How to Browse for Files to Upload Kdenlive

GNU/Linux has infamously been wanting for a good, solid, professional-level free video editor for years. There have been glimpses of promise here and there, just by and large the editors that take the look and experience of a professional awarding are prone to blockbuster-worthy crashes, and those that have been stable have more often than not been stable because they don't really do anything beyond very basic editing. Kdenlive changes all of that.

Read the other parts in this series:
Function 2: Advanced editing technique
Function iii: Effects and transitions
Part 4: Coior correction
Part 5: All about audio
Part 6: Workflow and determination

At the movie product facility at which I work, Kdenlive is the Linux editor in production apply, and information technology performs (and frequently out-performs) the Mac boxes in cost, budget, flexibility, speed, and stability. This article series seeks to illuminate for professional editors how Kdenlive can replace proprietary tools, about as a drop-in replacement.

A good video editor is one that is suitable for anyone wanting to edit video, with powerful features that enable the video professional person to practise any task required of the task, however with the simplicity that allows a hobbyist to quickly cutting together footage off of a telephone or bespeak-and-click camera. Kdenlive can exist both of those things, just regardless of the scope of your video project, there are right and wrong ways of doing things. Over the form of five articles, nosotros will review the practical usage and the common set up of best practices that volition ensure your projects are successful.

Installing

Kdenlive is a complex install, no question most it. It requires the MLT backend to deal with multimedia, and for maximum compatibility with all possible video codecs, it wants as many video decoding and encoding libraries that you can maybe throw at it.

The easiest fix, plainly, is to but use the Kdenlive version provided by your repository. The watershed release for Kdenlive, in terms of stability and feature-completeness, was the 0.8 release; all major distributions currently provide 0.8 or in a higher place in their official repositories, their "official unofficial" add-on repos, or build services (like Slackbuilds, AUR, et cetera).

First launch

During the showtime launch, Kdenlive will perform checks to discover what video codecs and sources it has available to it. You lot'll exist given the chance to rectify anything you may have neglected to install.

The usual advice about troubleshooting applies--last month while setting up a Fedora xv editing workstation, at that place was an error with the MLT-SDL module, causing the new install of Kdenlive to not launch. A quick Internet search for the issue provided the solution, and we were upwardly and running in no time.

Yous'll likewise be asked to create a default Kdenlive project folder. This isn't anything you'll exist locked into later, and in fact it's often all-time to split projects to distinct directories, but choosing a sane default ensures that you lot don't inadvertently dump important project files out into random folders without realizing information technology.

Your workspace

Kdenlive uses Qt4 for its interface, so customization is easy. It'south pretty common for video editors to utilise a darkened theme to emphasize the video rather than distract the center with a brilliant glowing interface (besides, the night theme helps during color correction). To change the theme of Kdenlive, use Settings Card > Themes. The available themes come up from the bachelor KDE4 themes, which you lot'll discover in your Organisation Settings.

Since I am frequently editing late into the night, I employ the default theme during most of the edit (I notice the low-cal from the monitor precludes me from having to turn on a desk lamp and still prevents me from blindly knocking over my java) only during colour correction, the bright theme is distracting. Good neutral themes for color work are Obsidian Declension or Wonton Soup.

Y'all'll probably want to use Kdenlive in full-screen fashion (a near-kiosk way is available by correct-clicking on the window's title bar and selecting Fullscreen), but within its principal window at that place are several dissimilar components. These sections tin exist popped out of the main window, tabbed, rearranged, and floated. All available components of Kdenlive's visual workspace tin can be seen via its View menu.

The layout of Kdenlive is up to you lot and your own work style. Y'all may choose to emulate the default layout of any video editor you lot might exist used to, or you may find a layout that works ameliorate for yous. Once you've created one that you lot similar, y'all can save information technology via View Menu > Save Layout As.

