Kdenlive has become great

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21

It is clear that you know much more about the development of KDEnlive than I do. Now that you mention it, in the early days of KDEnlive I read about MLT and, in fact, it was something they emphasised, using those libraries. But as you rightly point out, that is probably the bottleneck. As long as that doesn’t change, KDEnlive will continue to be a video editor with HUGE potential, but it’s weighed down by its performance. But there are other video editors (which I won’t mention because I didn’t intend to make a comparison, but to show the reality of what can be achieved) with GNU/GPL license that also have amazing features (such as generating 3D animated titles with the help of Blender) and also remain anecdotal when you try to use them seriously because of the same thing: performance.

I have had to abandon more than one project I started with KDEnlive not only because of the performance, but also because of bugs (that I reported and were fixed some time later) that appeared in the middle of the projects. And that translates into a waste of time and effort that only those of us who have encountered these problems can appreciate.

But as you say, this is not the place to make comparisons.

In case it’s not clear yet what I’m talking about, I’ll say it in one sentence: As long as KDEnlive’s performance is not what it should be and it even has failures with basic effects, it will remain a tool worth mentioning and for a “moderate” use.

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I want to extend a big thank you! I previously used another video software and was quite happy with it. However, Kdenlive has proven to be even better. It works seamlessly on both Windows and Linux, is very stable, and includes all the features I need. Plus, I can create videos much faster with it.

Just finished a new project and uploaded it:

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23

That’s exciting, can you tell me which is the other video editor? I keep trying the others that run on linux and always come back to Kdenlive because it’s the best for me.

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I used Vegas Pro but it does not run on linux. Thats why I was so happy finding one that is running so well on linux.

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Hello Geko,
That’s funny - it was exactly the same for me three and a half years ago.
I’m also very happy that Kdenlive is available on Linux and I don’t miss Vegas Pro anymore. It could do a lot of things, but it was pretty unstable compared to Kdenlive.
Wish you good luck, I also made the switch.

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The latest release has much improved performance.

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However, still same untested behaviours. It crashed when changing parameters of a video effect. In other words, the same old problems. I’m a bit tired of being an involuntary ‘beta tester’ who, when he is in a KDEnlive project, has to leave it because of this kind of problems. Hopefully, the problem is detected when starting the project. But in other cases, it’s in the middle of the project, and having to start it with another editor, even if it has fewer options, is truly demoralising.

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If by “moderate use” you mean a project with > 900 clips, 9 sequences with ~10 - 12 tracks each, and about 13 hours of finally rendered video in 9 “chapters” … then yeah, kdenlive is working really well for me with that sort of Moderate Use.

I just get a bit tired of hearing hand wavy and utterly inactionable complaints like “It crashed when changing parameters of a video effect”. Oh, really? Ok, just let me test changing each of the parameters in every available effect to see if I can figure out which one you mean! Hanging around here to say useless things like that doesn’t make you a “beta tester” - it makes you the reason the actual developers don’t have time to engage here and need other people to triage actually useful reports out of chaff like that.

If you hit a real bug that annoyed you, then I can sympathise with that. But the world, and most software free or otherwise is full of those. If you reported it and it got fixed later, that’s better than you’ll get from most non-free tools.

Complaining about something so vague that it’s impossible for anyone else to test and verify? That just makes me think you didn’t test the new version at all, and certainly don’t want to hear about all the things that do get fixed and the awesome new improvements that have been coming with every new release. If you can’t or won’t help someone else find a way to reproduce your problem, then sorry, kind of by definition it’s going to remain your problem alone to deal with.

What micha says reflects my experience and feelings.

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Don’t be offended by my experience (since the early days of the KDE desktop) with KDEnlive. KDEnlive perfectly supports the number of tracks, scenes and sequences you mention and more!!!. These are projects that require very little performance and will not cause KDEnlive to fail.

I have insisted that the problems appear with projects where there is already complexity, adding effects with more than 30 keyframes, simultaneously on several tracks, to give a simple example. The first thing the user will notice is a beastly drop in performance.

