I’m on CachyOS and want to switch from Davinci Resolve Studio 20 to a FOSS editor.
I’ve been eyeing Kdenlive for a while now but lack of GPU accelerated playback was the only thing keeping my from trying it. Because despite having a powerful CPU (Ryzen 9 9950X3D) H.265 4K 60FPS files my Sony camera produces play with stutter while scrubbing.
My RTX 5090 helps a lot in that regard thanks to its 2x NVDEC decoders with AV1 and HEVC support.
In one of the release notes I saw that Kdenlive added a check box in the welcome screen that says “Enable hardware decoding: nvdec”.
It is working for quiet a while, but the issue is that MLT is a single core CPU process. It is needed to render the video. Hardware acceleration improves the rendering a lot compared to non GPU usage, but it is still slow.
But hey, since it’s FOSS, you just can try it out. Put a video file in it, make some typical edits and render your 15 seconds video. If you can live with the render time, go for it. If not … well, you know what you want.
Before someone says “MLT can be multithreaded” - yes, but no. If you want quality, you don’t want to use multithreads that can cause artifacts.