Hey folks, if you use Kdenlive please share your behind the scenes footage/images for a campaign we are launching.
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I am not, but I would love to.
I run a small youtube channel so video editing is something I need to to. And for that I use DaVinci Resolve, which is the single closed-source piece of software that I use and that is not for lack of trying or not wanting.
I have tried Kdenlive on multiple occasions these last three years, and each time it has left a bitter taste in my mouth. It handles audio terribly, it glitches on cuts. It crashes a lot. It’s sluggish, it’s slow and it’s laggy. It renders video in three to four times the time it takes Resolve on the same hardware (and yes, I did use hardware acceleration). Aesthetically it’s ugly as sin, it just has this amateurish, unrefined vibe to it that simply makes it a nightmare to use.
Maybe someday…
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Cool, let me know if I can somehow help you.
Thanks for the feedback. I use it almost everyday for work or fun and although it is not perfect I can get the job done. 
Do note that you can’t really compare it to Resolve which is a HUGE corporation with full time paid devs while Kdenlive is developed by a couple of people on their free time. Every 4 months there is a release and a lot of progress.
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I realize I may have come across as overly harsh… most people that know me tell me I can be tactless.
In all fairness it has been close to a year since I last tried Kdenlive. I might give it another go soon.
Hello, I don’t agree at all with @zerosapte. A couple of months ago I was asked to make a diaporama/slide show based on old photographs and annotated with texts and audio (interviews with former factory workers).
I never used a video editor before and decided to use Kdenlive because it’s in the repos. There were others as well, but they didn’t please me at first sight. It took me about two days to find out how things worked.
The result was a 12 minute avi shown at an exposition that generated lots of compliments. So - job done.
About crashes, uglyness, bad audio and sluggishness - I suppose I used another version of Kdenlive because I didn’t experience these things. Apart from some crashes with the software from the repo, but that was solved by installing the latest AppImage version.
Oh, and one visitor who saw my diaporama asked me to make another one for her, we took this morning photos of her very nice collages, about migration. Of course I’ll make that one with Kdenlive as well!
Jesus Christ, people. This seems like an instance to keep your negativity to yourself.
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Coincidentally, last week I was asked by wife to rescue a video she and colleagues produced from some academic presentation, around one and a half hour footage.
I knew Kdenlive from a few video edits I needed to make some ten years ago, so I decided to give it a try again.
It took me a couple of minutes to get (re)aquaintted with it (by watching a video tutorial on the site), and I must say that, so far, I’m very pleased with it, either aesthetically as well as performance wise.
Oh, and I was really curious about the Color tools, given the numerous discussions here in the forum about the subject, although that’s a thing outside the scope of my “current assignment”
DISCLAIMER: As it’s already clear, I’m no video professional at all.
PS: @frd nice videos, specially the fun ones! They remind me some conceptual art videos I saw back in the nineties.
You must be new here.
I couldn’t share anything but I could tell you what I use it for.
I have been using it since the project started for cutting and refactoring videos and their audio made by myself or from other sources.
I have added subtitles/captions and remixed audio using other specialized software if I had trouble with kdenlive proper.
kdenlive’s stability has evolved over the years between unusable/frustrating to just-works. It seemed spiffy last time I checked about a year or so ago.
I mostly use it for my nonprofit volunteer roles where part of my goal is to make videos that are (actually) accessible and didactic for challenging children and youth.
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I can as well only tell what I used kdenlive for as in all cases the footage cannot be published for various reasons.
- My biggest project so far: I filmed the christmas musical of my son’s kindergarten (which also has a day care/after school group – main (solo) actors were therefore school kids aged 6 to 9, but smaller roles also younger kids aged 4 to 5, and the choir was formed from all actors) a couple of years ago, 7 cameras, each delivering 3 hours of footage. 5 of the cameras were fix, and 2 hand cameras by me and my wife. Audio was recorded in multiple tracks, the 3 main actors had wireless headset microphones, the rest shared another wireless hand microphone and I had additional microphones for the ambient sounds etc. Audio post processing in ardour, and cutting and color grading in kdenlive. I was able to bring it down to less than 45 minutes, which I think is OK for a children’s musical. Some of the actors were very talented, and I initially did a mix of the choir which emphasized the voices that were hitting the right tones, but then my wife gave feedback that I should not make a biased mix and therefore I came up with something that is not as clean as the initial mix, but one can still enjoy the music. A fun project, but this also required a lot of time. The result was shown in the kindergarten and also handed out to all families with involved children.
- Another project I did in kdenlive is a 5 minute technical video for my employer which is scripted as an interview situation. A colleague and I are discussing a technical topic in the lab, where you can see the running experiment in the background – 3 cameras and some simulation result footage as screencast. This was on the intranet start page of 80k people for several days. We had the challenge that we only had one running microphone as the second one was broken, such that we had to film this interview twice and I mixed the results later. Due to me being a bad actor, we ended up doing it like 20 times. It took one workday to film, and roughly 3 workdays for post.
- I did several private videos of & for my family as well.
I hope to be able to do more in the future.
I use kdenlive exclusively for video - ardour for audio.
These are final however - no behind the scene as I am the only one to take the video.
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That’s what I’ve found with Kdenlive. Shotcut however is painless, and easily supports NVEnc hardware video encoding.
At least for me, in a pinch, Kdenlive seems more dependable than Shotcut.
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Mind you, it could be the fact that I’ve been using Kdenlive on non KDE / QT based distros…
The last time I used Kdenlive was on Mint Xfce and Windows 10. Must have done something right when installing KDE/Qt. Windows binaries come prepackaged.