Kdenlive Part 1:
Introduction to Kdenlive
A good video editor is one that is suitable for anyone wanting to edit video, with powerful features that enable the video professional to do any task required of the job, yet with the "simplicity" that allows a hobbyist to quickly cut together footage off of a phone or a camera. Kdenlive can be both of those things.
Regardless of the scope of your video project, there are "right" and "wrong" ways of doing things.
The Workspace:
Kdenlive uses Qt4 for its interface, so customization is easy. It is pretty common for video editors to use a "darkened" theme to emphasize the video rather than distract the eye with a bright glowing interface (also, the dark theme helps during colour correction).
To change the theme of Kdenlive, click on Settings at the top of Kdenlive window and choose Color Scheme.
Within the main window of Kdenlive there are several different components. These sections can be popped out of the main window, tabbed, rearranged, and floated. All available components of Kdenlive's visual workspace can be seen via its View menu.
You may like to emulate the default layout of whatever video editor you might be used to, or if you find a layout that works better for you, the "layout" of Kdenlive is up to you and your own work style. Once you have created one that you like, you can save it via the View Menu > Save Layout….
A typical layout will have at least these panels:
- The Project Bin.
-
Clip Monitor:
a place to preview raw footage before committing it to the final edit. -
Project Monitor:
a place to watch your edited footage. -
Timeline:
the destination for all selected clips you use in your project.
Importing Footage:
Before importing footage, you should save your project.
This may seem strange given that your project is currently "empty", but giving your workspace a name and location on your hard drive will establish the default skeletal structure for all Kdenlive projects.
The path of your default Kdenlive project folder can always be changed via Project Menu > Project Settings… > Custom project folder.
When you have saved your project, you can import footage. You can add clips to your Kdenlive project via Project menu > Add Clip of Folder… (or by right–clicking in the Project Bin and selecting Add Clip of Folder…)
You may be notified by Kdenlive that the current project setting is not the same as the footage that you have just imported. This is telling you that your project setting has defaulted to, for instance, DV NTSC but that you've just imported CIF sized clips.
If this is the case, then you should accept Kdenlive's offer to change the project profile to match your clips.
Regardless of what you actually intend to create, the best thing is to edit in a native environment, i.e. you should try to edit in the format that you shot, and perform any transcoding only when exporting.
Three–Point Editing:
To perform a basic edit in your footage, click on a clip in your Project Bin. It appears in the Clip Monitor for you to preview.
Find where you actually want to start your video and set an "In" point by hitting the "i" key on your keyboard.
Allow the clip to continue playing until you find the "end" of the action you want to use in the clip. Mark "Out" with the "o" key on your keyboard.
Thus, you have just set the first two points in your three–point edit.
The third point is where in your Timeline the clip should appear.
If this is the first clip in your movie, then probably the logical place for it would be 00:00:00:00, i.e. the very beginning of your Timeline.
To do this quickly, press "v," which will drop the video between the In and Out points of your clip into the selected video track of your Timeline (by default, this will be Video Track 1, but you can select a different one by clicking the track label on the left of the Timeline).
Unlike many other video editors, where the video playhead in the Timeline determines where the clip is dropped, Kdenlive has a dedicated target tool for this purpose so that you do not need to move your playhead in order to drop in a new clip.
The target tool appears as a small white box in the top SMPTE ruler bar of the Timeline.
You can also do a drag–and–drop add by grabbing the video thumbnail from the Clip Monitor and dragging it down to the Timeline.
Having set your In and out points for a clip, you can then click and drag in the Clip Monitor over to the Project Bin where your shortened clip will appear beneath its "parent clip" as a "sub clip", and you can rename it.
The Basic Tools:
There are three basic tools in Kdenlive:
-
The Select Tool (s)
The Select Tool is exactly what you would expect: click to select a clip, drag to move a clip. Use it for related tasks as well, such as selecting the active track, creating Guides and Markers, extending or shortening video clips in the Timeline, control–clicking to select multiple clips at once, and so on. -
The Razor Tool (x)
It creates splices in a video region in the Timeline. -
The Spacer Tool (m)
This tool simply selects everything to the right of where you click.
If you do shorten a clip with the Razor Tool and delete the excess footage that you have just sliced off, you will be left with a gap between your new out point and the beginning of the next clip in the Timeline.
To get rid of this empty space, you can right–click on that gap in the Timeline and select Remove Space or Remove Space in All Tracks if you are using separate audio.
Rather than using the "Remove Space" function, you could manually move the video and audio regions over using the Spacer Tool. As this tool selects everything to the right of where you click; it all video and audio regions in the future and, thus, allows you to either move them to the left or to the right in your Timeline.
The Spacer Tool selects and moves every media region on every track.
Should you ever decide that you want to select all regions on, for instance, only track one, then you will need to either "lock" all other tracks, or you will need to zoom out and just use your Select Tool to manually select the regions you want to grab.