but that looked a bit complicated for me and from what I read was prone to crashing as well, I don’t know anything about Lives, but I’m open to suggestions, basically i want something that’s fairly easy to learn but with enough features to get more ambitious and challenging as i learn more
Something else to considere, does it haveto transcode the clips you are using? That would slow it down too
To be honest i don’t know, the image files are al jpegs, and the sound files are all mp3s
Could my problem be that all the files I'm using are on my network server, and it's the network that's lowing things down ?
I doubt it would cause too much of a problem but if you try it with local files and it is better then all is good.
As for Kdenlive bringing in lots of kde libraries, I did not notice any but maybe they were already installed (as I do use some KDE stuff like K3B etc).
You could try Lives, I found it OK but just preferred Kdenlive.
I doubt it would cause too much of a problem but if you try it with local files and it is better then all is good.
Thinking back, on one occasion while using Openshot my server crashed (kernel panic) and up to that point the server hasn’t had one second downtime in 6 months, so I think I’ll try moving the files to a local location and trying that, it will probably mean a lot of work but if nothing else it should tell me if that’s the problem or not.
I’m reluctant at this point to try another program because In spite of the problems I’m having I like Openshot and also switching to another application would likely mean starting completely from scratch as Lives or kdenlive is unlikely to work with an existing Openshot project.
That's probably going to be what you want .. a professional grade video editor.
I’ve heard about Lightworks and it looks amazing but I just want to do simple video editing at least to begin with and openshot looks like it has everything I need if only i can get it to work better, maybe one day I will need a professional grade video editor like that but Lightworks costs money, are you forgetting I’m a Scotsman ?
From what I gather there's a free and a paid version.
You’re right again, I’ll have a look at that.
But out of curiosity do you think my problem could be that I’m streaming the files from my network, because if it is then any editor I use will likely have the same issues will it not ?
Ok I tried moving all the files to a local directory and the difference is like night & day Openshot is much much faster & fluid, loading a project now only takes seconds whereas it took minutes before and general editing although sometimes a little slow doesn’t freeze up for 5 or 6 minutes before becoming usable again, there is still occasional crashing but that might just be the nature of the program or maybe my PC isn’t quite powerful enough to use this program flawlessly, but at least it reloads quickly so I can live with that, so all in all it looks like importing files in Openshot from a network location is not to be recommended
