Hi All, This is my first day with Kendilive. It looks so inviting and fun. I need help with Rendering. I am using a short 30 second 3840x2160 .mxf file that is simply a white star on a black background. It is an animation that starts with a full frameof black then ends as a star grows larger until the entire last frame is white.
But the star .mxf has no transparency.
In Kdenlive, I want to Render my anim into a new Prores 4444xq file where the Black background is fully transparent. and the white remains without any transparency. I will use this file for further compositing inside the program, but also in a separate program.
After reading the docs and searching online, I created a new Lossless/HQ Preset that I called Prores 4444, with
“profile=4444xq” added to Other > Additional Parameters:
It does work to render a .mov using 4444, but I cannot achieve the goal of having the black in my animation become transparent. I’ve tried so many ways, I’m just not delivering the output file with transparency that I need.
Any thoughts on this are most welcome! Please know that I appreciate any suggestions for accomplishing my file-output
Thanks for taking a look. I will move on and try your Advanced Chromna Key suggestion. I had been trying Lumakey, but I don’t understand exactly which toolsn to use. In a separate project, Itried making a Title with transparent bkd, but when I rendered it, it did not have transparency.
My guess: perhaps Kdenlive does not support Prores 4444xq yet? Or my profile needs to deal with “mlt” as noted in screenshot. THANKS!
Sadly, I’m not the kind of user that can comprehend or implement MELT parameters, on my own. I just want to find a working recipe to follow, if it exists.
I am however, very much wanting to Render my simple white on black animations ONLY to Prores 4444xq or Prores 4444. If I go into the Video with Alpha catergory, as you suggest, will I be offered a Prores 4444 option for UHD? If not, I am content to wait until there is a shared community posting of a profile that can do this. Thanks so much for your time. The program looks very well thought out and I like the feeling I get from it-- a important intangible. Good luck with it all!
My first goal was to learn how to deliver Prores 4444xq from Kdenlive, with transparency replacing my Black background. My second goal is to use Kdenlive to add pre-made fills to the White area with various different images, including rotoscoped fill footage that matches the shape and placement of my animated White areas, exactly. This is why I want the very best output, in Prores 4444.
If you really want the Very Best for post production use, you probably want to be using FFV1, since it’s actually lossless, not just “most people probably won’t notice the degradation from just a few transcode cycles”.
If you’re prepared to tolerate the latter, then DNxHR should also give equal results to Prores, but be supported much more fully and widely.
Thanks Ron. I don’t doubt it… but I am more than satisfied with 16bit Prores, for my purposes. I am using software that only accepts transparencies from either Prores 4444 or QT Animation… so that’s what I’m trying for.
I noticed in the Render page that there was a small widget called 'Download New Render Presets…", so I clicked to see a whole bunch of them, and further clicked on one that said Prores 4444. Very promising. I pressed Download. The upper right corner says: “Uninstall”, so I figure it was installed, but I can’t find it anywhere…yet
Any ideas? How does that download work, I wonder…
I tried that already… do you think that these community render presets usually populate inside the various render folder/categories, or show up `elsewhere?
Is it a matter of also going to that homepage to register?
I installed it and it doesn’t show up either. Currently running a search across my SSD to locate it
I also created a new profile based on the VP9 one changing the vcodec, the pix_fmt, and a few other parameters based on the ProRes 4444 render profile from KDE Store. I cannot get an output with alpha.
However, I used the default FFV1 profile as suggested by @Ron, and that works: same size as the .mxf/.mov and it has alpha.
You don’t have to register to download that properly. I am pretty sure there is a problem/bug with the installation function within Kdenlive.
I am on Linux, so YMMV, and Kdenlive installed the ProRes-4444 profile from KDE Store in ~/.var/app/org.kde.kdenlive/data/kdenlive/export as customprofile.xml. However, it is not the correct format.
When I downloaded the file from KDE Store (kdenlive prores 4444 alpha render profile - pling.com) and moved it to the folder mentioned above, it shows up in Kdenlive as a profile in the Custom_Profiles category.
A test render with that profile also doesn’t produce a video with an alpha channel.
I was able to convert your .mxf file with alpha, in order to to get it into my windows program, where I saw the alpha. I am trying to use Kdenlive to avoid that 2nd step, if possible.
But, given that it may be a lost cause, it would be great to see screen shots of the .mxf Render Profile you cooked up, that made the Black area around the star
transparent. (until the green background came up about 7 sec. in)
back to Prores 4444:
Do you think Kdenlive, running on Win 10 Pro x64, is able to create a Render Profile in Quicktime, using Codec ID ap4x ?
I don’t understand why I need to have a Prores 4444 or 4444xq or QT Animation, but I know that I do. If it is a lost cause at this time, it would be good to know.
