>>More powerful chroma-key function. The one included, with it's one pathetic slider...

What version of Kdenlive are you talking about?

@LonePiper - many of your suggestions are already covered.

re chroma key.
You are probably talking about the Blue screen effect. Kdnelive has another chroma key effect - Color selection
http://userbase.kde.org/Special:MyLanguage/Kdenlive/Manual/Effects/Alpha_manipulation/Color_Selection

re: title editing. You can edit existing titles. Just double click them in the project tree and edit them. The edits appear in clips on the timeline. And you can check the show background box to show what it looks like under your title.

re: cutting - see http://userbase.kde.org/Kdenlive/Manual/Timeline/Editing#Cutting_a_clip - you can just use shift +R to cut at the exact spot the time line carat/cursor is at.

re: reverse a clip - you can run a melt command at the command line to do this. But it is a feature that would be good.

melt -profile dv_pal_wide framebuffer:vid.dv?-1 -consumer xml:vidreversed.mlt
and you can load vidreversed.mlt onto the project tree and timeline

-More versatile text function. I need to be able to preview how my text will look in the video, and I need to be able to change it after it is created. C'mon guys, this is just not good enough.

Which version are you on? I'm able to playback titles in realtime in 9.2. there are some odd quirks, if I edit text, the wordwrap changes when I close the title edit window and that screws up centring, but it's easily fixed by just going back for another quick edit to realign the text.

-Sound for scrolling/scanning timeline. If I haven't hit the play button, I still want to be able to hear the sound at the position of the playhead as I move it back and forth. While we're at it, sound should also play for fast forward and rewind. This and the last suggestion are absolutely imperative for the kind of pin-point editing required of professionals.

Sound is not particularly precise in terms of sync in Kdenlive in some cases at the moment. I think they need to fix that before they implement scrubbing. (Hopefully 0.9.4)

-More powerful chroma-key function. The one included, with it's one pathetic slider, is next to useless. There really needs to be a LOT more options and variables. Come to think of it, more options and versatility for alpha manipulation in general would not go amiss.

This is bizarre. There are so many alpha manipulation modes available in various keying functions in KDEnlive. It is far superior in that regard to Avid Media Composer 6 and rivals FCP. (I wouldn't trade Avid or FCP for KDenLive for professional time critical work, but in this area, it's got the pro app beat).

The trick is to use a combination of filters to achieve the best key, as you would in a professional compositing app.

-Multiple sequences per project. I know I can import other projects as clips, but that's incredibly clunky and time consuming, especially when I have to jump between the two projects to edit each one individually.

This is asking a lot, even Adobe Premiere didn't implement this until its 7th iteration, and some pro software such as Vegas still doesn't AFAIK.

Scrubbing is now working in a git build, for a week or so.

"Scrubbing is now working in a git build, for a week or so."
Really. Do you have to turn it on somewhere.

I have a 17 Jan 2013 git build from sunab. What date is yours?

mlt 0.8.8-0ubuntu0~sunab~precise1
kdenlive 0.9.3+git20130117.91ea0353-0ubuntu0~sunab~precise1
frei0r 1.3.0+git20130119.c3fdd674-0ubuntu0~sunab~precise1

Okay, sorry - probably should have searched a bit harder for some of these functions.
For the record, I'm using 4.8.5

Re - Chroma key. Yes, I was referring to just the standard Bluescreen effect. I googled bluescreening in Kdenlive a while ago, and all the results I had were only pretty poor examples using this effect. I got the impression that it was the only real option.
Is the color selector supposed to be a standard effect, or one that I have to install? Because it's nowhere to be found in my program... *Goes off to download it*

Re - text. Umm... kinda messed up this one, sorry. Last project I worked on for some reason I couldn't seem to edit text after I had made it. Seems to be working now - my bad. But it still seems I can't preview what it will look like without playing the actual clip. There should be some option where you can display the frame at the playhead in the background of the text editor.

Re - Scrubbing. Good to hear they're working on getting scrubbing to work. Wasn't sure if it wasn't included because more work had to be done to get it there, or if it wasn't considered important.

