Recently I have had to prepare a couple of demo about some work I have been doing. As my internet connection isn't the fastest, I chose to do a screencast that I could then upload somewhere and share. This prevented issues with my internet as well as gave me the possibility to show the full thing by editing the recording.

However, I ran into a few problems.

I first tried quite a few screencast apps:

  • The screencast tool that is built-in in gnome (simply pressing ctrl+alt+shift+r). However, this is recording only very short screencast by default, changing this default meant editing a configuration value in dconf (and thus having some idea beforehand of how long the recording will be).
  • recapp, that one simply didn't start me for
  • peek, that one seemed to work but intercepted all my mouse clicks, so I could only navigate with the keyboard, could not highlight anything with my cursor and when I looked at the recording, it was all black
  • SimpleScreenRecorder, could not seem to be stopped once started
  • OBS studio, recorded a black screen

After all this, I gave up and re-log into my session using X11 instead of Wayland. Suddenly all of the screencast app worked fine... :)

So once I was able to record what I wanted to show, I still had over 10 minutes of video to show at a demo review, so I wanted to edit it, cut the parts where there are no progress, increase the speed of the parts where things are happening but do not need to be shown real-time (for example, when a system boots, or when it is being installed, if the speed there is x2, it is fine).

I've looked around at different tools and found:

  • kdenlive
  • VidCutter
  • Video Trimmer
  • ShotCut

I ended up settling for kdenlive for two reasons:

  • someone I know uses it and recommended it to me (thus I knew it is able to do what I was looking for)
  • I've found this tutorial on youtube explaining me exactly how to do what I wanted to do:





The kdenlive UI changed a little bit since this video was recorded (like the "Change speed" button is now available via a "right click" on the video track) but this tutorial is enough to give you some basis on video editing with kdenlive.