apologies if this is the wrong place to post this, please move this topic to a more appropriate place or point me at where to talk about this.
I’m a big fan of Kdenlive as a video editor and I’ve been gleeful about the improvements that it has gotten over the last few years.
The biggest UX quirk I keep running into while editing videos is the timeline for keyframes on composition and clip effects.
Instead of having a separate bar in the effects/ composition menu, it would be much more convenient if a video or audio track could “open up” a global timeline for keyframes, etc. I did some looking around for Kdenlive roadmap features and didn’t see anything about this yet (thus this post).
Anyway, is this something that the team has been talking about or planning? I could try making a UI mockup if it’s not clear what I’m imagining.
The dope sheet (scheduled for the 26.12 release but development is still ongoing and testing will show whether this is reaklistic) is probably what you are looking for. Check the News section of the Kdenlive homepage, in particular this blog post.
I’d definitely be interested in trying this out/ testing before it gets merged. I guess if there’s a test it’ll be annoyed on this forum? Or do you know what place I should keep an eye on?
(sorry for the double post, it’s been too long since posting to edit my post)
I guess my idea would be an extension of this? Because in my ideal video editor the keyframe widget would be part of the main timeline so you can see a bunch or all keyframes and curves for multiple clips at a glance
Are you talking about a dopesheet that runs across the entirety of the timeline like in Blender? That would work if you had a single continuous clip you are editing (like a scene in Blender), but I don’t see how that would work with multiple clips, as each clip would need it’s own dopesheet to display it’s effects.
I’m not sure about the lingo, I’m coming at this from an audio production background. I’m relatively new to editing video.
I was thinking about something like this from my audio workstation. The yellow bar at the top would be the equivalent of a video or audio clip in the main Kdenlive timeline, and then you can “open up” one or more tracks of keyframes and control values for various effects, etc.
Does that make sense? And would this even work for videos? Because I do recall that some effects are applied to clips and compositions are applied between tracks?
For audio editing, do you apply effects to a single continuous audio clip, or apply the same effects across multiple clips (say you have several sequential audio clips; 1 with normal loudness, 2 with quite audio, and 3 with loud audio; do you add a single effect that keeps the volume of the first clip the same, modify the effect to boost the audio of clip 2, and reduce the volume of clip 3)?
If your workflow is like either of these, that won’t really work for video editing because you typically aren’t editing a single clip, and if you have multiple clips, you need to change them independently. If you only added effects that apply across multiple clips, keyframing would get very tedious, and you would have less control over which clips get what effects.
Effects are typically applied to a “track” meaning it’ll be applied to any clip that sits on that track. In the above example I could have cut the clip in the middle and moved them apart and all the automation lanes would move with the clip they are associated with.
I think from the editing I’ve done in Kdenlive so far this should also be able to work there (at least for effects, no idea how this would interact with compositions)
You can already do this in Kdenlive (track effects), but depending on the kind of editing you do, it would be pretty inefficient. Or maybe your workflow is more optimized for putting the effects across the entire track.
In that case I guess my suggestion/ question is purely about changing the UI for all of these timelines to be unified in the main timeline. But I guess that’s quite a lot of work.
