Kdenlive rocks!
written on Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Last weekend my daugther participated in her first school race. She performed well and enjoyed it quite a lot. As a loving dad, I was there to record the performance with my video camera.
Not willing to bore relatives to death...Since I pity those who get trapped into watching raw video footage (it's even worse than raw photo footage, isn't it?), I decided to create a simple montage to make it more enjoyable. I remembered playing with Kdenlive back in the KDE3 days, but haven't had the occasion to play with the KDE4 version. I was really pleasantly surprised. After closing a few docks (I like simplicity), the interface was quite enjoyable. I especially appreciated the subtle hover animations to add transitions and to crop a sequence.
I see white artefacts...It was all great except for one thing: the preview was filled with small white artefacts. I initially ignored it because I thought it was a tiny preview bug, but the artefacts were also present in the rendered video... After some googling, I found out it was a bug in mlt 0.5.4, a media toolkit used by Kdenlive and OpenShot, a video editor for GNOME. The reports indicated the bug was fixed in mlt git, so since I know a bit about packaging nowadays, I created an update of the libmlt 0.5.4 Ubuntu Lucid packages which can be found in my PPA (Personal Package Archive). Be warned though: it worked well for me, but I know just enough about packaging to be dangerous for myself and users of my PPA...
Success!So, except for those artefacts, which were not Kdenlive fault, it was a nice experience: the software was stable and responsive. I will certainly be editing more video footage later. Those interested can look at the result here. Note that it's not really a show-off of Kdenlive possibilities, only a few dissolves between sequences and a fade to black at the end.