Ubuntu - Install Shotcut Video Editor

Shotcut is a popular video editor freely available on Linux.

Kdenlive Alternative

I recently ran into issues with Shotcut and found Kdenlive, which feels a little more "finished". For example, shotcut was crashing when I imported a video after hammering the CPU for a while, but when I tried to import into kden live it just immediately told me that it had trouble finding the end time of the video (which I had made through SimpleScreenRecorder). Thus I knew to simply quickly re-encode the video with a CRF of 0, to resolve this issue.

Installation Steps

We can install the Shotcut video editor easily through the snappy package management system that is built into Ubuntu 16.04 and higher (including Ubuntu 18.04).

Install the application using snaps with:

sudo snap install shotcut --classic

Then just run shotcut from the CLI to launch the application.

Installing Snaps

If the unlikely event that you don't already have support for snaps, install with

sudo apt update && sudo apt install snapd -y

References

• Snapcraft - Shotcut