10 mo. ago • 97%

Linux video editing and Kdenlive tips and tricks for a returning user?

Just recently switched back to Linux after more than a decade away. (I'm currently running Mint Cinnamon if anyone is curious) On Windows I was using the free version of Davinci Resolve for all of my video editing. I quickly discovered that the free version of Resolve for Linux doesn't support H.264/H.265 so after trying every Linux video editor I could find (even Blender) I've settled on using Kdenlive. I've been having a good time getting everything dialed in and learning Kdenlive. I was able to get hardware acceleration working with my Nvidia GPU, and I really appreciated that it could natively utilize the proxy clips that my DJI Action 3 generates when recording. I've been reading all kinds of tips and tricks articles but most of it is just basic stuff. Anyone using Kdenlive have more advanced tips to share? Particularly anything around title generation and animation as I've found Kdenlive's system to be a little clunky. Let's talk!

26 comments

It might be quite hard to give full tutorials - I suppose it depends a little on what you're trying to do - and are your titles intro sequences or other onscreen graphics etc?

The titler within Kdenlive is perfectly functional for static text/shape work, but you may find it easier to produce things externally - I certainly found myself producing the majority of titles in Inkscape - both onscreen graphics and intro pages etc. Basic stuff, i just put the full page in, faded in and out as appropriate. Kdenlive will take SVG and PNG, so you've got transparency for different layers of title component.

For bits with moving/sliding/fading components (like in an interview, a coloured bar slides onto the screen in the bottom left, then the person's name fades in, then their position/workplace fades in, then it all fades out together) - I'd do those with individual components in Inkscape, imported as separate svg files and layered up in Kdenlive, then individually positioned, cut and faded in/out as separate clips (My timelines are normally 8-10 tracks high).

More complex motion graphic work I used to render out in Blender, but I think these days I'd probably use Natron for some of it.

Also, copy and paste as much as possible - work with reusable templates where you can.

If you've got a better idea of what sort of thing you're aiming for (maybe an example of what you want to (re)create?) - I might be able to offer a few pointers at least :)

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- Yeah, the Kdenlive titler is perfectly workable, and I've already created a template or two for quick re-usability. I was being a bit nit-picky ecause everything else has honestly been great. I guess I'm just more used to Resolve where you can have premade title templates that have their own animations already built-in and dynamically adjust to the size of the content. This makes adding titles a snap as opposed to Kdenlive where I have to add my template, then add the content, then manually resize the elements to fit the content then add to the timeline and finally apply animations. What takes maybe 30 seconds in Resolve can be a 3-5 min job in Kdenlive. This could probably be cut-down a lot as I become more efficient though. My title needs aren't really that complicated.
  
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  I've been using Glaxnimate which integrates with Kdenlive. It's a tool for animating SVG elements. It's a bit clunky I find but it's nice in that you can have shapes and text follow animation path with different time curves. It can be used directly from Kdenlive which is pretty cool.
  
  As for other tips, one I use a lot is Timeline Preview Rendering. If you have a whole pile of effects, playing in the project monitor can become very choppy. With the prerendering, you can just render that section and it will play smooth while still allowing you do edit the audio.
  
  Finally, for getting the footage from clips, I use I and O to set the start and end of a part of the clip I want and then with Ctrl+I I can create a zone that shows up in the Project bin. I use that a lot to get the fragments I want first and then build the fill timeline later.
  
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  I would say one of the few downsides Kdenlive has is the lack of the premade templates. I feel like there's gotta be a site out there for those premade templates that us hobbyists can download and use, but hopefully they'll just bake that in directly in the future.
  
  The other issue I have is the effects plugins aren't always up-to-date, so not all plugins work with the latest version.
  
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  I get what you mean - it's quite "roll your own" rather than "pre-made" - and the same for quite a few of the effects and motion settings.
  
  Note that you can save template versions of effects or motion settings if you need, so after you've used it a while, you might have a reasonable library of things you need - but you're right, there's a bit of a lack of "drop in, ready to go", particularly for quick titles.
  
  Something like a "jiggly funky colourful text shaking about" effect can be a day's work, rather than a 2 minute "write your own text with this pre-made sequence".
  
  Just in case they're useful, there are a set of downloadable templates Kdenlive downloadable titles here, but I'm not sure it's quite going to cover what you're after - but worth a browse in case.
  
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Davinci Resolve doesn’t support H.264 or H.265 on Linux??? I was planning on installing it soon, that’ll be a huge problem for me…

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- Correct. I was disappointed to find this out as well. Supposedly it's due to these codecs requiring a paid license to use. With windows the license cost is baked into the cost of the windows license itself, but of course that doesn't exist with Linux. It CAN work on Linux if you purchase the studio version of Resolve, but I wasn't ready to shell out $300 for a video editor when I'm only producing content for Youtube as a hobby and for the fun of it.
  
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Completely tangential tip, but in the very-limited video editing I've done recently: I've used Davinci Resolve, rendered as .mov, and then used ffmpeg to render to my actual desired format. e.g. h264 w/ aac audio so I can upload to Youtube:

ffmpeg -i input.mov -c:v libopenh264 -profile:v high -c:a aac -pix_fmt yuv420p output.mp4

I do think that finding the right flags to pass to ffmpeg is a cursed art. Do I need to specify the video profile and the pix_fmt? I don't know; I thought I did when I adventured to collect these flags. Though maybe it's just a reflection of the video-codec horrors lurking within all video rendering pipelines.

edit: there may also be nvidia-accelerated encoders, like h264_nvenc, see ffmpeg -codecs 2>/dev/null | grep -i 'h\.264'. I'm not sure if the profile:v and pix_fmt options apply to other encoders or just libopenh264.

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- using openh264... well that's a choice. I would recommend to everyone that they use x264 whenever possible, and make sure to specify output crf and likely preset when you fo
  
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  thanks, I'll try out the libx264 encoder next time
  
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- haha, yeah figuring out those ffmpeg flags is an absolute nightmare. My problem there isn't so much the output format from Resolve, but source format I'm using. My camera only has the option to record in H.264/H.265 (consumer grade, what can you expect?) which Resolve can't properly import on Linux. I could take the time to transcode them with ffmpeg before editing, but I'm usually working with ~2 hours worth of video per project and I don't really want to wait all day for a transcode job to finish before I can even begin editing. On top of that my camera (rather neatly) generates its own proxy files while recording, and I've found leveraging these is necessary for getting good timeline performance on my aging rig. Now I could let Resolve generate its own proxy clips like I have in the past, but that's more time waiting around before editing. I was SUPER stoked to see Kdenlive can natively utilize the proxy clips my camera generates.
  
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  Oh wow, I didn't know (free) Davinci didn't support using H.264 as source media, that feels rather limited.
  
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For anyone who's curious, I went ahead and created a "default" project with the title I normally use already setup on the timeline. That way when I start a new project I can just copy the default template and my title with animations is already there ready to go. Just need to modify the text and it's good. It's not a perfect solution, and certainly wouldn't work for someone who desires to use different or multiple titles per project, but it's good enough for me. Here's what it looks like: https://youtu.be/dlGUT0c46Ts

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- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  
  https://piped.video/dlGUT0c46Ts
  
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
  
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- Nicely done :)
  
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@remindme@programming.dev 2 days

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