Free Linux video editors [4]: Kdenlive

So...I have been creating and editing home video for quite a number of years now. It wasn't a thing much when I was at school; schools didn't have much in the way of video equipment, and editing software at a reasonable price for the low spec PCs we had back then was almost non existent. Most of my time editing video goes back about 20 years to a multimedia course I did at CPIT as part of my DipBC qualification. There, we got to use Adobe Premiere Pro on PCs. From that, I went on to work in a school environment and Windows Movie Maker was available around that time on Windows XP. I also purchased a license for Adobe Premiere Elements and used it for a time, as well as a license for Vegas Movie Studio; both of these products are targeted at the lower end of the video editing market and are lite versions of Premiere Pro and Vegas Pro respectively. So I have a bit of experience with various low end movie editing programs. Premiere Elements was, I remember, very difficult to use, tended to crash a lot. VMS was a lot more stable once various patches had been applied, and had the capability to directly author DVDs. I also purchased a software package to write Lightscribe labels onto DVDs and used these packages together to produce official video DVDs for the school for a while.

When it's come to Linux I naturally expected it would be possible to find some reasonably good video editing software but it has taken a fair while to achieve this, which is reasonable when we consider the resources available to the open source community. In some respects this is a failing of the open source model itself, in that many projects are started and then abandoned or forked. This has happened numerous times in video editing and has been one of my frustrations early on with attempting to locate good software; examples being ShotCut and Pitivi mentioned in earlier articles in this series. Thankfully, as time has gone on and with further investigations, more high quality packages have become known to me. For the moment, Kdenlive has turned out to be the best for the type of stuff I do, and has quite a reasonable range of capabilities, few of which I have actually needed to use in my sample project.

Kdenlive, like some of the other editors such as Avidemux, is basically a GUI front end to the well known FFMpeg libraries, via an intermediary called Melt (MLT). This makes a whole lot of sense to implement the hard work via a well known and resourced existing software library rather than invent a new one in a software application. Kdenlive is thus essentially an application that makes it possible to visually assemble and preview the various source elements that will be combined into a video production. Once this stage has been completed, clicking the Render button calls up MLT/FFMpeg to do the hard work of producing the final video. Of course, this can be quite a slow process, but it can run away in the background; unlike GIMP it doesn't demand a high level of the system's resources so that everything else grinds to a halt.

I found the GUI very easy to work with and only needed to make a few references to the online documentation. The timeline worked more or less exactly the same as other editors I have used and this part was very straightforward; Kdenlive also proved to be very stable when working with it, with no crashes experienced. My very basic project consisted of editing together two large clips which each was made up by joining together a number of smaller ones in Avidemux, and as mentioned previously, the second one was rescaled from 1920x1080 to 640x480 to match the resolution of the first one. There were also some smaller clips to add to the end which were in 1920x1080 that I didn't bother to resize before bringing them into Kdenlive. Since the output resolution of Kdenlive was already set to 640x480, it did the letterboxing and downscaling of these clips itself, which is a useful capability I wasn't aware of. The rendering was also stable, and the fact it took 5 hours to complete rendering the 3 hour clip at 640x480 has not been a significant concern; what has been much more important is the fact the software has proved to be stable and reliable. So I expect this package can do everything I need and I will be interested to see where I can go with it in future. I didn't use any transitions in my project and it will be interesting to explore these in whatever type of video I might work with in future.

Free Linux video editors [3]

Well I have written about free video editors for Linux a number of times, this is the third article in this series. It’s taken me a few years to get to this point of discovering good quality software for Linux because there are so many open source projects that people have started and then abandoned, and finding the really good ones, which are mostly being produced by professional companies, has taken a while.

Here is an article from Linx Magazine and it lists a few options

https://www.linux-magazine.com/Issues/2015/171/Video-Editor-Roundup

For my setup, AppPC which has potentially sufficient storage and RAM, will be the system that long term is set up for tasks like this. Obviously it doubles at the moment with Gimp editing mosaic projects for NZ Rail Maps but this won’t be happening forever and so, it is natural to look at using its ample resources for video production, and possibly in the future, audio editing as well.

There are some really good high quality video editors out there. Last time I wrote I was taking a look at Blender and Handbrake among others. I am currently working on a tricky project that has involved bringing together a number of clips shot in two different formats. About half of it was shot at 640x480 in MOV format and the other half in 1920x1080 MP4. The problem is melding together these two resources that are greatly different in size as well as aspect ratio. After a lot of mucking around I finally used Avidemux with two video filters to put black borders onto the original video clip (changing its resolution to 1920x1440, which gives it a 4:3 aspect ratio) and then scale this to 640x480. A little trick to remember is that video filters in Avidemux will not work unless you choose a different video mode other than “Copy”, in other words you tell it to re-render the video output. This also gives you a chance to downsample the video at the same time. The combination of these settings brought the final clip down from 14 GB to 0.5 GB in size. Handbrake was useful for converting the MOV clips into M4V but I could not work out how to re-aspect the HD clips in it so that ended up being what I used Avidemux for, as well as joining a number of separate clips into one.

So I now have two separate clips each about 80 minutes in length and the same format, to put together in a video editor, along with a few still shots. I am trying out several different software applications to see what is going to work best. Here is what I have attempted so far:

• Blender is FOSS and has a lot of support for it, but not as a video editor. This function is not well supported in the wider community. When I tried using it, I found it was clunky and not very intuitive. This led me to look into other alternatives.
• Da Vinci Resolve is a free version of a commercial product. It is complex to install, and wouldn’t work out of the box for me. Because of this I haven’t looked further into it.
• Lightworks is also a free version of a commercial product. It looks promising, but so far I haven’t tried installing it.
• Cinelerra is another of the few that are FOSS. There are two versions, HV which is the full deal, and GG. If you want to use HV, you have to compile it yourself from the source code. GG is a whole lot easier, with native packages in a repository that install directly onto Debian (and a few other distros). So I have installed it, for testing, and will see how it goes. The software looks reasonably good but the interface so far is confusing, it has also crashed once. 
• Kdenlive is another fully FOSS package. It is officially part of KDE, and is produced as an AppImage. This makes installation very simple and straightforward as it involves just a download. So I have this installed as well, for testing alongside Cinelerra-GG. At the moment Kdenlive is the one I am trying the most.

So we will see how things go with the last two packages with this project and which option is the easiest to use and gives the best results. I hope to have this project finished by the end of this week.