OpenShot 3.5 is here with major speed and smoothness upgrades that make video editing feel much more responsive and enjoyable.
The free and open source video editor OpenShot 3.5 arrives with major speed, smoothness, and power improvements. This is one of the biggest releases in its 18-year history.
A new default timeline, 35% overall performance boost, smarter effects, and better exports make video editing feel much more responsive and enjoyable. Let’s have a look at the key features.
Table of Contents
OpenShot 3.5: Best New Features
The developers focused heavily on making the editor faster and more reliable while adding practical creative tools.
Here’s what’s new:
- New default timeline: Much faster zooming, scrolling, dragging, trimming, and scrubbing. Snapping feels smoother, multi-selection works better, and the whole experience is more responsive – especially on larger projects.
- New keyframe panel enabled by default: Advanced animation and property editing become easier to discover and use. You get smoother dragging, improved snapping, HiDPI thumbnails, and live trim feedback.
- Audio transitions: Cross-fading audio is now super simple. Fade-ins, fade-outs, and equal-power cross-fades happen automatically when you add transitions on the timeline.
- Mask support for all effects: Every effect now supports static or animated masks. New mask controls, improved timing, trimming, and inversion options give you more precise compositing power.
- New default Chroma Key effect: Softer edges, better quality, reduced halo issues, and much faster performance. Great for green-screen work.
- Experimental ComfyUI integration: For adventurous users, this opens the door to AI-powered workflows like generation, tracking, segmentation, and SAM2 pipelines. It’s experimental and requires extra setup, but it’s a exciting glimpse into future creative possibilities. You may want to take a look at the guide.
These changes make OpenShot feel more modern and capable while staying true to its beginner-friendly roots.
Performance Improvements
OpenShot 3.5 is about 35% faster overall, with the biggest gains in effects processing and frame handling.
You will notice quicker previews, faster rendering of clips with effects, and better responsiveness during editing. The team optimized hot paths in the engine, improved cache behavior, sped up audio file handling and waveform generation, and refined GPU acceleration for both decoding and encoding.
Exports now produce smaller files with higher quality thanks to updated presets, better CRF defaults, and improved encoder tuning. Hardware acceleration is more reliable, with safer fallbacks to avoid black-frame issues.
Other Notable Changes
- Tons of bug fixes across playback, dragging, trimming, caching, and missing-file handling.
- Improved stability through expanded tests, UI tests, and full-cycle replay testing.
- Better default behavior for many effects and clips.
- Polished UI elements, including more stable preview updates and refined multi-clip editing.
The release also lays a strong foundation for future work, including Qt6 migration and a new Android build.
Download and Installation
You can download OpenShot 3.5 directly from the official website.
For Linux users (recommended way):
- Grab the 64-bit AppImage from https://www.openshot.org/download/.
- No installation needed – just download, right-click the file, go to Properties, and mark it as executable. Then double-click to launch.
- It runs on virtually any modern Linux distribution.
Alternative options:
- Available on Flathub – install with:
flatpak install flathub org.openshot.OpenShot - Some distributions may offer it via their package managers (check for OpenShot in Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, etc., though the AppImage or Flatpak usually gives you the latest version fastest).
Windows and macOS users can also download native installers from the same page.
If you are updating from an older version, the new AppImage should feel noticeably better right away. Always back up your project files before trying a major update, just in case.
Wrapping Up
OpenShot 3.5 brings solid improvements in speed, stability, and creative tools. The faster timeline, easier audio transitions, enhanced masks, and overall performance gains make this a great release for both new and experienced users. The experimental AI features show the project is looking ahead while keeping the core experience friendly and powerful.
This free and open-source video editor continues to improve in meaningful ways. You should give it a try if you need a capable, no-cost tool for your video projects.
Via release notes
