Works for me here. Can you play other videos using inigo ? Did you remove your old MLT install as recommended in:

http://www.kdenlive.org/bbforum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=455&hilit=#p1547

Thanks. After removing the old installation, it works for me.

But it seems that inigo is not backwards compatible, especially when effects are used.

Inigo displays "invalid".

I will report kdenlive issues in another thread.

I am struggling to understand why this is required. Previously, modules and .dat files were stored in .../share/mlt/modules. Now, only binary modules are stored in .../lib/mlt with not .dat files. The old stuff in share should be ignored by inigo. The revised code in libmlt just looks in lib/mlt, and the service names have not changed.

I suspect that my change to ld.so versioning might be to blame. I wonder if building new versions of MLT linked to an old installation of libmlt.so making it actually use the old logic but with some binary compatibility issues.

So, from an end user's perspective: can I edit 1080i AVCHD with Kdenlive? Just edit (cut off a few bloopers at the end of a scene, maybe join two scenes, simple stuff like that), not decode / recode. The files should remain essentially in the same format after editing.

I'm thinking specifically about AVCHD material produced by camcorders such as Canon HF10

At the moment, everything in MLT and therefore kdenlive gets re-encoded. There is no capability at the moment for stream copying. Also, I think ffmpeg is still not decoding all frames of some AVCHD, but I could be mistaken. I have to double-check that.

Oh, wow. :( My hopes for doing HD on Linux just sunk a little.

Transparent editing is pretty important. E.g., let's say I want to just chop off a few seconds at the end of a file - it would be quite pointless for the editor to re-encode anything (other than what's strictly necessary to rebuild the final GOP).

Also, modern AVCHD camcorders (like these newfangled flash-based ones) not only use for recording the same AVCHD codec used by Blu-Ray, but some (all?) actually create a full Blu-Ray image on the flash memory in real time. So in theory, one could simply dump the flash on a BD and obtain a 100% compliant Blu-Ray disk. Or dump it on a DVD-9, using the UDF 2.50 filesystem for burning, not the traditional 2.01 which is normally used for video DVD (e.g. the Windows app ImgBurn allows you to select the UDF version manually), and obtain a so-called "AVCHD" disk which is accepted by most BD players (e.g. PS3).

In this case, at most, some small editing might be required, but think about it - it would be a pity to re-encode anything while editing, since both the camcorder and the BD format would allow for a transfer with 0% quality loss. An editor that re-encodes would spoil this beautiful scenario.

Transparent editing is pretty important for those who care about PQ (picture quality).

Honestly, all I care about is the particular AVCHD "flavor" generated by the new HD camcorders: 1080i, 60fps, long GOP, 15Mbps (the older models) or 17Mbps (the new ones) near-CBR. Here are some samples:

http://file.meyersproduction.com/hf10/

The HF10.dmg.zip is the archive of a .dmg file - the Mac equivalent of an .iso. I converted it with dmg2iso, mounted it, then extracted the .mts files - those are the AVCHD streams. The .dmg is the raw dump of a Canon HF10.

Please note that the filesystem on the .dmg is truncated to 8.3 - hence the AVCHD streams should really be .m2ts. A lot of other filenames are truncated on that image. I had to tweak it manually and make it identical to the naming conventions of a regular BD before burning it on a DVD with UDF 2.50.

Yes, I know pass-through or stream-copy is important. Stream copying is on the TODO list for MLT. However, MLT was not written for kdenlive or for video editing. It just so happens to be pretty damn good in that regard, so kdenlive adopted with some obvious limitations for now. Besides, a large class of users (arguably the majority) say they don't care because they do not output to Blu-Ray or DV devices--only Internet distribution. Another large class of users are advanced and will end up filtering nearly every single frame for color correction or some other reason. Your voice and vote have been noted.

Also, there is no single universal flavor of AVCHD, and I already have several samples including ones from Meyers Production. I will make sure that includes the ones in the HF10 archive. Don't worry, I have a MacBook Pro running OS/X too, and MLT runs on it as well. :-)

Dear Dan,

I am going to buy an HF10, which is a revolutionnary camcorder.

It produces very sharp h264 video nearly without artifact.

Passthrough editing a THE needed feature for MLT.

I know that are plenty of projects in the tube.

Keep on going.

Kind regards,

Jean-Michel

Well, from a larger perspective:

It looks like the AVCHD camcorders (flash, HDD, DVD) are finally catching up with the HDV ones (miniDV tape) in terms of PQ (picture quality). Which is odd because the AVCHD codec (H.264 MPEG4, 1920x1080i) should be better than HDV (MPEG2, 1440x1080i). Probably, MPEG2 + miniDV being older technologies, were a known quantity and manufacturers could squeeze all the PQ they could possibly squeeze out of them. Also, until recently, most AVCHD camcorders were encoding at 15Mbps which seems like it was not enough, even for H.264.

