Today the fee open source video editor Kdenlive announced the first major release of 2026, I haven’t updated to it yet but it looks like there are some useful new features.
It’s also great to see such a wide variety of contributors.
I use Kdenlive for lots of my Blender projects, so I thought I would share the news with the community since it s a great fee and open source tool.
New features look great, I use it as well.
I find it really useful for editing together different renders, I know that Da Vinci resolve it meant to have more features, but I know the Kdenlive interface now. I also like how it still performs really well on my MacBook Air M1 8gb, despite the resource limitations.
A very long time ago I used Adobe Premier, and Kdenlive feels like the closest thing to that without costing an arm and a leg.
The internal clip editor in Blender gets better and better too. I prefer it for small edits because I’m already familiar with the UI, the UI of Kdenlive is a bit unintuitive sometimes.
My problem with Blender’s editor is that it doesn’t even let you export into a custom format, even though it uses ffmpeg. It hasn’t really changed in 20 years which is a bit sad. Also I like Blender’s shortcuts for modelling (I still use right click select!), but pressing G to move video clips around is silly. I would happily rebuild the entire video editor to be more like Kdenlive / Premier if somebody paid me to do it.
I use the clip editor for putting together individual frames into an animation, and then I use Kdenlive for the bigger edits.
sI use the clip editor for putting together individual frames into an animation, and then I use Kdenlive for the bigger edits.
That’s what I do, Blender works great for putting together all the images, but adding audio, cuts, text etc is done in Kdenlive.
I believe I used a much older version of this, or tried it out at the time… Since this post I have started using it and DAMN! I like it! I had been using Blender for a short film to put together the outputs into a complete video, Kdenlive has completely changed that workflow. Thanks for the post! It made my list of go to software now.
That’s great, it’s one of my go to applications as well.
