Hello! I am a fairly new kdenlive user and I’m loving it, but I’m running into some performance issues that seem like they shouldn’t be occurring.
-Playback of the timeline while editing is horrendously choppy and slow. Some clips, unplayable at all in the timeline. I’m not even talking about playback with effects, just simple playback of clips in the timeline. What are some ways to speed up timeline playback? I already have the preview set to 360p which is about as low quality as I can go while remaining usable. I’ve tried switching around the “Timeline Preview” selection under project settings; doesn’t seem to do anything. There’s got to be a way to make playback smooth.
-Encoding brings entire system to a grinding snail’s pace even if I set thread count on encoder & parallel processing to very low numbers (such as 2 threads). These options don’t seem to do anything? CPU usage always varies between 68-100% while rendering a project, leaving the system unable to do anything else during the long wait of rendering.
Having these same issues on two different Windows 11 systems.
System 1: Dell Latitude 5540 w/ Core i7 1370P, 16GB RAM, 512GB NVME drive, and Nvidia MX550
System 2: Custom PC w/ Ryzen 5800XT, 32GB RAM, 1TB NVME drive, and Nvidia RTX 3070
Use the Preview Render function for effect-heavy sections
Don’t work with material > 2K if possible
You are already reducing the project monitor resolution, so that’s pretty much all you can do until GPU support arrives or you upgrade to a much beefier CPU
Oh man! Now we are getting somewhere! I just enabled proxy clips and the timeline playback is super smooth now. This alone is going to be a game changer.
Now about making it so the PC is still usable during rendering. Should I completely disable parallel processing? Or what level of CPU do I need to upgrade? It looks like my Ryzen 5800XT can be upgraded to a 5800X3D, 5900XT or 5950X. Not sure if any of those would be worthwhile.
if you’re rendering on the CPU and the PC gets unusable that is a problem solvable in software; hate to be that gal but you’d be best off upgrading to linux first thing for better performance. what you can do about this on windows 11 is limited.
either way, you should not need to disable parallel processing completely, rather if the default is too heavy try using 1 or 2 less threads first to give the rest of the system more breathing room.
Thanks, but setting the threads count lower seems to do nothing. I can set it all the way down to 2 threads and it still uses the whole CPU on both systems. Render time turns out the same regardless of what I set thread count to.
I tried to disable parallel processing and it went about 10x slower through rendering but wouldn’t get through rendering without crashing.
I’m open to giving it a go on Linux to see if the bug is still there on Linux. Unless someone knows how to just make it work… That would be great!
What bug? That rendering on Windows 11 is slowing the whole machine down to a crawl?
As @hsza pointed out, this is not a bug. I am on Pop!_OS, and sometimes start a render of a specific section and then go back to editing. Sure, it’s not as snappy as before but at least I can continue working.
The issue I’m having is that turning the “threads” count down even to 1 or 2 still uses the entire CPU. I would say that’s a bug. But I am not a developer here so that may be the incorrect terminology.
In any case, I’m just trying to find a way to make the PC usable during rendering at this point. Turning down thread count does nothing, and turning off parallel processing entirely simply doesn’t get through a render. Again seems like a bug to me.
Switching the entire OS is a helpful suggestion. Just wondering if there is a simpler workaround first. Thanks.
that sounds like a bug, perhaps the encoder does not support configuring parallelism, or kdenlive fails to pass the option properly? can’t be sure, but if it’s saying one thing and doing another chances are something’s going wrong
