Hi,

Having my sister getting married, I was supposed to prepare a speech. Instead I chose to make a movie. Actually the main Idea was to use portions of "gone with the wind" and dub it with our own voices to make the character tell my sister's story (in a funny way)...

The job consisted in

- watching a splitting the movie in interresting parts (4h30 of movie this is quite a job)

- Writing a scenario and finding the parts that could fit

- Writing the dialogs that matched the movement of the lips

- Find appropriate SFX

- Putting it all together using Kdenlive (a the start in july in v.4x and in the end the V6SVN from 20 august or so)

The tools I used

- Avidemux for splitting and exporting parts of the movie

- krec to record the sounds

- gimp as a titler

- and of course Kdenlive.

Summary

I spent for this 10 min show (= target time) I think 30-40hrs, a large part of it on Kdenlive. I knew at the time that the soft was still in early development and that I would have to face carshes and bugs. But in the end, not counting the time I spent learning the soft (which was I think rather short) the wild crashes didn't drive me crazy (too much :p ). I think Kdenlive is a great tool : simple in its interface and to use, but allowing to do (almost) every thing I needed.

Detailled review

Before choosing Kdenlive I went through a little market study of what was available in video editing in linux.

- Pitivi was interresting but didn't have enough features at the time (and still don't)

- Cinerella, seemed powerful but also very complicated and not flexible in tis approach.

- kino : linear -> out of competition

- virtual box + win XP + Adobe premiere : well certainly the more rational choice (know how to use it), but not in my philosophy (windows + warez... well you know the story...)

Kdenlive seemed very promising and I tried to install it from the sources (kubuntu feisty).

Advices - Feature request

I had a real pain at compiling the right version of MLT ./++, and finally when I touchedown somebody released a nice package that went fine.

I think it would be great to find someone(s) who could maintain packages for the main distributions.

Filters are great, and the four transitions are all you need. Nevertheless I missed a system (excuse my English, French here) to make the little thingy at the end of the movie where the names and roles go from the bottom to the top of the screen. (Please someone answering tell me what it is in English).

When you get a file from the medias to insert it int the timeline (In track 3), and if you have on track 2, a long media, passing the meda over track 2 to track 3 is sometimes hard : it somewhat "resists". I think it should "jump" to the free track.

Export system is clear (sometimes buggy), but could be clearer : what about an export system per use : make a presentation on video projector (xvid medium quality), make a dvd, export on web small size... This could go in a profile section.

The titler system is (in my opinion) quite poor, and is not very usefull in this state.

Using the soft things that did not go too well for me :

- Spliting and cutting tracks (mostly audio), often result in a hard crash of Kdenlive. Not always reproductible, no particular error shown.

- Rescue system works very well. An improvement could be to make it remember the project path and .kdenlive file name (with confirmation for overwrite).

- Opening Kdenlive from the project file always result in a "Kdenlive was not able to open your file" or smthing like that. Instead if you open it by "File>open..." it goes fine.

- Applying some audio filters (mainly used volume, but also reverb and others), result in muting the file in preview (you can hear it when previewing, but it will render). It is frustrating especially when you do small tuning on equalizing the sounds.

- Some vdeo formats does not import well : most xvid I had lasted between 5 a 120 sec, but where shown to last 1h40mins. So you have to unzoom to max and reduce, or cut (taking the risk of a crash).

- Some formats are fine at importing but crash the render/export (wmv, some xvid)

- Some exports do not work : mainly hdtv stuff - consistently skipped (did not crash Kdenlive).

- If you want to export in dv 16/9 and your project is dv 5 or dv raw, Kdenlive crashes.

- some medium quality exports (flv) export the sound with the video some (xvid) don't.

I may have forgotten one or two things I will repost if relevant.

Conclusion

I Had a great time using Kdenlive and, will continue to use it and promote. All the thigs Said earlier are not a big problem in day-to-day use as you now how to bypass them.

This software is in my opinion the best video editing system on Linux for beguiner to advanced users. Say (as I have read) that it is ready for production, is in my opinion not true : yes you can achieve profiessionnal work with it, but no, you cannot expect professionals (if not free lance) to use it with those bugs. Yet, I think those bugs and feature request could come soon and change my opinion on this point.

Thanks for having achieved this great soft.

Keep on the good work, best regards

Alexandre

Pardon my writing for all the mistakes that hurt your eyes.

Is the black screen issue linked to sound modification?

Same bug as this: http://www.kdenlive.org/mantis/view.php?id=10

Can you provide a screenshot.

It seems to be MLT related.

can you test in inigo please?