The current render dialog (please click thumbnail for full size view) has some issues. Actually a few, among them:

- many users are confused about the project/render profiles (which are not the same)
- it exposes too many options for some, too few for others
- there is no easy way to indicate dual-pass (and, actually no support for it currently).
- audio and video encoding is mixed - perhaps it is better to split them
- currently no "make dvd project" options.
- lots of other issues

The developers of Kdenlive are dedicated to provide a powerfull, flexible, yet easy to use NLE. We realize that the render process is an important step in every projects lifetime, and that the current render dialog does not provide the features, nor the usuability experience we aim form. In designing a new render dialog, we seek the help of the community.

The currently most complete "developer" discussion of the render dialog/workflow is in this mantis issue: http://www.kdenlive.org/mantis/view.php?id=323 - which also holds links to related requests/issues. We are intentionally moving that discussion to this forum.

What we are looking for, is good ideas for a future render/export dialog (or dialogs!). Should it be a wizard? Should it be more task/end result oriented? Should it partition the render options in e.g. "Fixed media", "Web Media", ??? Should it be "normal"/"expert" partitioned? In other words: how should it work? Can we be inspired from other KDE projects? (We try to *not* "copy" from other video editors, this is intentional).

We are looking for ideas that take into account that different users want to acomplish different things. Integration with other projects: should kdenlive produce e.g. k3b projects/qdvdauthor projects/kmediafactory options? And, so on.

We are also looking for mockups. Not fancy graphics (even though that is nice too!), but rather mockups that illustrate the workflows and possibilies supported by the ideas represented in the mockup.

Mockups can be drawings (e.g. in krita/gimp/whatever), or perhaps constructed with the use of e.g. designer or kommander.

So, if you have an idea about how the render dialog should work, please let us hear it.

Regards

Mads

I made some mockups, but it's not possible to upload images directly to here .

Sorry for that. I just enabled the attachments in comments, so you should be able to upload now. Regards
Edit: I changed permissions, should now work.

hello j-b-m, still not working.... thanks.

Edit by j-b-m: Please try again, should work now.

 

I made a few mock-ups. there is no wizard and just 2 options: simple and expert. the toggle between them is by button (as in the mock-ups) or by tabs.

the expert is very simple ;) you have all the options (just some of them are in the mock-up)  and you select each with a separate combo box, and it also could be edited manually in a text window.

the simple window have 1 main combo box where you select the destination(web, media, OS, etc) and the options below changes accordingly.

 

- scroll boxes are not used as in the current implementation (they take a lot of space and not so useful).

- progress bar is optional and I think it is better to put it here and not in the notification area of the task bar.

 

hope it helps a little, thanks for a great project,

Amir

 

 

IMHO the fist important feature to impliment is dual-pass encoding:

* You can specify a target size and reach it with 1% or less error.

* Motion is very good, as higher bitrates are used during motion.

* Image is usually sharper. If you look at exports today, usulay it containes squares.

Advanced users will look only at dual-pass encoding. The export dialog is important, but the features of dual-pass encoding is ***VERY*** important.

@amir: very good screenshots.

Seems to me that the two most extreme use cases are:

1. Joe wants to click "Make my Movie", click a Youtube (/Vimeo/DVD/Google Video/Blip.tv) button, and then click "Save". (What's "rendering"?!!) He has no idea about codes, bitrates, progressive vs interlaced or multi pass rendering. He doesn't want to know. He wants to click a couple of buttons and have it done for him.
2. Mary wants to click "Render", change every setting available in MLT to best fit her demanding technical needs and then click "Start rendering now." She likes the convenience of presets, but invariably ends up tweaking them all to get the output precisely how she needs it.

The best way I can see to accommodate both, is to have a render dialogue that has clear buttons for presets (Youtube, Vimeo etc) that may not be perfect for everyone, but are the best guess for someone who knows nothing. To the right of that, are only the most basic settings (height, width, fps). These numbers change automatically when Joe clicks on a preset. There is also an "Advanced" button that reveals all of the more technical settings available underneath for Mary.


Oh, and I just remembered usecase #3:

3. Andrew is an idiot. He paints half his body green, and the other half pink. He wants to fly to the moon with only his arms. We ignore him. ;o)

I like the expert screen (the first one). I suggest to add a frame including a text explanation of the characteristics of every format selected and information about the suitability and parameters to be selected, ie:

• mpeg1 suitable for VCD. The standard bitrate shoud be between 900 and 1200 kbps... etc.


• mpeg2 suitable for DVD's and SVCD's. The standard bitrate shoud be... You can select several audio codecs AC3, mp3, pcm...


• xvid. suitable for modern standalone DVD players with bitrates between 700 and 1500 kbps... Its a high quality standard but still compression is usually higher than mpeg 1 and 2....Audio codecs includes: mp3, AC3...a second pass is recommendable if high quality is required... progressive is recommendable too.

I know it is a lot of work, but users will be happy to have a contextual help to understand what are these options for. If contextual help is included i think there is no need to add "simple" dialogs which are a lot of work too.

I hope it helps.

regards

 

I am wearing a camcordian hat as I am an inexperienced user of a Flip Video Ultra pocket-sized camcorder that has a USB male connector that plugs straight into PCs. The camera video clips (AVI files in MPEG-4-part2 format) can be easily copied to PC memory. I have about 120 clips and I want to merge these into one big AVI file after editing some of them. That is all. I don't need menus or effects.



I have tried several products and after two weeks have not been able to accomplish this simple task. Kino got stuck in pulseaudio loops while editing, Kdenlive did not output any video only sound for DVD rendering, PiTiVi also had problems and some of the DVD authoring tools, e.g. ManDVD did not work either (don't remember the details).



Apart from bugs/quirks, all these were extremely awkward to use. I first had to select AVI clips that ended up as part list in the GUI and then drag clips individually to a timeline workarea. Dragging 120 video clips of course is tedious beyond description. Kdenlive delete operations left white gaps in the timeline area.  Unkind and unhelpful. I expected the editor to close the gap and move all subsequent clips accordingly, like a text editor.



I am a fairly typical camcorder user. I just want to edit clips and merge them into a single video file. Kdenlive could handle this task as follows:



1.  what goes in comes out

 

the output AVI file should be of same type as the input clips (for Flip mpeg-4-part2). Then there is no need to specify anything before rendering.



2.  work at file-level



Clips are files. The Flip camera names the clip files xxx_video1, xxx-video2 (other cameras probably do too) so they are already alphabetically ordered and can be moved straight into a listbox in the GUI without sorting. It is natural to copy camcorder files into a directory on the PC, so the collection of clips can be specified by clicking a directory.

If needed, repositioning filenames (i.e. clips) is very easy to do in a listbox. The user only has to ensure the clip files appear in the right order in the listbox.



The user should be able to hop back and forth between clips and to single out clip files for editing with live and immediate feedback. Kdenlive should allow the user view the effect of editing, especially before and after cuts and between clips.

Simple navigation like 'goto next/previous cut in current clip', 'goto next/previous clip' are needed. And of course it should be possible to view the whole creation from first to last clip while still in view/edit mode.



Cutting defines exclusion zones in the data, the data itself should not be touched. The display and generation of final AVI data would just ignore the exclusion zones. An exclusion zone is defined by a start and end point. It would be useful for Kdenlive to allow the start and endpoints of several exclusion zones so the user can experiment before making a final decision.



This approach eliminates the awful dragging and fiddling with the timeline area. The latter is not needed at all.



Operation then reduces to: click directory with clips, optionally edit some clips and press Save to get a result file.



Generally, I think Kdenlive should be task oriented with entry points for YouTubers, Camcordians like myself and so on. Let the user specify desired task up front and then display dialogs tailored for the task, but I would not like Next/Continue style of Wizards.

 

Sorry, double post - accidentally clicked button twice.

Hi resander

I think you raise a number of valid points and use case scenarios.

The number 1 point is surely a use case we should accomodate. See also this issue:
http://www.kdenlive.org/mantis/view.php?id=279

Your number 2 point is not related to this topic. It would be great if you would create a new topic/idea/mantis issue for this, which I would consider a different "editing" mode (autoremove space on clip deletion?) Perhaps it is also a "multi drag-drop onto timeline" issue?

Also, please note, that Kdenlive SVN now have a nearly working spacer tool, which makes it a lot easier to remove space in controlled way. Perhaps we need a "trim space" tool too, that removes all space between clips?

Most of these are related to a use case that could be called something like "Working with many clips in a project", not?

The reason I ask you to create these topics/mantis issues is that you will then be involved in further discussion.

Oh, and about the render issue; I have just added a logging facility (svn rev. 2810) to kdenlive_render, that should allow us to getting closer to figure out why render fails for some people. It can be very hard to figure it out, we would be very glad if you could help us. (We need someone that has the error to figure out why it goes wrong).

I hang out a lot on IRC (#kdenlive irc.freenode.org) and would be very happy to try and pinpoint this issue.

Thanks

Mads

Just a quick note that Kdenlive 0.7.1 now offers more export formats. It adds WIDE DV export, Media player exports (Windows, MacOsX), h264 better quality (long GOP) and Mpeg2/H264 I-frames only. The ISO names are used (MPEG-2, MPEG-4). I hope you will like it. These export modes still need heavy testing to find the best suitable options. This is the main work to provide good exports.

In expert mode, we should be able to set a large number of FFmpeg export parameters. For a short and quite complete howto: http://itbroadcastanddigitalcinema.com/ffmpeg_howto.html

These are the main options:

http://itbroadcastanddigitalcinema.com/ffmpeg_howto.html#Generic_Syntax The export dialog in expert mode shall give access to any of these parameters. Maybe in a tab. I don't know.

As for sound, you may be insterested to work with DAN to provide more than 2 sound tracks. This may be interesting for profesionnals.

I think it is important to distinguish between the container (mp4, avi, etc) and the codec.  Sometimes the container implies the codecs use (mp4 => h.264 & AAC) however this definitely isn't always the case.  Too often they are conflated. 

Given a robust burning project like k3b already in the KDE world, I'm not sure it would add much for kdenlive to have its own "Burn to DVD" option, unless there is already some template code from the k3b project you can leverage easily and not really have to maintain yourselves.

I agree with JMP that two pass encoding is the highest priority, but isn't that just a check box for the containers/codecs that support it?

Here is a preview of my first steps in redesigning the render dialog... I think it is important to keep very simple options for DVD / Web export which is very common, then the "Files" export page will show a list with various formats a bit like the current render dialog, and expert should allow to choose the codecs, formats, etc from a list...

Update: new image of current state uploaded. Comments welcome.

Hi!

Below is a screenshot of the current rendering dialog in Kdenlive. I re-organized the categories, so that you now have the following categories:

• File rendering


• dvd


• web site


• media player


• Lossless

I also added some new options (rescale and drop audio). I will not add an "expert" mode now because it is really complicated to make something usable given the complexity of video encoding with all parameters that can conflict... The dialog will probably look like this for the next Kdenlive release, and if someone wants to work on an "expert" mode for next release, he/she is welcome.

Suggestions still welcome.