As a user, I often feel overwhelmed when trying to use effects on Kdenlive as compared to few other video editors I have tried earlier. I have to try out the effects first to understand what each of the effect does or read about it online.
I’m planning to contribute further to Kdenlive by improving two areas that seem especially impactful for everyday users:
More ready-to-use presets (especially for content creators)
This would include:
Export presets for platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc.
Better documentation for effects
Many effects are powerful but not always easy to understand or use correctly. I’m thinking about creating clearer, more practical explanation within kdenlive about what each preset does.
Before I start working on this, I’d really like input from the community so this effort actually solves real problems.
A few questions:
Which effects in Kdenlive do you find confusing or poorly documented?
Are there effects you avoid using because they’re hard to understand?
What presets would save you the most time in your workflow?
Do you prefer written guides, short videos, or something integrated directly into the UI?
Any examples from other editors that you think Kdenlive does particularly well (or poorly)?
If you’ve run into friction while editing and using effects, I’d love to hear about it—specific pain points are especially helpful.
wow that would be awesome if you manage to create new presets.
For vertical content in a widescreen timeline(16:9) I copy my video and put it under. then I zoom in with transform to fill the black sides and then gaussian blurr. It would be nice if there is drag and drop preset to do this for noobies. Took me a while to learn this.
the other thing is the LUT effect with the possibility to change the strength of the lut. there is a way with mask and mask apply in a sandwhich style but I forget all the time.
some good audio effects to bring the audio from lets say -18db to -6 to-3. without going over 0. especially for voices without affecting the noisefloor too much.
nuxtux created some good presets and effect stacks.
I dont like kdenlives way of speedramping. the time tool is hard to use.
some cool titles would be nice
I have a hard time export my sony files to the final video without compressing it too much or with taking up too much space on the drive (lossless). There should be a good export preset for different quality requirements. To be more clear, I often have artefacts in the shadows. thats what I hate the most. When I am doing a huge lossless file, there are no new artefacts. thank you and have a great day
Hi @aivelon, and welcome to the forum and community.
I have seen your contributions to the repo - well done, and thank you very much for the great improvements you brought to Kdenlive!
Thanks for driving this initiative about effects and presets. Allow me a few thoughts:
Export presets for platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc.
This is available from KDE Store. We should encourage users to contribute presets via KDE Store. It promotes this platform, and also has other benefits. I’d rather have users provide their settings via such a platform than the Kdenlive team to maintain them. We may choose some good ones as defaults but I’d prefer crowd-sourcing this.
I would support a new category in KDE Store for that type of stuff. We could still incorporate very good ones in the Kdenlive builds (see above), but since this is very source, purpose, and user specific, I am a bit hesitant to make this defaults in Kdenlive.
What would help is making it easier to save entire effect chains and make them more independent from the clips they were created for (e.g. relative vs absolute key frames).
Also already available in the KDE Store. Again, sharing them is easy but adapting to different text sizes and lengths is the hard part. We need to work on the effects UI and how they are handled in Kdenlive to make it easier for users to work with such templates.
Better documentation for effects
That is, imo, where the online documentation comes into play. What would help is context-sensitive Help that brings up specific explanation/documentation from the online documentation. Think document once, use many.
We already have tooltips but there is only so much space, so I think that if a user can just press F1 while in an effect parameter field or right-click and select Help, and a window pops up with the relevant explanation from the online manual, that would go a long way.
LUT effect with the possibility to change the strength of the lut
That’s indeed a good feature request!
some good audio effects to bring the audio from lets say -18db to -6 to-3. without going over 0. especially for voices without affecting the noisefloor too much.
The upcoming 26.04 release will bring back many of the Steve Harris’ SWH Plugins. Perhaps there is one that does what you need.
some cool titles would be nice
Have you checked the KDE Store for that? There are some title templates and also project files for titles.
There should be a good export preset for different quality requirements. To be more clear, I often have artefacts in the shadows. thats what I hate the most. When I am doing a huge lossless file, there are no new artefacts.
You can create your own render presets/profiles for exactly that reason. And you can also upload them to KDE Store for others to download them directly from within Kdenlive.
Thanx i check out the pillar effect and try to create my own preset.
Do you guys have a suggestions for creating the render profile? The Sony is set to 100mb/s 4k. Just trial and error. Or is there a mathematical solution.
