Openshot

OpenShot can take your videos, photos, and music files and help you create the film you have always dreamed of. Easily add sub-titles, transitions, and effects, and then export your film to DVD, YouTube, Vimeo, Xbox 360, and many other common formats.

PiTiVi:

PiTiVi is an easy-to-use video editor targeted at beginners and intermediate users.

I have found kdenlive to be very easy to use and serves most editing needs very well:

I understand it is now available for other desktop environments as well. Hence made it a separate answer so others can vote up their choice.

You have quite a few options:

Cinelerra

A non-linear video editor and compositor for Linux. It also allows users to perform common compositing operations such as keying and mattes.

Installation guide for 12.04 & 12.10

Avidemux

Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks.

Kdenlive

Kdenlive is an intuitive and powerful multi-track video editor, including most recent video technologies.

Comparison

Cinelerra is used for professional work. It is very fast, and can handle a heavy load.

Excellent question, because at this time it has not been addressed. I know exactly what you are going through. I've been down that road of frustration. I tried everything in the repos and everything I could manage to successfully compile. One app stood out above them all: OpenShot. Try it out.

• It's in the repos, No confusing compiling necessary.


• It has an intuitive interface.


• It's stable.


• Decent package of features.

There is one small dependency you might need for some hd wide-screen output but that's it.

I would suggest:

• Vlc to make your clips


• Audacity to edit your audio


• Gnome-subtitles to add subtitles if you need


• OpenShot to build your audio/video project

That's the real aspiring Directors package right there, when the professional stuff is out of reach, or for the hobbiest.

OpenShot also has a forum where you can showcase what you've done.

If you need any help getting vlc to make clips, just ask me, it can be a little confusing the first clip. OpenShot is so intuitive, I'd be surprised if you asked a question. I tried all the others, and finally found OpenShot last. OpenShot is what you want. Beat the others hands down.

This is just one fan vid I did. Check out what you can do: (Beware I Am A Vampire Fan!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_7iZfd63y4

Helpfull things To Know About OpenShot:

• Save your project and videos in the same folder.


• Save often, and save using Number, i.e., projectSave#1, projectSave#2, etc. You can go back to a previous state if you change your mind or have a strange issue.


• Do not use an exported video as a source to build another video, every time you convert, quality will degrade. Use only direct source if possible with clips.


• Do not use clips that are too long.


• Do not move clips outside of you project folder, or you will disable your project.


• Buy some RAM if you've been putting it off. It will smooth things out.


• If you notice something out of the ordinary with the program itself, save then, and see if the bug goes away, or to go back to your last save. Otherwise if you continue to work, there is a potential for loss of work.


• Keep a processor monitor up while you work, and if you apply an operation that consume lots of processor percentage, wait till it's done. I'm impatient and multi-task and crashed OpenShot because I tried to apply too many operations that had a heavy load all too close to one another.


• Make sure you are up to date on your codecs!

With that in mind, some of the other editors would not even start or crash once a clip was added, or just flat out not work. OpenShot will get the project done if you take those things in mind.

blender is a very capable option. It's essentially a 3D-modelling and animation platform, but also has video editing capabilities (which I haven't tested yet). It's worth giving a go, but I'd recommend watching some tutorials first, as the UI has an unusual logic, which takes a while to get used to. The interaction model is very consistent though, and optimised for productivity. Overall, it's one of the most mature and impressive graphic design packages with an open license

DVBcut

DVBcut is a Qt application that allows you to select certain parts of an MPEG transport stream (as received via Digital Video Broadcasting, DVB) and save these parts into a single MPEG output file. It follows a "keyhole surgery" approach where the input video and audio data is mostly kept unchanged, and only very few frames at the beginning and/or end of the selected range are re-encoded in order to obtain a valid MPEG file.

If you have a DVB recorder or a digital TV card and want to cut off some parts from your recordings (like commercials) frame-exactly without re-encoding the whole file, use DVBcut. Not suitable for most other purposes.

Documentation about how to use it you can find on it's homepage.

Other option that seems to be a professional option is novacut.

Find more info to install it here:


https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Novacut/HowToInstall

And here you go the official website for novacut:


http://novacut.com/

http://blog.novacut.com/

"really good" is of course subjective and it depends on what you think of the interface and features.

Personally I like Openshot. Easy to use, nice itnerface, all the features I have ever needed.

sudo apt-get install openshot

Alternates include Cinelerra (not in the Ubuntu repos), Avidemux, Kdenlive, and Kino.