Kdenlive playtime


Over the weekend I have been testing Kdenlive, a multi track video editor for Linux, made curious by some positive recommendations and reviews saying that Kdenlive “is a really good application as it stands, and if it continues to be developed in the same fashion as it is at the moment, it will be a fantastic tool for those who want to edit their home movies on linux.”

I downloaded it through this page; (looked for my distribution and followed instructions), launched it, imported some clips and gave it a go.

The wiki of Kdenlive and the Sourceforge page shed light on its features, capabilities, and roadmap to the future. Many sources mentioned the software is (not yet) a finished product, and warn for it’s instability, which was good to know before I started.

There are many attractive sides to Kdenlive: it works smart with its (ffmpeg) encoder, allowing for a fluent output to many different video formats (real, avi, mp4, mpeg) in a choice of qualities. The interface of Kdenlive is easy and intuitive. Its strongest point is the fact that it offers multi track editing through a simple interface.
Another good feature is that it supports different import formats in the same projects. This however is also a weak point: importing 3 or 4 different image types already crashed my project.
There are funny small bugs. Drag a clip into the timeline, drag it to the left. You will notice that is possible to loose the entire clip beyond the 0 point of the counter.
Kdenlive is a promising project. Lets keep an eye on it and hopefully many developers will dedicate energy to refining and stabilising the software so it will be fit for use a.s.a.p.


Here is a (3 mb) mpeg video fragment which I worked on …
In the time it took to bricolage these few seconds together, I counted 9 software crashes.

Posted on: Sunday, April 8, 2007 by: in category: Editing software