As a photographer, what would you like your video editor to have?

Lounge
1

Is there any feature you’d like to see implemented?

Edit: I am a Kdenlive community member and can try to take this to the devs if any cool ideas come up.

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2

I’m trying to think of good use-cases that a phtoographer normally would have for approaching video editing. Besides the usual type of work (BTS filming, tutorials, etc), I can think of a couple. (Keep in mind that I don’t currently use kdenlive personally.)

  1. Time-lapse videos. It might be neat to accommodate in some way the creation of a video using multiple images. There have been a couple of examples lately of course, but perhaps some sort of deeper integration or snatching some code for deflickering, etc…?

  2. One that I think would be nice is possibly supporting the creation of slideshows automatically? Not just autoscaling image sequences with timings and the usual fade options, but including pan+zoom across an image at 1:1 scale or so? Our images are usually much, much larger than a video canvas frame. I can see a use-case for creating a video slideshow of images that was more than just a rotating series of images + wipes. Rather, allowing control of the virtual ‘canvas’ across an image + zoom.
    This is something I do now with Blender without too much trouble, but I imagine it would be quite interesting for others to have this (assuming it doesn’t already exist). I’d be happy to elaborate more if I’m not making any sense…

3

Metadata is always important for me, e.g. creation date. Looks like there are some many places you can save the date in (see the list below) and different software saves it in a different tag. I wish I was able to actually choose where to save. Example: knowing that Lightroom reads the date from ContentCreateDate I would save it there if I used Lightroom; for digikam I would write another tag, etc. Besides the dates I also do star ratings, keywords and geolocation on my video files. I would like to be able to read and write them.

MediaCreateDate
MediaModifyDate
QuickTime:CreateDate
QuickTime:ModifyDate
TrackCreateDate
TrackModifyDate
FileCreateDate
FileModifyDate
DateTimeDigitized
CreateDate
DateTime
DateTimeOriginal
ModifyDate
ContentCreateDate
EncodingTime

Besides the metadata, I would like to be able to clip on the fly (similar to what GoPro Studio allows you to do). You can just watch video, click “start”…“end”, start…end which sends them to some sort of the clipboard on the right. After you done you can click Apply and do something else while the program saving the clips to the designated folder.

4

I’d want Filmulation in video. I tried it once with Magic Lantern raw video and it worked but video was just too tedious and took too much space for me to deal with and I basically stopped shooting video entirely.

5

Less crashing and some ui polish would be good for starters?

Auto aligning of (external) audio to the camera audio is another nice feature.

Integration with natron would be another very nice thing to have, which could then be a way to integrate some other features I miss like retiming (like twixtor, using something better than frame blending), compensation for rolling shutter and better stabilization. All of them can be built on the same base which is optical flow estimation. All of it is very handy when working with action cam and/or drone footage.

Color matching for multi cam setups is another thing.

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6

Automated would be even slicker. Basically look for a colorchecker of some sort in-frame, then auto correct to match.

7

Farid

Thanks for the thread

I know I am taking it off at a tangent slightly, but it still sits under the “video editor” tag …

I really like creating AV’s (still pictures to music) with nice transitions, titles etc. and the last time I looked at doing this through Kdenlive it seemed a tad difficult and was more a sledgehammer to crack a nut approach.

If you could make it so that the AV creation is simpler then that would be awesome.

Kdenlive is however a fabulous piece of software , so respect to those of you who develop it.

My last few AV’s I’ve done through “Imagination”

Thanks for the thread

Phil

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1- I would definitely like to hear more about the timelipse workflow. A while ago i tried a darktable/ffmpeg script if i remember correctly to do a timelipse but it would be much better using a gui.

2- Do you mean something like this?

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Does this help?

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Imo it is better to separate the editing from the post-processing/color correction/vfx so that would be a better task for Blender or Natron.

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+1 I think all the video editing programs are trying to be stable. For Kdenlive specifically they have fixed almost always all the bugs i have reported.

Definitely, that is in the roadmap for the future.

Integration via EDL with Natron/Blender is my dream.

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This is a better task for Blender or Natron imo.

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So what where your difficulties? Also which version of Kdenlive and which OS are you using?

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1- I would definitely like to hear more about the timelipse workflow. A while ago i tried a darktable/ffmpeg script if i remember correctly to do a timelipse but it would be much better using a gui.

I’m couriers which script have you used, and what kind of GUI do you need? I wrote this darktable time-laps script some time ago.:
https://github.com/darktable-org/lua-scripts/blob/master/contrib/video_mencoder.lua

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With a gui in a video editor you can easily pan or zoom also it is “more accessible” to people. It would be cool at least to have a gui in darktable for this.

I will check out you script, the one I tried way way back is this one:

https://code.google.com/archive/p/timelapse-darktable/

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Yep - that’s the effect (though maybe some better timings on those pans :wink: ).