Kdenlive
Version 0.7.8 (rev. 4343)
Using KDE Development Platform 4.4.00 (KDE 4.4.0)

I wanted to render / encode a simple mp3 file + 1 jpg imgage for a youtube upload
just as I would do in windows movie maker.

3 problems:

1) I chose a standard youtube profile (640x480 PAL). Kdenlive said it takes 40 Minutes
to render the file. As I said 1 mp3 file (8min) and 1 png image.
The same thing would take me about 10 minutes in movie maker.
Why is kdenlive so slow? Is this normal?

2) After only 5 mintues into the file it crashed. Second try same outcome.

3) It uses 100% of my system ressources 100% of its time.

The package runs on an archlinux box
P4 HT @ 3.2 GHz 1 Gb Ram using gnome

Summing up all dependencies I needed in order to compile the binaries I had to install over 200 mb.

Basically what I need is a simple tool that takes one image (jpg or png) and one mp3 file and
renders both into something that I can use to upload on youtube. If there is a simple command line tool
that handles this task please let me know. I guess kdenlive is simply too huge for my system.
But anyway I still don't believe that my P4 can't handle the rendering of a 640x480 clip in a decent time.

I'll be happy to provide you with any log files if you need any

thanks!


sorry for my clunky English as I'm not a native English speaker

I duplicated your use case, and it only took my computer 2 minutes to render - single pass, and not because it is really that much faster. Sure, its an Core i7, but the software is doing any more parallelism than a dual core system. Oh, and it did not crash.

Well good for you then:) but that doesn't help me ;)

See what I need is as simple as this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwY8gbg64So&feature=related&fmt=18

But as I said... using movie maker its takes me only 8-10 minutes, I can live with that but 40-30 minutes is way off and crashing makes it totally unusable.

Maybe there any tweekable compile time flags to optimize the execution on a single core cpu?

I noticed you are compiling from scratch.

What distro are you using? Does it have precompiled packages for you that might help these optimizations?

I actually find the file compilation in kdenlive faster than premiere pro, so I know it is working relatively well. That is based on a single core. My quad core laptop flies, so I know it upscales.

For testing purposes, are you willing to try a livecd and install the packages? That way you can see if it is an error with kdenlive proper vs your current setup.

My distro is Archlinux


I think the problem with kdenlive is that it totally consumes all my memory and even my 2 GB swap partition. It starts immediatly with allocation 200 mb of ram (wow!). After a few seconds it has already alloc'ed over 800 mb. Then it starts consuming my swap until there is nothing left. After that the process chrashes (console just says "Rendering of "/home/mo/kdenlive/untitled.mp4" aborted, resulting video will probably be corrupted. ") How much memory does it need? So this is definitely a mem leak or something! Otherwise that would be insane. Allocating over 3 Gb Memory to encode a 3 MB mp3 file... see atteched screenshots

EDIT

I removed the trunk version and installed kdenlive 0.7.7.1 "proper" but there is no change! Memory gets is allocated until the swap is consumed then it chrashes.

Good to see someone was able to reproduce my problem. I'd like too add two more things from a user's perspecive:

1) Assume you want to add a photo and a mp3 file to the time line where the mp3 file time line gets much longer then the window's width, so that the file's end lies outside of the visible area. Then you want to adjust the end of the image to the end of the mp3 file accordingly by dragging its right end across the screen. But by the time you reach the right border of the screen you have to stop dragging the photo time line in order to scroll the window manually to the left because only then you can keep on dragging the picture line further to the right. If the mp3 time line is long enough one must repeat these steps until the end of the mp3 file becomes finally visible. It would be nice if there was a feature that could automatically stretch and snap the end of the picture's time line to the end of the music time line without having to manually drag it across several window frames. Or allow continoues dragging of the time line by automatically scrolling the screen to the left when the window border is reached ( same goes for the opposite direction of course)

2) When adding a clip from the project tree to the timeline the tab in the project tree automatically changes to the effect stack tab (or transition tab iirc). This is kind of against the priciple of least astonishment :). Let the user decide what tab he/she wants to see/use. Thanks!

I must admit that I also had an issue with a render taking up all my memory.

Rendering to Flash 600K, from ntsc dv sources (so 720x480). If I selected scale to 320x240, it would take up all available memory and then crash. Without scaling, no issues.

Were any of you guys scaling? That might give us a clue.

1st posting --> 1) I chose a standard youtube profile (640x480 PAL)


If that means scaling then yes.