A typical layout will take at to the lowest degree these panels:

• The Project Tree: otherwise known as a "bin" or "clip browser" in other video editors.
• Clip Monitor: a identify to preview raw footage earlier commiting information technology to the terminal edit.
• Project Monitor: a place to watch your edited footage.
• Timeline: the destination for all selected clips you use in your project.

We'll review what each of these panels is used for and how to use them, but showtime let's import some footage.

Importing footage

Before importing footage, you should salve your project. This may seem foreign given that your project is currently empty, simply giving your workspace a proper noun and location on your hard drive will establish the default skeletal construction for all Kdenlive projects. Kdenlive, like most professional-form editors, generates lots of cache files and metadata. Starting your work without determining a identify for all those temporary files to go merely ways that yous'll exist dumping temp files into your default kdenlive directory and so abandoning them once you save.

Save your examination project in its own subdirectory. I generally keep my Kdenlive projection directories in a ~/kdenlive directory, with the default location beingness its own subdirectory called ~/kdenlive/default. This tends to work quite well and lends itself to beingness able to off-load former projects onto backup drives without worrying virtually whether or not that project is really self-contained or whether I need to search through files to locate dependent media. Keeping the projects self-contained, even if information technology means replicating media, is quite liberating and should be used unless you are working in an infrastructure with stores of shared media that don't need to be saved along with your project data.

Creating a standard path for your projects is also helpful in the event that you need to migrate projects from one organization to another. If the file paths are always ~/kdenlive/project-name, so Kdenlive losing track of media files is less likely. The path of your default Kdenlive projection folder can always be inverse via Project Menu > Project Settings > Project folder.

Now that you've saved your projection, yous tin can import footage. At that place are several ways to exercise this, and Kdenlive can handle them all. Since almost cameras record to solid-state media now, "importing" footage often consists of footling more than putting your camera into USB storage manner, plugging it into your calculator, and dragging and dropping the camera's directory tree to your Kdenlive project folder. Notation that carrying over the unabridged directory tree is essential, since many cameras use circuitous muxed formats that crave metadata nearly the clips in order to really play the clips. Do NOT just drag over the "Streams" or "Clips" binder.

Once you lot've copied the footage to your harddrive, y'all can add those clips to your Kdenlive project via Project Bill of fare > Add together Clip (or past correct-clicking in the Project Tree and selecting Add Clip). You may be notified by Kdenlive that the current project setting is non the same equally the footage that you've just imported. This is telling you that your project setting has defaulted to, for instance, DV NTSC only that yous've just imported CIF sized clips.

If this is the case, then you should accept Kdenlive'southward offer to change the project contour to match your clips. It'southward best to edit in a native surround and perform any transcoding only when exporting, so regardless of what you really intend to create, you should attempt to edit in the format that you shot, or else transcode up-front end (a topic we'll cover in more than detail in Article 5 of this serial). Otherwise, you'll be capturing footage from some external source, similar a tape-based camera, or even, in theory, a webcam. All of these options are accessible via the View Menu > Record Monitor.

The Record Monitor is a robust video capture frontend. It currently defaults to Firewire and will warn y'all if dvgrab is not installed on your organisation, but don't panic--you tin change this. Click the wrench icon to configure what backend Record Monitor attempts to utilize.

The configuration card for Record Monitor should give you a pick between Firewire (dvgrab), Video4Linux (USB and, accordingly, built-in webcams on laptops), Screen Catch (via RecordMyDesktop), and fifty-fifty third-party capture cards. Cull the appropriate back end.

One time you've ready the default capture device, return to the Tape Monitor and select from the pop-up menu on the lower right the back end you'd like to use. You may need to click the "Connect" button on the left of Tape Monitor in gild to bring the capture device online. Finally, press the Play button to preview the external video, and Tape to save information technology to your hard drive.

3-bespeak editing

The editing process was invented and refined more than than 100 years ago and is still just as applicable as always. The first of these editing principles that we have inherited from men and women dealing with hundreds of anxiety of celluloid picture is the three-point edit.