But since you are ironic in your comment, I’m going to be ironic too.
I don’t know if you are a developer, contributor or user to complain about hearing so many complaints you mention. I didn’t expect there would be so many, thanks for confirming that. In the message you refer to, I have expressed a fact that happened to me a few days ago with the latest version of KDEnlive. Two video tracks, a simple video effect, a series of 3 keyframes in the transformation and … it closed when changing a parameter!!!. Yes, it closed with something simple by changing a parameter value. I just told you what happened. If it had happened to me a couple of years ago, like so many times, I would have accessed the KDEnlive bug forum to explain the whole process to get to that failure. But not anymore. I got tired of reporting problems that can be detected if a good debugging process has been done. This is a forum for expressing opinions, not the bug forum or maybe haven’t you noticed. Check the URL, because I think you got confused.

Maybe for you the things I have said here are useless, because they don’t follow your way of thinking and your experiences with KDEnlive, but I assure you that for others they won’t be. I take it for granted that developers here won’t look because, indeed, they have a lot of work to do instead of reading my experiences.

I doubt very much that you understand what it’s like to detect a real bug in an application in the middle of a project. You have no idea. But since I have experienced it, I can warn others. I use free software, I have been a Linux user for at least a couple of decades, and of course, I have reported bugs of all kinds in many forums and all kinds of applications. Some take longer than others to fix them (even years) but they are not usually critical bugs that make you wonder where will the next bug come from? The bugs I have encountered with KDEnlive have made me abandon half finished projects to start them again in another application from 0. That is, my love for KDEnlive and free software does not solve their problems.

So, I return to my mantra: KDEnlive has a lot of potential, but unfortunately when you try to make use of that potential, there are often … unfortunate surprises.

I am very glad that KDEnlive exists and that the vast majority of users can solve their simple edits with it. However, for creative and advanced users, here is my experience: Use sparingly.

30

Oh, dear ones, stop arguing, it’s not worth it.
Kdenlive is very good or very bad, depending on how you look at it. It’s perfectly fine if someone doesn’t like it, and it’s just as fine if someone gets on very well with it.

Life is very diverse, open source is an offer that volunteers make available to others free of charge. Anyone who wants to use it can do so as they wish. But you don’t have to.

It’s always a shame if someone’s own projects break because the software is faulty, but you have to expect that. I would also like to mention that the proprietary software, Vegas Pro, caused many more crashes than Kdenlive. And when Kdenlive crashes, the program automatically saves almost all the editing steps. The losses are minimal.

I expect nothing and get a lot. That’s why I love Kdenlive, Linux and the whole open source world. That’s why I left Microsoft and am now being given a lot, much more than I gave.

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31

Amen micha :slight_smile:

This reminded me of two things:

I’ve just filed a feature request to include the subtitle files when autosaving, because I discovered recently that changes to those don’t get recovered, you just get back the state at your last manual save.

And I’ve just checked and confirmed that the new performance improvements also fix a minor nit that I’ve hit in a couple of projects now. When I had a sequence of consecutive clips in the timeline with effects having many thousands of keyframes (think one every 2 or 3 frames for several minutes at a time), then everything would work just fine except at some point adding more keyframes to adjacent clips would cause the zoom operation to become increasingly slow when those clips were visible in the timeline.

It had the feeling of something being Accidentally Quadratic in its handling of them, quite possibly for displaying them in the timeline. But in the current appimage zoom is fast and smooth now when viewing those sequences.

I suspect the underlying problem is still there, but it’s been nullified by the huge improvements in ‘lazy’ handling of parts of the project which aren’t being actively worked on. That’s been an awesome usability improvement - it’s made it possible to continue working on large complex projects which in older versions would need more than 100GB of memory just to open, but which now open and are ready for editing using barely 2-3GB.

It’s really refreshing to be using software that’s more often than not growing and improving faster than my growing requirements need it to. Not changing things just for the sake of change, but constantly improving the things that are limiting real users.

That’s on the short list of things that earns my deepest respect.

32

What pleasant, conciliatory words.
It makes me very happy when someone sticks with the software that is so important to me, despite interim hurdles - because there is none on Linux that can fulfill my requirements better.

Everyone is allowed to be dissatisfied sometimes. But if you stick with it when you realize the bugs and pass them on in an understandable way, then that helps everyone. I would like to encourage or motivate everyone to do this. It’s always a win-win situation.

I probably feel so connected to Kdenlive because I’ve been through so much with it. There were times when it wasn’t so easy, because a lot of things worked differently or didn’t work as they should.

Like you, I can see the great progress that the developers have made.
That really is a reason to celebrate. The second is that we can all share in what has been achieved free of charge.

Thanks to Kdenlive.