But things are changing now. There's finally at least one AVCHD camcorder family (the HF10 and HF100) that competes with HDV, due in part to the bitrate increase to 17Mbps, and there's almost unanimous agreement that the direction the technology will take in the future is towards MPEG4/AVCHD. Also, probably, solid state storage will become more and more popular.

So there are good reasons to support this technology (AVCHD) in the Linux-based video tools. Just editing AVCHD is one piece of the puzzle. The other two missing pieces on Linux are:

- (at least rudimentary) Blu-Ray authoring capabilities. AVCHD camcorders such as the HF10/100 produce a Blu-Ray structure in real time on the flash memory. So it's possible to just dump the whole thing on a BD or DVD-9. But if you edit the files, some rebuilding of the BD image might be necessary.

- UDF 2.50 burning capabilities. That's the filesystem used by the Blu-Ray disks (and also by the "AVCHD" disks, which are just DVD-5 or 9 with a standard BD file structure, and are compatible with most BD players and can hold more than 1 hour of AVCHD content)

I am trying to advocate the cause of digital HD video on Linux, since the technology is already accessible to the masses and we finally seem to know the direction it's going. It will take a while to get up to speed on Linux, but I think it's worth it.

P.S.: Hey Jean-Michel, you may want to look at the HF100 as well. It's significantly cheaper than the HF10 and the only differences are:

- the HF100 does not have the internal 16GB flash, it relies solely on the slot for external SDHC cards

- the nifty black paint job is missing on the HF100 ;)

To mention the other reasons why the H10 is interesting :

:arrow: No mecanical parts for recording.

:arrow: Robust metal body.

Also, it seems that picture quality is better than on the H20/H30.

So stick camcorders are not only catching up. They are the future.

Kind regards,

Jean-Michel

i've had my eye on HF100 since it was announced, i'm wondering what the price will be like in Europe and when will we get full support on linux... the future looks bright, but i'll be really mad if the manufactorers of AVCHD plan to upgrade their camcorder by 2mbs more each year... (just make it 24 and lets end the tape era)

I watched a footage and could see many-many artifacts.

Why is the comp-20k.mov file so bad, especially in 24P.

If this was shot in normal conditions, I am not going to buy this cam.

Can we compare comp-20k.mov to other HV20 files shot in the same situation.

Hello,

Please put me on the list of people that want to output to Blu-Ray or AVCHD-DVD at the highest possible quality. :)

I also have a Canon HF100, when I plug it to the HDTV the picture quality is fantastic. If I go through either kdenlive or iMovie, the loss in quality is absolutely striking.

I've done several tests with iMovie and I'm particularly annoyed by the fact that it reduces the frame rate from 60i to 30p. I would like to keep my video in 60i.

I haven't tested the latest versions of kdenlive. Let's say that I:

- accept the fact that there will be conversion and some loss of quality

- want to at least keep the format in 1920x1080 60i; no deinterlacing or frame rate reduction.

Is there a good pipeline to do that? Can kdenlive output to 60i?

If it helps, I can use ffmpeg to manually convert my clips to H264 files or even MPEG4 files with very high bitrate to use as an intermediate format (making sure to keep the clips as 1080/60i). I had to do that during my iMovie tests anyway.

As a plus (maybe this is already possible) I would like to output to Standard-Def 480/60i, for people that don't have a Blu-Ray player. (Please don't tell me kdenlive also converts it to 30p...)

 

Cheers!

Eduardo

 

Yes, Kdenlive supports 60i output if you use at least version 0.7.3 and the appropriate Project Setting.

I have posted a new, downloadable render profile for DNxHD .mov output that you can use to convert the AVCHD footage for better compatiblity with Kdenlive. It will appear in the Lossless/HQ > Custom category after you download it via Settings > Download New Render Profiles....

Great! Good news, thanks.

Since my last post I installed the latest Ubuntu version of Kdenlive, ran into the "almost all output formats are disabled" bug, and already fixed it.

Did you mean: convert the original AVCHD files to DNxHD and edit using DNxHD?

Interesting, I'll try that. I assume there's also a performance improvement with editing DNxHD compared to AVCHD? I could use some performance improvement too! :)

My Linux computer is old but it has lots of hard disk space, which is probably the case of a lot of people that have secondary computers for running Linux. So I'm not worried about big intermediate files, I can handle them! I'm more worried about good output quality and good editing performance on a single-core machine.

Cheers