I’m using kdenlive to edit footage from my team’s volleyball games. We have two cameras set up, a wide-angle and a narrow FOV camera. Each game takes about 20 minutes. My goal is to take the two ~20 minute recordings and trim out the fluff so I have a ~5 minute video from the wide angle camera (track 2), with cuts to the narrow FOV camera for replays (usually track 1 for synchronization but I’ll put a segment in track 3 for a replay) when something cool happened. I have a process that works, but it’s got some issues and I want to know if anyone can suggest improvements. What I do is:
- Put each recording on a video track in the timeline
- Audio align them
- Watch the wide-angle video and add guides at the start and end of each point with numpad *
- Go to each guide with ctrl+right arrow and cut both tracks with ctrl+shift+r
- Manually select and delete every other segment, where we’re setting up between each point
- In each gap, Remove Space in All Tracks by clicking a gap and using the keyboard shortcut I set up. I’d think I could ctrl+right arrow to each guide marking the end of a point and Remove Space in All Tracks there, but that for some reason moves guides to random places as the clips move.
- Watch and mark cool plays that I want a replay of with a different guide category
- After a segment with a cool point, use the Spacer tool to add space to both tracks.
- Select the narrow FOV segment where something cool happened and Save Segment to Bin.
- Move the newly saved segment from the bin down to the third video track and set its length
- Use the Spacer to move track 1 and 2 to abut the end of the replay.
The problem I’ve run into is that it requires a lot of keystrokes, or worse, mouse movement, to
-go to each guide and cut the tracks in step 4
-make the manual selections to delete the fluff segments in step 5
-Remove Spaces in All Tracks in all the new gaps in step 6
I imagine there are a ton of better workflows for this, but I haven’t seen enough of the program to know what they are. This is the first thing I’ve found that works; if you’re wondering why I’m not doing xyz when it would be so much easier, it’s because I don’t know about it, so please share!
Also, I imagine this is a stretch, but it would be cool to have a scoreboard text in the corner. Is there any sort of API or extensibility that would let me set some variable in each segment, e.g. if a Category 3 guide is there we won the point, else the other team won the point, and so generate a scoreboard appropriately?
Example image of my timeline when I’ve finished editing below:
