When comparing Pitivi vs OpenShot Video Editor, the Slant community recommends Pitivi for most people. In the question“What are the best video editors for Linux?” Pitivi is ranked 7th while OpenShot Video Editor is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Pitivi is:
Pitivi uses CreativeCommons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license with source code available on [Gnome's source code page](https://download.gnome.org/sources/pitivi/).
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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 GTK based
Being GTK based, it does not require extra dependencies on gnome and other desktop environments using the GTK Toolkit.
Pro Uses Gstreamer instead of ffmpeg
Pro Easy to learn interface
By using a clean interface that is uncluttered and simple to understand the program allows for intuitiveness that is not always seen in other video editors.
Pro Free and open source
Pro GPU rendering
The GPU rendering is said to still be in beta, but works smoothly, even on low end GPU.
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 The GarageBand of video editing
Not a terrible downside, unless you are looking for the latest, fastest, cutting edge production software. It does small things extremely well, but has difficult workarounds for more extreme edits.
Con Timeline only zooms in to eight seconds
Although this is supposedly fixed in the daily builds, it is not out for the public yet, and it can be very frustrating to align and grab clips that are less than eight seconds long.
Con Editing effects is not intuitive at all
Applying effects is as easy as drag and drop. But if you want to edit them, you'd need to right click on each clip and select Properties. You'd need to experiment with not-so-well documented parameters which take forever to preview just to see if you are on the right track. It is sort of easy to learn unless you want more than drag and drop controls.
Con Only simple editing, no compositing such as rotoscoping
