I’m not asking a lot. It’s just the UI it’s a bit
Overwhelming for beginners.( Like me.)
I just wish It was a bit more simpler.
Can you make a proposal? What needs to be simplified and how could that look like?
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Aren’t most video editors a bit overwhelming for beginners?
The first time I tried a video editor (OpenShot, a very basic program) I found it confusing in the first couple of days. After many years of using Shotcut I recently changed to Kdenlive (both far more complex than OpenShot) and it was second nature to me, very easy to use.
You’ll get used to the UI in no time.
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I also suspect that it’s not the UI of Kdenlive that’s too difficult - it’s the editing of videos the first time. Yes, when I think back to my first days, I didn’t know anything. You have to look at tutorials. Maybe @Joshua_Parker should ask for such beginner’s guides. I don’t know off the top of my head which ones you could recommend.
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Well, there is the official documentation that has a Quick Start chapter.
Then there are many tutorials available on YT:
- Nuxttux has a tutorial for beginners
- TJ Free has a playlist for Kdenlive beginners
- Victoriano de Jesus has also good tutorials for beginners
- Simply search for beginner tutorials in YT …
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When I first got into video editing, I tried all of the free editors, including DaVinci. They are all a bit overwhelming at first, but I found Kdenlive to be the most intuitive and fastest, on what was a modest PC. After a couple of years of using it, I again tried the usual contenders to see if any of them had improved beyond what Kdenlive had to offer. They didn’t, and I’ve stuck with it ever since. It’s well worth persevering with it. I even use it for some audio only editing.
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Okay. I’ll still learn how to use Kdenlive.
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BTW, I totally agree with you. But the there is limited willingness to reassess usability issues and a lot of “we learned how to use it, so can you” attitude, regardless if it would make it easier for new users.
I don’t get the feeling that is true. Though there is a bit of a classic dilemma where the people who “think something is Too Hard” tend to want and suggest things that reintroduce the problems whose best solutions were the things that Made It Hard in the first place.
If you think driving a manual car is hard, try driving one that’s been “simplified” by removing the gearbox and directly connecting the engine to the rear wheels.
Meanwhile the people who know those problems all too well aren’t always the best placed to recognise what isn’t explained as well as it could be for new users yet.
And then there’s the eternal problem of getting people to read those explanations even when you put them in a big book with The Documentation in large print on the cover.
But either way, the bottom line is: if you can’t even tell us what it is that you find too hard then it’s not a Lack Of Willingness that’s making us unable to help you more than we already have.
See Bernd’s very first reply. That’s still gone unreplied to.
[ed. I think I misspoke unfairly saying “I don’t get the feeling that is true” - you only need to look at the changelog and history of this project to see that there has been a nearly constant stream of reassessing and improving usability issues in almost every single release…
But that takes nothing away from the rest of what I tried to say about how you’re going to have to be a bit less handwavy about what you feel has been neglected if you don’t want it to stay neglected.]
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For what it’s worth, I came to Kdenlive from having used OpenShot, Davinci Resolve, and a couple of others, and the “UI overwhelm” difference was night and day for me. Kdenlive felt vastly more intuitive right from the start, and I felt comparatively very little friction.
A UX Designer’s job is never done, IMO, and there’s certainly room for growth and change going forward, but I for one think you guys are most definitely on the right track and are doing great in the UI department!
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The reason Kdenlive’s UI is difficult for beginners is because it is a video editor for people who know how to edit video. I was a Radio/TV broadcast major in high school and have been using Kdenlive for over 20 years. I moved from Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere to Kdenlive and hit the ground running because it is designed similarly to all of the other pro class video editors.
What this thread is showing is that there is a need for something in the non-pro side, maybe a Kdenlite? But please don’t ruin Kdenlive, some of us need it to make a living.
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I agree with all the remarks that say video editing is not easy at first attempts. I had difficulty with the interface of kdenlive at first go.
One specific but very simple thing that puzzled me for some time was how to zoom in on the timeline on the tracks. I expect that someone will tell me it’s well explained in the docs but there is always a conflict with trying to get on with the job versus RTFM.
Another thing that caused me grief was trying to produce a short video to meet Amazon’s ads specs which are not very straightforward. For example, they accept mpeg2 codec for some types of ads but not others – not a kdenlive problem, I know.
More difficult was their demand for a minimum video bit rate. I couldn’t find a way of adjusting this parameter directly in kdenlive or other. Made worse by the way the acceptable H264 codec produced a lower bit rate video than the mpeg2 codec which they would not accept.
