Don't Use Pitivi

In 2021, I had to learn how to produce videos for online conferences. I do think that my first results are quite good for a start.

When I looked around for a video editing software for GNU/Linux, Pitivi seemed to be a good trade-off between complexity and usability for somebody entering this topic like me.

Unfortunately, I did face some issues.

I could not select video clips after working with Pitivi for a while. I had to save the project and re-start Pitivi to be able to select clips again. This is quite a basic feature and I wondered why this is broken in the widely used Ubuntu version of Pitivi.

From time to time, Pitivi crashed. Sometimes, I could work for an hour without a crash, sometimes it crased three times within five minutes. I could not find out what caused those crashes. I just pressed the save button much more often.

For fixing a few bugs like the selecting issue, I had to switch to a more recent version of Pitivi. Unfortunately, this was only possible by using flatpak which I don't like. Now, crashes stopped from being a show-stopper and clips could be selected even after working for a while.

As I've found out later, the crashing issues is a well-known long-term issue of Pitivi.

Many things were not quite intuitive to learn but I found videos on YouTube where people explained me most things. So the community help was there.

Recently, I helped with the setup for a cooking video for my wife. I wanted to have the verbal explanation in normal speed and a five-times playback speed on the non-voice parts where things were less interesting in detail. A rather basic and straight-forward approach, I think.

It really got complicated with Pitivi, I have to say.

Effects are either audio or video effects. For 5x speed, I had to apply a video effect and an audio effect and synchronize the same rate-value to both. This needs to be done for each clip separately. Very annoying and error-prone work.

The straw that broke the camel's back: when I cut down a one minute clip that should be speed up and applied the two effects, the resulting clip was not a fifth of the minute as you would expect. The resulting clip was still one minute in length, showing the desired part and the next four fifths in length of the following sequences I had previously cut. Maybe there was a better workflow for that but this was the last thing I ever want to have tried with Pitivi.

I switched to Kdenlive and was able to finish the cooking video with a minimum amount of learning effort. In contrast to Pitivi, everything I needed just worked in Kdenlive so far.

It's a shame when a free software project that exists for 17 years gets a blog article like this. I can imagine that there are good people putting much effort into their baby.

However, when somebody like me is looking for an easy to use video editing tool, issues like I have experienced is not something you want to face.