I just donated €25 to Kdenlive, and it was genuinely well deserved. 🤓
I needed to anonymize a username in a gameplay clip I was uploading to Reddit. Kdenlive was the first video editor I've used in decades where I could just sit down and figure it out without first watching a 20-minute tutorial.
What impressed me most was the UX:
- sensible defaults for project settings, codecs and bitrate
- obvious, discoverable effects
- visual positioning with precise numerical adjustment when needed
- useful guidance without getting in the way
- straightforward rendering/export
- enough feedback at every step to let me verify that I was doing things correctly
The whole process was basically: import → find Obscure → position it → check the result → render.
Rendering took just 17 seconds for blurring a defined area, making the entire workflow easily completable within a few minutes, even with very little experience in video editing.
And that's probably the highest praise I can give an application: it didn't make me think about the application. It let me think about the task.
This is the first time in decades that open-source software has solved a task for me this easily, without sending me down a rabbit hole of tutorials, obscure workflows and weird shortcut combinations.
So, €25 to the people who made it seemed entirely reasonable. ❤️
I used Kdenlive 26.08.1 in W11 Pro 26H2, on an Intel 265K, 48 GB DDR5-7200, 4 TB 990 PRO.