To perform a basic edit in your footage, click on a prune in your Project Tree. It appears in the Prune Monitor for you to preview. This is akin to a film editor taking a strip of motion picture from the moving-picture show bin and running it through a Moveola (a small, hand-cranked, personal picture projector).

In one case you lot've played the prune past the introductory footage (actors getting set for their shot, the clapboard or slate, and so on), set an "In" indicate for that prune past hitting the "i" key on your keyboard. Let the clip to continue playing until you find the terminate of the action you lot want to use in the clip. Mark "Out" with the "o" key on your keyboard. You've just set the starting time two points in your three-signal edit.

The third point is where in your timeline the clip should appear. If this is the first clip in your movie, then probably the logical place for it would be 00:00:00:00, i.due east., the very beginning of your timeline. To practice this quickly, press "v," which volition drop the video between the In and Out points of your prune into the selected Video track of your Timeline (past default, this will be Video Track ane, simply you can select a different one by clicking the track label on the left of the Timeline). On many other video editors, the video playhead in the Timeline determines where the clip is dropped. In Kdenlive, y'all go a dedicated target tool for this purpose, meaning that you needn't movement your playhead from its parked position just to drib in a new clip. The target tool appears equally a modest white box in the height SMPTE ruler bar of the timeline.

You lot can also practise a drag-and-drop add by grabbing the video thumbnail from the Prune Monitor and dragging information technology downward to the Timeline.

The basic tools

There are three basic tools in Kdenlive: the Select Tool (due south), the Razor Tool (10), and the Spacer Tool (m). This is a fairly standard, albeit basic, toolset. There is no ripple edit tool, gyre edit, or any of the power-user tools that some editors might have get accustomed to on other editing systems, only I've constitute that adapting to the simplified toolset is almost natural. For the amount of use virtually of the specialized tools actually get, information technology's probably difficult to justify maintaining the associated code. I noticed the lack of some specialized edit tools when I outset launched Kdenlive, just in practise haven't fifty-fifty noticed them missing.

The Select Tool is exactly what you'd expect: click to select a clip, drag to movement a clip. Use the it for related tasks as well, such as selecting the active track, creating Guides and Markers, extending or shortening video clips in the timeline, control-clicking to select multiple clips at one time, so on.

The Razor Tool creates splices in a video region in the timeline. In theory this isn't really a necessary tool, since you could always just use the Select Tool to shorten a video clip manually, but in practice, information technology's nice to be able to target a bespeak at which you wish to cut out or in, make a splice, and then delete the backlog footage. If yous practice shorten a clip with the Razor Tool and delete the excess footage that you've just sliced off, you volition be left with a gap between your new out point and the starting time of the next clip in the timeline. To get rid of this empty space, you can right-click on it and select Remove Space. Note that yous demand to Remove Infinite on both the Video Runway and the Sound Track if y'all are using separate audio.

Rather than using the Remove Space function, you could manually move the video and audio regions over using the Space Tool. This tool simply selects everything to the correct of where you click, i.e., it selects all video and audio regions in the future and allows you to either move them to the left or correct in your timeline. It's a mutual task, although unforunately the Infinite Tool is quite rigid in how it selects. It volition select and move every media region on every rail. Should you always determine that you want to select all regions on, for instance, only track one, and so yous'll need to either lock all other tracks, or y'all'll need to zoom out and merely use your Select Tool to manually select the regions you want to grab.

Conclusion

Kdenlive excels at a very difficult task: importing media from a myriad different sources, organizing them into projects, and allowing them to exist manipulated in whatever variety of ways. It'south user-friendly, powerful, simple, and yet capable of then much. It is easily a drop-in replacement for manufacture-standard video editors, as y'all shall continue to discover in the forthcoming articles in this serial.

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Source: https://opensource.com/life/11/11/introduction-kdenlive

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