Mind Diary

Kdenlive Part 2:
Advanced Editing Technique

A Brief History of the Editing Workflow:

The initial edit of a movie is called a “Rough Assembly”. It literally consists of each take of each scene, and is really just a good way to review all the footage available.

After this basic edit, a new cut is created, and it is called, simply, the “first cut”.

This edit is revised into a second cut, and the process continues from first cut to an editor's cut, a director's cut, and a producer's (or “final”) cut.

This model might not be imposed on everyone, but its logic still applies and can help you organize the sometimes monumental task of making hours upon hours of footage into presentable content.

Editing in the Timeline:

After your shots are all lined up in the timeline, you will find the need to adjust their in and out points. This can be done in three different ways:

1. Place the playhead on a frame and then use Shift+R to place a splice in the region. Then select the excess footage and delete it as desired.
2. When you know that you like a shot but need it to be, more or less, half as long; grab the Razor Tool (x) and click on the video region at the point you wish to slice. A splice mark should appear and new thumbnails will be generated on the video region to demonstrate that it has been divided into two sections.
3. Double–click on a video region, you will get a pop–up dialog box allowing you to modify the clip's position in the timeline, the clip's “in” and “out” points, and so on.
   

Audio Splits and Grouping Clips:

By default, Kdenlive displays this audio stream as a part of the video stream. If you want to turn off the audio embedded in the video, you can do this by clicking the “Mute Track” button in the track label on the left.

If you would like to separate the audio track from the video region so that you can manipulate it separately, you can do this as follows:

Right–click on the clip and select Ungroup Clips or use the keyboard shortcut (Control+Shift+G). This removes the invisible link between the audio and video, allowing you to, for example, cut and remove a piece of the video without affecting the audio.

You can always re–group clips together by selecting clips (using the Select Tool while holding down the Shift key to add to your selection) and then right–click on them and choose Group Clips or, simply, use Control+G.

Basic Navigation in the Timeline:

The now classic and very common “jkl” keyboard sequence is present in Kdenlive:

• To play your timeline, press "l" once for standard speed, "ll" for double speed, "lll" for triple speed.
• To stop playback, press "K".
• To reverse playback, press "j", "jj" for double speed reverse, and "jjj" for triple speed reverse.

You can also move by frame or by second:

• The right arrow or left arrow will advance or rewind by one frame.
• Shift+rightArrow or shift+leftArrow will move forward or back by one second.

To move your playhead to the beginning of a video region, use the Home key; for the end of the region, use End.

To move along the timeline by splices, use Alt+leftArrow or Alt+rightArrow. And finally, you can jump to the beginning or end of the Timeline with control+Home or control+End.

Notes on Video Formats:

It is possible to edit on even a modest laptop, mostly depending on what kind of footage you are trying to edit.

If you sometimes run into “stuttered” playback when you import muxed footage, try to transcode it to a high–quality lossless matroska file or to something similar, so that you can edit it smoothly and quickly.

Some phones and portable devices record video in such a highly compressed format that Kdenlive is forced to spends far too much energy “decoding” it to something that can be played back at a normal frame rate. Avoid this the same way: transcode early in the project's life and leave the compressed or muxed footage as backup source files.

To do this:

1. Go to the File Menu and select Transcode Clips.
2. Select the clip you want to transcode.
3. Choose what profile you wish to transcode into (Lossless Matroska is quite nice although depending on the source footage it may be overkill).
4. Make sure the "Add clip to Project" box is checked.
5. Click Start to commence with transcoding.

What codec you use when transcoding will depend on the project and its intended destination. If you require full quality for maximum output potential, then you should probably transcode to Lossless Matroska.

If you feel confident that the video is destined for a limited distribution at a fixed maximum resolution, you might choose to transcode to DNxHD 720p or whatever resolution would be appropriate for the destination.

Never transcode to something that will lose information before you edit; leave that for the final render and compression.

Keep this in mind when constructing your projects: Whatever footage you place in your timeline is occupying RAM. If you attempt to edit a one–track 30 minute project, then you will find that your computer (provided it can handle the video format itself) will perform quite well.
Start adding new tracks, compositing, two hours of footage in the timeline, and your computer will start to feel like “it is working harder”.

Do not hesitate to split a very complex project into separate Kdenlive project files, and edit on a scene by scene basis until you are ready to string your project together into a complete piece.