3w ago

When did Kdenlive get so good?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32192355

Just found out about this guy on YouTube named Nuxttux because I've been trying to make some social media videos.
Kdenlive is a completely different beast than the one that I remember using a couple of years ago. It has so much functionality in it, like all the "TikTok effects", proxy clips, rendering previews, visualizing effect curves between keyframes... like damn. This is actually legit software now for my basic needs.
The thing is, it seems like these were all added in the past 2 years, because I had 23.x installed through the Debian repo and I upgraded through Flatpak to 24.12 and it seems to have added all of these?
Anyway holy shit. Go give these guys some money. This is game changing

32 comments

Does not not constantly crash anymore? That's the only feature I want. I don't do a lot of video editing but for the every-now-and-then scenario I have it always crashes at least once...
- They wanted people switching over from big name software to feel right at home
- I was seeing a lot of crashes two or three years ago, but none in the past year or so.
- I do a fair amount of video editing with it, and I haven't had it crash once, in Windows or Linux, in years now.
- The Flatpak version is solid so far
- Same here, I'm not a pro but I tried few years ago and it wasn't that stable. Now I can't remember the last time it did crash on me, kudos to people behind Kdenlive!

Yes! I had the exact same thought after I got my Steam Deck and started using Arch again about a year ago. I remember it being clunky and awful, but now it's so smooth and simple.
Granted I don't do anything crazy, I pretty much just load a clip, SHIFT+R at a few time stamps, and render a new file. Maybe add a dissolve or fade. There wasn't really much that could even do this simple stuff well before KDEnlive beefed up, at least not that I used.

Kdenlive has always been good for me, but I prefer shotcut. It seems simpler for the smaller edits I do
- Shotcut does not work on Linux.
  
  Shotcut definitely works with Linux. Flatpak, Snap, Appimage, Tarball you choose.
  
  What distro? Works fine on mine
  
  Fake news.
  
  It does

Thanks for sharing the channel, I checked one of those tutorials (I can't watch more rn) and it's very well made, putting the end result right at the start, bringing up special considerations like watching for lighting changes or cloud movements in background footage.
By the way, what kind of "TikTok effects" are you talking about? Dynamic transitions and shaky-cam effects, or other things too?
- I think they're referring to the how to make a tiktok style edit tutorial video on the Youtube he linked. It's pretty good, ngl, although i'd much rather than fade out, overlay the alternative clips by a few frames, then fade out and in usinc either cubic out/cubic in, or a combination of exponential and cubic. Gives it a more seamless transition imo.

Our family does a reasonable amount of editing in kdenlive every week (youtube, education etc). A decade or so ago practically every video editor on linux felt incredibly unstable. I remember trying to work in Cinelerra. Now shit just works. There are a couple of things in the workflow that still need other tools but kdenlive has been fairly solid. It could do with some minor usability tweaks to make it friendlier to people coming from other editors and for beginners. Also I wish the gpu acceleration (movit) was stable enough to be enabled in MLT in kdenlive builds. Focussing on stability makes sense though.

Davinic is paid but its a one time fee and pretty solid on linux, no issues transitioning for the modst part, some reactor plugins are incompatible like shaderotoys
- (reactor used to be free and would extend it a lot only works on studio now) btw I pirated it, its very easy to do on linux just one reddit post where you copy and paste 3 commands into the terminal after downloading the official studio version from their site, eventually I might buy some hardware from them for around 300 since you get free studio with it.
- DaVinci Resolve also has a free version that's a fully-featured editor with nothing locked behind a paywall, the benefit from buying the paid version is you get an actual upgrade in functionality over the already-pretty-powerful free version.
  However it's still a proprietary app so if that bothers you, then KdenLive seems like a good FOSS alternative to that.
  
  It has plenty of nodes locked behind a paywall like magic mask, they also recentlly locked reactor, the community made plugins, behind a paywall (I still think its worth it, especially if you buy hardware for editing, the studio license comes with it)

I just make little videos for myself a couple times a year. So I'm far from a pro. But holy shit kdenlive and blender are powerful programs (blender moreso, but kden is still pretty cool)
- Same, for quick-and-easy hobby work, it's a great tool. Sometimes I will be surprised by looking up a video effect and seeing it can be done in kdenlive.
  A few years back there was a bug with my set-up where it would crash when moving clips a certain way, but once that was solved, kdenlive has been smooth sailing for me.

Sadly kdenlive is still extremely buggy and slow for me.
Even when using proxy clips which are an absolute necessity to get decent performance I still can't edit at decent performance. This is on a ryzen 2600 and arc a380 which has no problems with other tools even when editing 4k timelines so long as I use low impact codecs on the timeline.
The insane amount of crashes it has makes it really hard to use, I can get by using autosave but its more tedious then it is worth. I keep coming back and trying kdenlive, but I can just never use it. I hope it does good eventually, but for the forseeable future I dont see that happening.
- Is that with flatpak?
  
  I have tried both flatpak as well as native and via wine

I've been using it for nearly a year now. It's not perfect and has given me a little grief from time to time. But it gets the job done

Proxy clips are new? My poor VM in Qubes couldn't do video editing without them

32 comments