I'm still a newbie to linux, but I love Kdenlive so far. I'm having trouble with still photos, some of the portrait oriented photos show up as landscape in kdenlive, and I don't know how to correct them, what I find odd is that some of them show up correctly. can anyone help?

Are they rotated?
Maybe you can upload an example so I can try to reproduce.

The probable reason is that the images aren't really rotated but has a rotation tag which your image application reads and uses but not Kdenlive. The solution would be to rotate the images according to the rotation tag.

here's one solution I found googling:
http://linux.die.net/man/1/renrot

Remember that if it is jpeg images you will get a little loss of quality with each resave which you'll have with rotation. Perhaps not enough to be visible but still there.

JPG files can also be rotated in a lossless way (kipi-plugins e.g., or jpegtran). (If the size is a multiple of 4 or 8 or so.)

I am currently working on implementing automatic rotation for images based on Exif data in Kdenlive / MLT.

The problem is that it will only work for image clips, not for slideshows clips, because the exif data is read by Kdenlive then passed to MLT, so it is not possible to do it dynamically when playing a slideshow clip.

Do you think it is still usefull? I have MLT / Kdenlive patches almost finished...

of course it'd be useful.
thanks!

I'm wondering, would it be possible to implement the direct loading of image sequences in Kdenlive as single video files?
That is, treating
image001.png
image002.png
image003.png
...
image999.png

as a single video file? This would be very useful when editing 3D animation sequences, for example, as generating image sequences is mandatory when doing network rendering of large animation projects.

Thanks again.

I have now sent my patch to allow automatic rotation of JPEG in MLT to the MLT dev mailing list, so hopefully it should be available in some time.

Regarding image sequences, this feature is already available through the "Slideshow clips". Go to the "Add Clip" button at the top of the project tree, and select "Add slideshow clip". It will ask you the folder, image type (jpeg, png,...) and frame duration, and then all images in the folder will make a video clip.

Thanks for the patch. very useful!

Regarding image sequences, I know Slideshow clips are there, but I think they are not the most flexible way of handling image sequences. that's what I asked in first place.
It's very common to have more than one image sequence rendered to the same directory, just with different "base" names (render_cam1_###.png, render_cam2_###.png, etc.) so the fact that slideshow clips take the whole content of the directory is not good for that kind of situations.
In most editing programs you just select any image in the sequence and in the import dialog, check the "image sequence" option (which is usually checked by default, anyway). Then the program looks for the lower numbered file on that sequence and loads it from there, until the sequence ends.
Optionally, some programs alert you if the sequence numeration has "holes" in it (missing frames), letting you:
- truncate the sequence where the hole appears
- leave the missing frames as "offline" frames (basically when you go over these frames in the timeline, a noticeable picture appears in place of the missing frames, to alert you they are not really there).
- just contiguously import the frames that are currently in the sequence, even if they have holes in it.

That last options are not as important, to be honest, as the possibility of just click over one frame to import the whole sequence.

Thanks for listening!!

This feature - image sequence based on name like render_cam_xxx.png - is already available in the MLT framework, so it should be easy to add to Kdenlive. I will check that in the next days.

regards

oh... that would be definitely great!
thanks for trying!!
if you need more input about it, I'll be glad to help.

The changes for image sequences have just been committed to Kdenlive svn trunk for those who want to try out. Below is a snapshot of the modified slideshow dialog. If you have ideas for UI improvements, please speak...

sorry, I'm not able to compile a bit. :(
what behaviour(s) this commit changes exactly?

You do now have the option to either:
- Use all images in the directory with selection being done by file extension (the old behavior)
or what is new:
- Select a filename from which kdenlive will try to create a filter (e.g. select "folder/base004.png" and kdenlive will use all the files in "folder/" matching the pattern "base*.png")

ok, I understand.
That'd work I think, perhaps the "Frame duration" could be preset to 1 frame when you use the "Filename pattern" option? That would save the user one click when importing image sequences.
Thanks!

What I'm thinking of now, is that perhaps there's still too many steps involved for just loading an image sequence. I mean, if you just want to load an image sequence, you have to select the Add Slideshow Clip button, then you are faced with a dialog where you have to select the "Filename pattern" option, then select the image from the disc, then closing the dialog (assuming we preset the frame duration to 1 when in file pattern mode, if that's not possible, then there's one more step). So there are 5 or 6 clicks involved.

Then, I wonder, why not just let the user go to the regular "Add Clip" option and select an image from the sequence he needs, and automatically trigger this new behaviour from there? That'd be 3 clicks at most, and no learning curve involved.

Besides, perhaps it's also better to preserve the "Add Slideshow Clip" dialog to actually make slideshows from several images, which seems to be a pretty specific feature, which Kdenlive does very elegantly already.

Just thinking... would like to know other people's opinions as well.

Hi, just to note with image rotation. In KXstudio (kde desktop and ubuntu underbelly) I made this work by right clicking on the image in my file manager, and selecting rotate 90 degrees. The image in my file manager didn't appear to change at all, but when i refreshed the clip in KDEnlive it showed portrait as desired :) WHOOOOT for cures to ailment! : ) x