3 months ago I decided to create one video per day teaching programming. I'm ready to upload episode 71 to YouTube now.

I thought I could share some details of my workflow and what difficulties I'm facing when using Kdenlive.
This is what I do daily for producing the videos:

1. Planning. Thinking of exercises and how to explain things.
2. Record. I use a python script that calls ffmpeg to record the screen. Very easy and does its job.
http://www.davidrevoy.com/index.php?article65/recordscreen-py-video-and-audio-capture-for-linux-with-ffmpeg
3. Edit. I import the .mkv file recorded in the previous step. In rare cases it's two or three files instead of one. The files are between 40 Mb and 60 Mb. I add the mono to stereo audio filter. I use no transitions and rarely any other filters. My editing consists on cutting out the mistakes and silent parts. The resulting file can have up to 100 cuts of the original video.
4. Export. I use webm 10.000kbps for exporting.
5. Upload. I use googlecl and my own python scripts for defining a title, summary and uploading the video from command line.

These are the troubles I encounter.
1. Kdenlive suddenly closes while editing. Sometimes it shows a screen telling me that it closed, sometimes it doesn't say anything at all. I would say this happens once every two days. It's not much trouble if I saved the file, because I can recover almost everything. It's just a 1 minute delay.

2. Kdenlive does not export the movie. This is happening each time lately. The solution is to restart the computer, open Kdenlive and export. Then it works. If I try to export right after editing, somewhere between 70% and 95% it stops giving an error. Most of the times there are no details for the error. A few times I saw this: melt: /build/buildd/libvpx-0.9.6/vp8/encoder/tokenize.c:177 tokenize1st_order_b: Assertion `-2048 <= v && v < (2048)' failed.


3. While editing all the movie cuts suddenly are showing the beginning of the imported movie, even they are supposed to show some part in the middle. This happens in different ways. 1) after loading, if I try to scroll to the middle or end of the timeline, all clips show the beginning. This is solved by clicking in early locations in the timeline, then advancing. It's like Kdenlive sometimes required displaying previous areas of the timeline to know how to display next ones. 2) sometimes I split the audio and ungroup the audio, so I can use audio from one part of my recording with the images of another part of the recording. This seems to mess up things at times, causing the described effect: suddenly all cuts show the beginning of the imported movie. Unfortunately I don't remember how I solved that.

4. The program menus are shown in three mixed languages: English, German and Spanish. I think it's related to KDE locale settings in my Ubuntu 11.04. I would like it to be shown all in English.

5. I have to use the X11 video controller. I don't know if that's ideal because I haven't found documentation about it. If I leave it on default audio and video are totally out of sync.

6. I wish Kdenlive would apply an audio fade in/out of very short duration (milliseconds) to each clip to avoid clicks. Maybe fade in/out is not the right word, maybe it's making sure the audio waveform is crossing the 0 value or something like that. I often get clicks between cuts.

7. I wish I could cut the audio with more precision than the 25 frames per second. Often is not precise enough to trim specific words out.

8. It would be great to be able to record audio from a line input directly to a audio track. Currently it's quite complicated to do some audio dubbing to replace mistakes. I have to use Audacity, export the file, import it in Kdenlive, place it. And repeat if it doesn't sound right.

9. Ubuntu suddenly logs me out at times, but that's not Kdenlive's fault I guess.

In case this helps: I work on Ubuntu 11.04, i7 2.66 laptop, 4Gb RAM, SSD, Kdenlive 0.8, Audio Kontrol 1 external USB sound card, Wacom Intuos graphic tablet.

Overall I can work quite fast doing that editing in Kdenlive. I use the keyboard shortcuts a lot.

If someone in the team is interested in receiving some of the project files for testing I can pack them on a DVD and send them by post. If I can somehow help with debugging, let me know.

I'm receiving positive comments on my videos from people around the world, and they were all edited on Kdenlive, so thank you for your work!

I have the impression that what cause Kdenlive to crash sometimes is my graphic tablet, but I'm not sure. Sometimes by accident I think my pen is sending a really fast double click. And I believe then Kdenlive just closes. But I don't know how to test this.

I solved problem 4 by opening the file ~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals, finding the section [Locale], and writing Language=en_GB, removing from that line the other languages I use (es, de).

If you have three languages in that line, Kdenlive shows program menus randomly mixing all three languages. Quite fun, but confusing.