Hey all!

After completing my first project with kdenlive, I quickly found that my editing became a slightly messy process, even with only a small amount of footage.

I was wondering if people would be able to tell me what their typical processing flows are so I get some idea of how to make it a more efficient process!

An example is that I would consider trimming and cutting all of my footage, and then re-rendering into new clips before compiling it all into a final product, with transitions and all, so I'm not trying to pick out good footage and apply transitions all at the same time!

Hi,

You might want to play with the In/Out points in the clip monitor and Ctrl+i to add the section back to the tree.

Some time ago I had uncompressed source material which I then compressed and trimmed at the same time (to save disk space), and then cut it. With compressed footage you usually need to re-compress it which results in loss of quality.

Which other messy actions are you thinking of?

Thank you Granjow, the moving of the in and out points was just what I needed. I think that was the 'messiest' part of the process, though I think that my problems were more a case of operator error than anything else!

How do you go about making your videos? Would you suggest picking in and out points of all the sections of film you want to use first, and then putting them on the timeline in the rough order, and finally selecting all the transitions you want to use? Obviously only as a rough guide as I'm sure it can vary from project to project!

I generally make videos to music. What I do is skim through the video I have, use in and out points when I see a good bit of footage and drag that on the timeline. When I have all of the best footage, I then cut, move, add effects etc all to the music. Having a ton of footage, I find this works pretty well.

Did not know that you could stick in/out point footage back in the tree, so that is very handy! One for the new manual!

In my projects I usually work with 100-250 clips shot at car races. While filming I get some idea of how the video could be at the end.

After copying all footage from SD I start a new project and import all clips. Then I review all clips and drop a short note about the contents and a + or ++ if it is good or a must use clip. If a clip is for the waste bin, it goes there in this step.

Then I add the first music track to the timeline and start with trimming the first clip and drag it to the timeline. Then the second and so on. All directly cut to the music and I also directly add the transisions and effects. When I collect a complete round of one car, filmed from different positions, the "search in clip descriptions" is my best friend.

Cheers, Achim

Hi, this ctrl+i is just was I have been looking for to prepare multiple clips from a longer video clip/file. But I can't see anything related this in the clip monitor buttons or preview menus.

My typical workflow with kdenlive is this:

* first get all project footage in a project directory on file system
* go through all videos, photos, sounds and music with file browser and tag good ones in the file name, I add scene related info between file name and extension, e.g. P1060871.MOV becomes P1060871_sheep_on_the_field.MOV etc
* fire up kdenlive, create new project and add all good clips, due to naming convention I can use the filter *_*
* go through all the clips in kdenlive and mark in and out points, with multiple good scenes/shots in one clip/file the ctrl+i is a life saver!
* then assemble all clips to the time line, at this point sync with audio is not important but I'm looking at the flow of clips and see that they form a story some how
* when first round of timeline is ready, review it and start compressing, usually scenes are too long and transitions out of place
* then add music or sound track, and start syncing transitions and other important events to it
* preview and polish the timeline, again, and again.
* then add titles and other texts, and I'm done

And save the kdenlive project all the time, use a counter in filenames since timeline corruption can happen. In bigger project my counter has been up to 77, and sometimes the old versions have been a life, err timeline saver.