Avidemux

What is Avidemux?

Avidemux [avidemux.sourceforge.net] is a free video editor for PC (Windows, Linux, MacOS, and BSD). It provides simple features for converting from one file format to another, cropping videos, cutting the start and end of a video, selecting which audio channels to export, and applying filters to the whole video.

Avidemux vs. DaVinci Resolve

Avidemux is better than DaVinci Resolve in some cases.

DaVinci Resolve (like Kdenlive) is a timeline-based editor for creating complex videos out of video clips. It serves a completely different purpose from Avidemux. In most cases, you should use DaVinci Resolve for editing videos, because it simply has countless tools that Avidemux doesn't have. However, there are some cases in which DaVinci resolve is not the right tool for the job, and then Avidemux is better.

This is specially true if we aren't working with footage of the real world, but with screen recordings, or working with video files directly instead of mixing them.

For example, let's say you record your whole screen, but then you want to remove the taskbar. You just want to crop it out.

In Avidemux, all you need to do is change the video output from "copy" to a codec so that it lets you choose filters, then click on the Filters button, add a cropping filter, and move the edges, save, and you're done.

In DaVinci Resolve, you'll have a lot of trouble with this. The first problem is that you can't crop the video itself. You create a project, and video files you import become clips, and you can crop a clip, but doing so doesn't change the resolution of the project. In other words, if your recording was 1600x900px, and you crop 100px at the bottom, the output doesn't become 1600x800px like it does in Avidemux. You just get a black horizontal bar at the bottom where there is no clip footage.

In general, it's very inconvenient to edit the resolution of videos in timeline-based editors because they're created with the assumption the you want to export to a standard resolution like 720p, instead of just cropping the video arbitrarily.

DaVinci can do a lot more than Avidemux, but for basic tasks like just converting a video you can do them in Avidemux faster than in DaVinci, simply because it's a simpler application.