Such is video editing life for beginners.
I won’t tell you there are tooltips on the zoom slider in the bottom right corner then 
As a general rule, that’s not something the majority of users would want to be directly selecting manually, regardless of whether they are beginner or expert. And the ‘demand’ for it is a pretty crude proxy for what they really want which is Quality (unless maybe they’re getting kickbacks for burning up bandwidth!)
But that said, you can manually set any ffmpeg option you wish, regardless of whether that would be sensible or not.
I don’t know what amazon’s requirements actually are - but it’s probably something you could make a custom profile for and share in the kde store, or submit for inclusion as a default profile …
Glad you did. I hadn’t noticed it because I was mesmerised by the larger slider under the tracks. 
But as for Amazon ads spec !!! I was only trying to make a 20 seconds or so video for an ad. I ran into multiple rejections time after time.
One occasion they said my video was 25.05 fps, whereas they wanted 25fps but they could also accept 23.976, 29.97 and 29.98 (but not 25.05).
Another time my output had drifted from the desired 1920 x 1080 to 1920 x 1072. Those missing 8px were critical.
But the most difficult was meeting their requirement for a minimum video bit rate of 1Mbps. I found I had to use ffprobe with each attempt to check my output but even when ffprobe reported my video bit rate as 1138 Kbps, that didn’t satisfy Amazon. I even tried using Handbrake to increase the bit rate.
I really wished that video bit rate could be directly addressed as a variable parameter.
In that case, you can also ctrl-mousewheel in the timeline 
That’s not bitrate, that’s framerate, and expecting that to be one of a standard set isn’t unreasonable … and all those rates are standard project profiles in kdenlive.
likewise:
1080p is a standard aspect ratio and there’s lots of good reasons not to deviate from those without very good reasons.
That is the only one you need to get your hands a bit dirty to directly control - and it’s one of those things that if you don’t know why you really don’t want to be doing that, will be a footgun you’ll shoot yourself with more often than it will do you any good.
I don’t know what’s in your videos or how well they compress, but usually you’d want to turn the quality settings up, not directly mess with bitrate values.
But yeah, that sort of exactly makes the point of all the people, including yourself, saying there is a learning curve. You don’t have to learn everything to get started - but there are some fundamentals like this which will make the first bit look a lot steeper and full of a lot more stumbles until you invest some time into getting at least a basic grasp of them.
Yea…Ron, I agree with all you say. I did know that fps was frame rate and not video bit rate. I was merely recalling all the niggling details of Amazon’s spec that took a lot of time for me to get right. And I never knew why some things went slightly astray - like the 25.05 fps or the missing 8px.
Of all those, the most difficult was video bitrate. And even when ffprobe reported a bit rate of 1138 Kbps that didn’t satisfy Amazon. Whether you consider 1Mbps = 1000 Kbps or 1024 Kbps, 1138 should have passed but maybe ffprobe isn’t very accurate?
I did try manipulating quality settings but in the end, what gave me a higher bitrate was increasing the complexity of the images used. If I hadn’t needed to get the video ad approved, I’d have binned it much earlier.
None of that hassle is really kdenlive’s problem but it’s the sort of thing that happens to beginners.
My first thought about the UI was how closely the HIDE icon would resemble the regular, visible icon used for the visible track state (ie. the icon without the slash through it). I once spent quite a bit of time not knowing why a track was not visible.
I always felt it would be an idea to make the HIDE icon more different visually (different shade or a different icon altogether) when the track is hidden, so you can quickly determine which tracks are hidden and which aren’t by looking at the icons (and do it quickly). Just my 2 cents.
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Yeah. That would make it easier.
Any suggestions? Can you mock up something and share it here for discussion?
Again not saying there’s no way this might be improved, but hiding or muting a track not only changes the icon, it also greys out the entire track - and if you can miss the cue that the entire track is dimmed, I’m not sure that tweaking the tiny icon in the corner of your vision, in a place you don’t often have much reason to look, is going to be something you’d more probably notice either?
But that said, I have also, more times than I probably should have without making it a hard final checklist item, come home to see the result of a long final render only to find that I have left some important track disabled after ‘temporarily’ hiding it during editing for some reason or another. And I don’t think this forum will let me use the words that usually express how annoyed with myself I am for doing that again …
So maybe something in the render dialog, that prominently but not too annoyingly reminds you “You do know you have 2 tracks currently hidden, right?” would be helpful.