Hello from a new forum member, also new to Kdenlive. I have used ffmpeg, etc for the past few years, have also experimented with Kino, and Cinelerra. I could use suggestions for a Kdenlive workflow to achieve particular goals.

My main requirements are to maintain as much video quality as possible for the intended output format, Dvd, and to support the 5.1 ac3 audio. I don't really care how long it takes to render. I don't care if playback in the video editor is a little jerky. I have spare computers, lots of disk, and a lifetime to play. :) But I want my movies to have the 5.1 audio and decent video quality.

Should I edit the .mts files and render final output from that?
Or should I transcode the .mts to .mpg and edit that?
Or something else I haven't thought of or read about? ;-)

My old workflow looked like this;
1. create proxy files with ffmpeg. mts to dv
2. load dv proxy files into Kino
2.1 trim scenes
2.2 apply fades - Kino creates a new dv file for the effect
2.3 join trimmed scenes with dv fade effects scenes
3. export the whole thing to dv/whatever
4. Load into Cinelerra for more effects, music mix, etc.
5. render to mpg for dvd authoring process

This process worked, with the critical flaw of not maintaining the 5.1 audio where it was present.

So, what would be your suggestion for a kdenlive workflow that maintains 5.1 audio?

Thanks in advance,
axman5389

I've loaded 5.1 videos into Kdenlive and made custom render profiles with the tags:
acodec=ac3 ab=384k ar=48000 and it seems to work fairly good. I haven't tested this on a 5.1 set-up to make sure the audio channels are right. All I have is stereo on my desktop.

To add to what arthur provided, you can add channels=6. I am not exactly sure what will happen with a timeline that contains mixed stereo and 5.1 and/or mixing, but on a single file transcode with melt (the kdenlive rendering agent and command line tool from MLT) it seems to work. By "seems" I mean that the output file with ac3 audio reports 5.1 with ffprobe. However, I have not done any actual play+listen testing to be certain it is all correct.

mediainfo also reports:

Channel(s) : 6 channels
Channel positions : Front: L C R, Side: L R, LFE