Hi guys!

I'm a new user to Kdenlive and fairly new to Linux in general.

I have some experience with video editing mainly Adobe Premiere and later Sony Vegas.
What prompted me to explore the possibilities with Linux was the fact I upgraded my PC from an old Pentium 4 system to a snappy AMD Phenom quad processor. Reloaded Sony Vegas and they refused to grant me another reinstall even though I explained I'm the owner of the software and I upgraded the PC.
Even though I really liked Vegas it really soured me to Sony and their business practices (The minds behind Vegas was the guys that created Sound Forge. Great software. Sony purchased the company, they have been a pain the **** ever since)

I will admit I was pretty comfortable with Vegas so I tend to judge (unfairly sometimes) with a bias. I tend to think "this was easy to do in Vegas".

One neat feature that Vegas had that now a days is pretty common was the ability to do automatic cross fades in clips by just pushing them together on the time line. The length of the cross fade was the amount the clips overlapped.
I mostly do home videos and shoot my desired shots; and a simple assembling of the clips I want on the timeline with a simple cross fade is all I need. I can crank out the completed video without much fuss using this method.
Well, I kind of expected Kdenlive to have this feature because it is much more feature rich than the other Linux video editors I have tried. So far I cannot find this kind of automatic crossfade in Kdenlive.
This really strikes me as odd because even Pitivi has this feature. But I found Pitivi very buggy also. I have to be missing something. Maybe a plugin.

2nd question.
The Linux distro I use is Ubuntu 10.10.
It seems Kdenlive is written for KDE. Would this be a better desktop to use instead of Gnome?

I bealieve you can do this by "overlapping" the clips on separate tracks and then clicking on the lower right edge of the upper clip. This should create a simple crossfade.

I got the cross fades to work. Wow, it is sorta like the older version of Adobe Premiere. It is kind of clunky compared to what I'm use to (there I go again)

How did you do it without doing 1000 times clicking the same? I am looking for a standard overlap time with eg 0.5sec when clips are imported to the timeline.

I am missing the overlap feature of Vegas too, when you simply drag the clip a little bit to the left.

I really don't know who is at fault here, but I've had this problem on a few occasions.

I like to call them 'wandering MP3s' interlaced with a few other words.

I might just be lucky, but what's always worked for me is converting them into .WAV files using Kdenlive.
I just drag the .WAV into the project, line it up with the MP3 and then mute the MP3 to test.

This might not be related to your issue but it's worth a try. (if you haven't already)

3gp is a container for formats like mpeg4 & h264. So a quick remux with ffmpeg to mp4 or mkv may be better supported by kdenlive, no need to transcode to mpeg2 (.mpg). HDV for example is terrible to edit via kdenlive. Or maybe Avisynth to go VFR to CFR.

Maybe it's due to VFR video off a phone, compared to say CFR off a better video capture device or better codec combination more suitable for editing. Maybe lack of timecode.

Personally I have no issues with sound not hitting the mark. But support for codecs varies.

@yellow: Well, I didn't know that. So phones have a variable frame rate. Glad I don't use their footage. Thanks for that.

I kind of like clips timed well with music, especially images. To me, it makes it all flow smoothly. Obviously I don't bother on long clips.