Hey everyone. I'm new to kdenlive, and I just wanted to mention what workflow works for me. Hopefully this will help other newbies. Also, I hope to get better tips.

This workflow is for screencasting on an Ubuntu 10.10 machine.

1) I record with Kazam, and get mkv clips.
2) These mkv clips don't work too well in kdenlive. The audio was scratchy in the preview window. To fix this, I convert these clips to m4v using Handbrake.
3) I import the m4v files into a kdenlive project that has these settings: HD 720p (with any framerate that's higher than your screen capture software. I just picked 24 fps).
4) Edit the video
5) Export using these settings: Lossless / HQ > MPEG4 I-frame only (video) + MP3 (sound)
6) The rendered file is rather large, so I convert the file again in Handbrake but specify 15fps. I couldn't seem to export a nice looking video in kdenlive at 15fps.

I'd appreciate any tips and ways to make this better. Thanks!

You've got 3 transcodings of your material with losses in all 3 of them. You should strive for just one conversion, from source material to final output.

Can Kazam record and output in some other format? If not, perhaps there is some better alternative for recording?
Rather than convering the output, set a better format from render. You still have the project and can export in better quality later if needed.

Thanks Rylleman. I test out other ways to render it.

Unfortunately, Kazam only records into one format. But I like it because it's fast, much faster than recordmydesktop. I don't wait sevefral minutes to "render" after a 5 minute recording session.

I tested Kazam output. The H.264 encoding does not work with VDPAU - causes Kdenlive to crash sometimes and corrupt video other times; I will have to try to detect that and automatically disable VDPAU. Audio worked fine. I made a fix for FLAC in v0.5.10 of MLT. And, of course, like rylleman said, you should be able to render just fine directly out of Kdenlive. Maybe not quite as good as Handbrake because its x264 parameters are tuned more, but it should be close.

... and otherwise I'd recommend using mjpeg with q=2/quality=90 as intermediate format, it's almost lossless, frames are independent and light on CPU. For the sound you can use simple uncompressed pcm.

Thanks guys. I will try these out!