When comparing Pitivi vs Olive Video Editor, the Slant community recommends Olive Video Editor for most people. In the question“What is the best free video editing software?” Olive Video Editor is ranked 4th while Pitivi is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Olive Video Editor is:
This video editor has the ability to move things in the visual space straight in the viewer panel compared to the others where you need to change some value of x or y to scale or move things in your composition. This might not matter much in many cases but if you have a lot of elements moving or scaling throughout your scene, this is the fastest and a much more intuitive method than having to adjust the scale/position values of individual axes separately. This again is a big reason why I prefer an alpha (a damn good alpha) version of this software than a stable release of Kdenlive.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro GTK based
Being GTK based, it does not require extra dependencies on gnome and other desktop environments using the GTK Toolkit.
Pro Free and open source
Pitivi uses CreativeCommons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license with source code available on Gnome's source code page.
Pro Uses Gstreamer instead of ffmpeg
Pro Scale / move elements directly on viewer
This video editor has the ability to move things in the visual space straight in the viewer panel compared to the others where you need to change some value of x or y to scale or move things in your composition. This might not matter much in many cases but if you have a lot of elements moving or scaling throughout your scene, this is the fastest and a much more intuitive method than having to adjust the scale/position values of individual axes separately. This again is a big reason why I prefer an alpha (a damn good alpha) version of this software than a stable release of Kdenlive.
Pro Blazing fast preview
GPU preview means a lot and I honestly cannot understand how other video editors do not have this as the default choice. Incredibly fast previews tested even on low end machines. This is the sole deal breaker for me when it comes to editing clips.
Cons
Con Encoding and decoding is not hardware-accelerated
The feature is planned, but not yet implemented.
Con No way to modify the speed of a clip
The feature is planned, but not yet implemented.
Con Lacks proxy editing
The feature is planned, but not yet implemented.
Con Still in alpha / No stable release yet
Not exactly going to be a long term con. The official website clearly states the same, which is why this piece of software should not be used for important projects. Then again it is so damn good that Olive editor is right now my primary editor for most projects. The fact that there is NO stable version of this software does bother a bit as it's ability to handle complex projects is almost unpredictable. But all said and done, it's still not crashed on me even once. Even though an alpha, the best damn alpha release ever.
