UI needs work. I’m a professional vocational instructor for Adobe Premiere, AfterEffects, Final Cut Pro, Maya, Lightwave, and used Vegas Video, Blender, Rhino, 3D StudioMax, Alias/Wavefront and many other apps through the years, and I cannot intuitively figure out your User Interface.
DELETING A SECTION OF VIDEO CLIP IN A SEQUENCE
I drag a clip with a video and audio track into a sequence
to cut out a section in the middle, I razor cut the clip on the start and end times of the section to remove
I right-click the section to remove and choose “Delete Selected Item”, it fails saying I have 2 items selected.
Delete key does not delete selection
CMD+X does not delete selection
The online Kdenlive guide has no answer at quick glance for deleting clips or clip sections
no easy solution for something so basic as deleting a section of a clip, maybe there is but such a waste of time against inuitive conventions and forcing a rediculous learning curve
SCROLLING THE TIMELINE VS MOVING CLIPS IN TIME
to scroll the sequence timeline horizontally I must 2 finger scroll vertically on my MacBookPro w/OS 12, which is wierd
sometimes the 2 finger vertical scroll is moving the timeline, sometimes it moves clip sections along the timeline instead, I cannot predict which will happen, makes no difference if the mouse pointer is over the clip or not
when finger scrolling moves the clips on the timeline, cannot predict which clip sections will move or not, and when SELECTING a clip it WILL NOT MOVE along the timeline
click-and-drag for clips and clip sections is the intuitive rule
These are the most basic operations in digital video editing and I find no intuitive solutions for these in Kdenlive, a huge mistake IMHO. Kdenlive seems a very robust tool set and I’m very disappointed and surprised at your non-intuitive approach.
I want Kdenlive as my video editing app but, if not getting a solution from you soon, I’ll bail on your app back to Blender and take my students and colleagues with me. You’re losing more potential adopters than you realize. Too bad, I had such hopes for Kdenlive as the go-to video editing app for the World.
I’m not knowledgeable about any of this topic, as I don’t do video editing, but FYI - all KDE projects are majority community-funded and volunteer-developed.
If I can offer a general suggestion (and then I’ll get out of the way for folks with actual subject knowledge) - if you would like to see things change in a KDE app, look for ways to get involved in development directly, or support existing work. I don’t believe making ultimatums to volunteers is the way to do that, though.
There are certainly areas where it can be better, granted, but there are not that many complaints. On the contrary, a lot of people have said the UI of Kdenlive is better than what other FOSS video editors offer.
Hmm, perhaps this is because you have worked with all those applications that spent $$$ on UI research and development? Kdenlive’s dev team is two people with the occasional contribution from others. The fundraiser opened up the possibility for bounties but it is very limited. Perhaps you can get your huge fan base and students to pitch in?
Hmm, that is strange because DEL works for me. I am using Kdenlive 24.08 on Pop!_OS 22.04. You haven’t stated your OS and Kdenlive version, so I don’t know why it doesn’t work for you. BTW, you can create your own keyboard shortcuts.
The online documentation is - just like Kdenlive - the work of volunteers. Your expertise and vast experience with other tools and apps in the multimedia space could help to improve it so perhaps you could point out more precisely what in your opinion is missing or can be improved. And just FYI: the documentation is currently being overhauled. Just recently a new chapter for Titles and Graphics was introduced.
Don’t have a MacBook, so I cannot really comment on this behavior. I am using a mouse as often as I can because I find touch-pads not very reliable and accurate for such work. But I encourage you to open a bug report.
AFAIK, Kdenlive was developed with input from professional editors and TV production folks. But there is always room for improvement, and I don’t know what has changed ever since the UI and keyboard shortcuts were designed. Your professional input is very welcome, and I encourage you to get in touch with the dev team.
I couldn’t agree more with @johnandmegh’s comment: threats or ultimatums don’t really work, in particular in the FOSS environment. I think with you, your students and colleagues there is good potential to improve Kdenlive through reasonable [Feature Requests] created in the official bug tracker (yeah, I know it’s not the greatest platform but KDE works with it). The dev team is quite good at fixing bugs and taking feedback from the user community into account (see the roadmap), but again there are just two developers. So, every donation helps and gets us closer to our common goal of making
Thanks for the feedback. I took the time writing it up because I see such great potential with the robust tools and want the most success from the contributors. The more adopters, the more momentum and assistance for development, a positive and exponential feedback loop in best case. I will be happy and honored to assist in intuitive interface design if getting the opportunity. Not exactly sure who or how to reach the right people. This is my first attempt and your responses encourage me to try more. Any advice is welcome. Thanks again.
I find Kdenlive’s UI very intuitive, which is probably why I use it as my main editor. I tried all of the free editors before I settled on it, as I found it gave me the best and fastest results, but a lot depends on what you are used to. I have DaVinci Resolve, which is amazing, but it needs a very powerful machine, and I find it takes me longer to do what I want than in Kdenlive.
You’re just not used to it. I remember almost a year ago when I started using it that I was also frustrated with the UI, I wanted it to be more like sony vegas because that’s what I was used to, now I can’t imagine going back to sony vegas and I objectively am able to do keyframing and overall editing faster than I was capable on sony vegas. What really helped me get started is simply keybinding every single tool that I needed, binding cut to S, binding timeline zoom in to Q and zoom out to W, and so on. Not sure how you had a problem deleting a section of a clip, it’s as simple as clicking on the thing and pressing the delete button, maybe a bug or something. That’s still my main issue with kdenlive now though after a year, not the actual UI, it’s the updates constantly breaking something, on top of that the odd frame rate drops on certain rendered sections that are hard to reproduce and other relatively small issues but it does stack up, still not going back to using anything else as the issues are never with regards to really crucial functions.