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OpenShot, the free open-source Qt-based video editor, released new 3.5.1 version few days ago.<\/p>\n
The new version introduced preview scaling feature named Optimize Preview<\/b> and other changes that significantly improved performance for the editing workflow.<\/p>\n
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Different to other video editors (e.g., Kdenlive and Shotcut), OpenShot down-scale the original video sources by generating (or linking to) another copy of videos<\/i> in lower resolution (e.g., 720p, 360p).<\/p>\n
Then, it uses these lower resolution videos for preview playback, trimming, and editing, resulting a very faster and smoother user experience, while, the export process will use the original videos.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ubuntuhandbook.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/openshot-optimizepreview-700x411.webp\")
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By default, it will down-scale original videos to 720p (1280×720) and store them in In preferences, user may change the down-scale resolution to 1080p, 540p, or 360p, accordingly, and, configure how many videos it can optimize concurrently.<\/p>\n Besides preview scaling, the release also introduced UI scaling<\/b>. Like the fractional scaling for desktop, user can now scale the app window fonts to 75%, 125%, 150%, 175%, 200% to well fit small or HiDPI displays.<\/p>\n However, when enable the Legacy Timeline, it will set back to 100% scale, because the legacy web timeline backends have ugly artifacts when using some fractional scales.<\/p>\n The new 3.5.1 also improved the zooming behavior in the timeline. Instead of moving playhead to timeline center when zooming out, it now always keeps it as is when zooming in or out with clip length larger than visible timeline.<\/p>\n.openshot_qt\/optimized<\/code> (for Linux). They will be deleted when you undo the scale action, or close the app window (may have few minutes delay).<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ubuntuhandbook.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/openshot-previewprefs-700x436.webp\")
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