Hello,

I made a video using vids from my digital camera. The clips are 640x480, avi, 30.00300 fps, 1:1, motion jpeg. I was able to take my 20 or so clips, cut them up, lay them out just fine and save it. This was yesterday.

Today I tried to add videos from a friends camera: 640x480, mpg, 30.0 fps, 1:1, mpeg-video.

My video kept going black when i dropped it into the timeline with my other clips. I tried creating a new project, this time square NTSC (the first one was dv pal). I'm getting all kinds of problems now with clips not playing in the timeline, or they play and when I go back to them they dont, or there's just a white shell where the movie should be. This is very frustrating. What to i have to do to merge these two series of videos together? I'm getting black playback now when only one type of video is added.

thanks.

OK, here's what appears to be happening with the mpgs:

I can edit a clip in the clip monitor, but when I drag my edited clip to the playlist, it's all black (with sound). When I drag a full clip to the playlist, it plays. And when I edit it in the playlist, it works. But then if I drag it anywhere on the playlist, it turns black again. Any ideas??

When you wrote "mpeg-video" does that mean MPEG-1? There are problems with some MPEG-1 video clips. Double-click a clip in the Project Tree to open the Clip Properties to see what kind of video it is.

Yes you got it, MPEG-1. Everything was running swimmingly until these MPEG-1 files came into play. Suddenly it's total glitch city: audio tracking off, black screens, playback speed problems, constant crashing.

I'll ask you a couple questions now in case you know the answer:

* Is this consistent with the known MPEG-1 problems?
* Can I batch process these clips into the other AVI format, with the same parameters? I mean I had *0* problems with the avis.
* Can I do this with kdenlive or do I need a different program?

* Finally, I'm curious to know about a good standard for rendering my finished product. I would like this stuff to be closer to 24 fps because our eyes associate this with film and I think it resonates better. But I wonder if this is going to affect the speed or tracking.

Anhyway don't worry so much about the last question if you dont know, as I realize it is off-topic and I should read the documentation. Any avice on the first three things will be much appreciated though.

try to convert the mpeg-1 to avi using ffmpeg:

$ ffmpeg -i the.mpg -vcodec copy -acodec copy the.avi

If it works, you can add it to the new Transcode settings in Kdenlive 0.7.4 or newer.
Then, after adding an MPEG-1 to the Project Tree, right-click the clip to access the Transcode feature. If you want to batch convert:

$ for file in *.mpg; do ffmpeg -i "$file" -vcodec copy -acodec copy "`basename $file .mpg`.avi"; done

If you attempt to convert ~30 fps to 24, then you will introduce some slight temporal distortion (judder) because frames will be dropped and with no interpolation among retained frames to achieve that result. Interpolation is very difficult to do with good quality and Kdenlive simply does not have that capability. In short, it will not be the same fluidity as footage shot natively at 24 fps. However, you can give it a try and make your own determination. You need to create a custom Project Setting in kdenlive _before_ you start your project, and then use it.