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  • Good news from the developers of the free video editing software "kdenlive":

    • Their fund raising campaign for one developer to devote two full man months on some long desired re-factoring succeeded - and quickly!

    • kdenlive 0.9.2 was just released, addressing some regressions from the 10 days old 0.9 release, which introduced numerous interesting features (see http://kdenlive.org/discover/0.9 for a list).

    Two new features I found especially notable:

    • The availability of a second video stabilizing filter (which was ported from "transcode"), which offers numerous parametrization options (that the first stabilizer, "vstab" is somewhat lacking).

    • Automatic synchronization of video tracks taken from different cameras at the same time (by using the audio track similarities).

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  • I should mention that when using with GH2 recorded .MTS files, please make sure you do_not enable the experimental support for multi-threaded rendering (you'll find that option under "settings/configure kdenlive/environment/processing threads" - set that to one. Or make sure your render script does not pass "real_time=-3" to the "melt" command).

    It took me quite some time to figure out what was going on - but melt (the executable from the underlying "mlt" framework) seems to produce awkward jumps back-and-forth-in-time when rendering with multiple threads.

    In addition, I found that kdenlive erraneously thinks that GH2 recorded .MTS files have a frame rate of 23.9805 (instead of 23.970) per second, which is enough difference to let the audio go out of sync. I found it more convenient to replace the occurences of the wrong frame_rate=... assignments in the *.kdenlive file with the correct frame_rate before rendering, but of course you can also use the "clip properties"/"advanced" settings to enforce the correct frame rate. (I'll also file a bug with the kdenlive maintainers, to fix this upstream.)

  • @Karl

    The new Kdenlive looks good. How does it compare with the other editors?

    I'll be installing it... I'm building a new editing box now (Fedora 64/Cinelerra/VMWare for W7 & Ubuntu Studio) plus any of http://dries.ulyssis.org/ayo/packages/group-applications-multimedia.php

  • So far I only tried "OpenShot" and "Cinelerra" as alternatives (but there are several more).

    "OpenShot" is kind of similar to kdenlive, but IMHO not quite as feature-rich, I found no particular reason to use it. It is based on the same rendering engine and codecs (mlt, ffmpeg).

    Cinelerra(-CV) is kind of the "grandfather" of Linux video editing software, it can certainly do a lot, but its user interface is very unusual and I did not really like it. Also, it does not play too well with AVCHD files, it seems obvious that Cinelerra is still living in the TV broadcasting era, where "preparing video by taking stuff from an SD card, converting it into some file for InterNet upload" was not a scenario to design software for.

    I should also mention that I still like avidemux26 - which is not a full blown video editing suite, but a more simple tool similar to "VirtualDub" - for its ability to cut footage in the compressed domain - which is what I usually do as a first step of the workflow.

  • I must say I am astonished by Kdenlive.

    I needed to rough-cut a few shots together on by Lx notebook and in minutes I'd done the 5MB install and found myself not only intuitively navigating this new editor but also able to do almost any of the common image adjustments - on a standard install!

    some text

    I can't tell if Kdenlive'll do everything, but' I'll no longer be thumbing my nose at it!

  • Thanks, @Karl! I did notice some flickering, possible frame-rate errors you mention, in my 1080/24 moving shots. I'll check as you suggest.

  • The latest kdenlive release introduced a feature that IMHO received much less attention than it should have: The "Colgate" "LMS white balance" filter.

    That new white balance filter provided such stunningly better results to me than conventional white balancing functions that I proposed its inclusion with RawTherapee.

  • is it able to support: 1)4k? 2)96khz? 24 bit audio 3)5.1 mixing??

    i look for these spec but i couldnt find the answers, do you know it @karl? Greetings!

  • @lolo: "is it able to support: 1) 4k?" - yes. There is no pre-defined profile for that, but defining one is a matter of seconds and works fine.

    "2) 96khz? 24 bit audio" - you can read and write audio files of various formats with that sampling rate and bit depth, but I have no idea what number space and sampling rate is used for internal calculations

    "3)5.1 mixing??" - there is no obvious support in kdenlive for more than stereo, but the underlying MLT framework seems to support multi channel audio, and you can read from or write to multichannel audio formats, so there might be a chance that at least passing through such data is possible - haven't tried that.

  • @karl

    Guys. Numbered list is easy.

    1. Like
    2. this

    Just 1) Not 2) This

    1. I think I'll install kdenlive on a box this weekend in between filling out job applications.
    2. I love linux.
    3. Lists are easy.
  • Good news: Not only is there a new version of kdenlive available, this is also the very first version of kdenlive to also run on Windows, and it's available in distribution-independent packages like "AppImage".

  • Big update to Kdenlive released. Version 20.04.0b.

    Although the software is free, it has some of the professional features that you'd find in Premiere Pro from what I've read. I have not used it yet. I hear the Linux version is a little better than the Windows version. It has motion tracking, multi-cam editing and batch audio alignment (Automatically aligns video clips to an audio file) just to name a few.

    https://kdenlive.org/en/2020/04/kdenlive-20-04-is-out/