We run a small medialab in the eduaction branche and are looking for an opensource videoeditor on linux. I have set up one of our laptops (HP, Geforce 9400, core2duo@2.26 GHZ, 2 GB RAM, 320 GB sata HD) with ubuntu lucid and kdenlive. We also hooked up a 21 inch LCD-monitor (twinview via nvidia-settings). Yesterday we run a test with some of our students, and I just want to post some of our experiences. We used the laptops' screen for projectmonitor only, and all the other stuff at the big screen. We use firewire-cameras, and the students filmed about 15 takes, all together about 10 minutes, 720p, PAL, 16:9. Capturing the data via kdenlive was no problem, and they loaded the clips and began to cut them (mostly cut some away some seconds at the beginning and at the end of the clips). They used to start/stop the playback and somehow expected the application to stop when they hit the space-key, however they ran into problems, since it took some time for kdenlive to respond. Often the app greyed out for 5+ seconds, playback continued way to long. When they zoomed into the clips, they expected some preview frames, however only the first and the last frame of the clip was there, in between only blue. The app remained in "grey-mode" 2 times, and I had to kill the app. The emergency-projectfiles worked nice. In the end we had a nice 8 minute film, however the linux-group had to spend 1 hour more then the windows-group, who spend 2 hours on their movie using canopus-software.

What can we do to accelerate the response from the app? We really need this. Any recommendations very welcome.

Greetings

Since you captured 720p from FireWire, I assume then the video is from HDV camcorder. I do not recall having this responsiveness problem when stopping playback, but I have not yet tested the Kdenlive build in Lucid. I have been meaning to try it; I will do so soon.

Thanks alot for your response.
I am 99% sure the cam (a SONY) is not capable to do HDV. I will take a look at the files and so on in few days, when I am at the lab again.

I am also seeing unbearable GUI responsiveness in Ubuntu Lucid, and Kdenlive 0.7.7.1 (standard Lucid package). It was suggested in another thread that turning off audio thumbnails would improve things, and this is true. Higher zoom levels make the responsiveness worse. To be fair this is perhaps a codec problem(?). The clips I am using have a .m2ts extension, and are from a Sony CX-110. Kdenlive shows the properties of these clips as: H.264 / AVC / MPEG-4 AVC / MPEG-4 part 10, 1440x1080, and audio as AC3 stereo 48K. These clips will play in Totem Movie Player (2.30.2), but video becomes badly distorted and audio drops out completely if you fast forward/rewind, which would suggest that the difficulty Kdenlive is having is not unique to it.

billstei, you are using AVCHD. As has been stated here repeatedly, there are known major performance problems with _seeking_ on AVCHD.
The original poster mentioned acquiring from FireWire, which can not be AVCHD, but he seems confused about the source format anyways.