Re - multiple sequences. Okay, I'm not an expert programmer, but is this really such a huge task to create? Citing commercial software not implementing it until recently is a non-sequitur. Just because they didn't do it, doesn't mean it's necessarily difficult. As I said, you can already import other projects without first rendering them. To me that would be the difficult part of the operation.

Re - cutting. Wow, thanks ttguy! Quite a different way of doing it to how I'm used to - most other softwares snap automatically to the razor (or equivalent) tool, so when searching for a solution that's what I was looking for. Well, problem solved!

Re - reversing clips. I know there's a command line way to do it, but as you say it would be better as a feature. Not everybody has the time or patience to mess around with the command line, especially for something as supposedly basic as this.


Additionally, dylanpank - you mention there are a lot of alpha manipulation modes. I'm taking it you mean mainly in the "transitions" (which is honestly a misleading name if you ask me, because they are way more than just transitions!)? Sure there are plenty there, but as for creating the original mask for them to use there isn't a lot, at least not preinstalled in the one I have. There's the aformentioned BlueScreen function, Mask0Mate and Rotoscoping. That's it.



Addendum - why do I only have version 0.8.2.1!?!?!? Shouldn't it update with my other software? I only just realized that the current version is 0.9.2
Seems the latest version in my package manager is the one I've got. Guess I'd better do something about that!
I guess sorry for a lot of silly questions then!

@ttguy "I have a 17 Jan 2013 git build from sunab. What date is yours?"

26th Jan 2013, but it's been working for me for a couple of builds before that too I think.

@lonepiper, not sure what distro you're on but there are Fedora near daily builds from MLT site and Ubuntu via sunab's PPA's, latest git packages are available, there's also a more recent regular 'stable' version than you are using if on Ubuntu via sunabs 'stable' PPA. Then there's also the build script route which allows you to keep your distro repo's 'stable' kdenlive & MLT versions and also allows you to have the latest git build in dated folders within your home/.../kdenlive folder for cutting edge, best of both worlds. :-)

Yellow - I'm guessing Ubuntu's repositories for kdenlive are just woefully out of date.
(I'm actually using Ubuntu Studio. I consider that quite ironic considering how badly it fails at being a studio OS. I plan to switch to straight xubuntu in the near future.)
I've gone ahead and added the PPA from the KDEnlive site and a lot of my issues have been resolved.
Honestly though, I'm sorry for turning what is supposed to be a suggestion thread from experts into a "how do I make this work" thread for newbs... Again, I should have done more research before posting my complaints.

RE: audio scrubbing. I am finding this working in 0.9.3 / 0.9.4. But you have to hit play and then drag the play head around. If you start from a paused video and drag the playhead around you do not get the audio scrubbing.

Which is probably OK - I normally will get quite moving of the play head - but if I want it to be noisy I know what to do.

re scrubbing, I'm not having to hit play, just dragging the play head works for me, weird. :-)

@lonepiper, yeah i used Studio a few years ago for the newer versions of jack integrated apps and such but gave up on it as development seemed at the time to slow down and moved to vanilla Ubuntu. Like KX Studio too, gave that up when KDE Desktop became the problem in sucking resources and arguments of fixing KDE performance bugs when using NVidia proprietary drivers. All in the past now though. :-)

@Yellow - re:scrubbing. Hmmm. Yes very weird. And I just played with it some more and I don't like it the way it works for me because when you let go of the play head cursor the video keeps playing. And so it is not useful for positioning the play head. I am imagining people like audio scrubbing so you can position the play head at exactly the right spot with respect to some audio in the clip. And with how it is working for me - no go.

So from your comments Yellow I have a valid gripe to raise a mantis defect on. Something like "audio scrubbing not working unless clip is playing"

I have noticed that you can get a kind of makeshift scrubbing by hitting play and moving the playhead around, but that really defeats the point of scrubbing, as you say ttguy. It feels like trying to climb into a moving car.

On the 094 release page it says scrubbing is only available with openGL output.

Haha that'll be it then, I have OpenGL toggled on in kdenlive config. So that's where I can turn it off. :-) jk

Oh yeah :-). Checking the "use Open GL for video playback" checkbox in Settings > Configure Kdenlive > Playback section turns on audio scrubbing for real for me.

Thanks Marko

PS - I updated the manual on this.