Re hvdwolf: wow, I do need to try this! Maybe it can provide the solution?

Re yellow: Thank you for the encouragement. I de-installed and re-installed with the following result
- Adding clips: still crashes at random. Trying around I realised that if I recover then it reliably crashes again whereas if I do not receover but load the same clips again then kdenlive is smart enough to recover nevertheless the work done in the previous session and proceed a little further. Applying this method over and over again I managed to get all clips included after about 2 hours :-) but done it was.
- Editing: worked like a charm (for the limited functions I used: rearrange, cut, set timeline guides and title clips
- Rendering: I tried different output formats and all sort permutations of configuration settings (interlaced or not, different quality settings, etc) and it stalls and it stalls and it stalls - usually ater about 5-10 minutes. The PC never run out of resources (disk space or memory). Inspecting the mpeg2 files at times you could see jitter happening just before kdenlive stalls. It looks like if after some time kdenlive develops a (syn) problem of some sort that gets worse until it stalls. The kdenlive mts process goes on hrtimer-nanosleep and never again wakes up.

Yellow: How did you render your project?

Hvdwolf: Really appreciate your help. I will try it as soon as I get time and report back ...

hlan, too bad you're still having constant crashes. When you say adding clips crashes kdenlive do you mean adding them to the timeline or project tree?

Is that with kdenlives project assigned proxy generation active or not.

As mentioned, I always use proxies by first ensuring I have a usable proxy commandline working in kdenlives config, then start a new project, choose the proxy profile in project settings, load in all clips by drag drop into the project tree, I then wait a bit for thumbnail and proxy creation, then save the project with a name and begin editing, I don't generally start dragging onto the timeline until the proxys are built.

re remuxing, you can remux to mp4 from within kdenlive, but this does not include the excif stuff posted above, the excif stuff is cool but personally as I'm working with a copy of source files in a project directory and keep well away from the RAID backup archive originals I don't see a lot of point with maintaining dates, just personal choice, wanted to say that a simple remux of MTS to mp4 doesn't require CLI stuff necessarily, its in kdenlive already.

Rendering I have no problems with any format and also custom output, if you can provide a small clip might help.

Hello Yellow,

Yes, the workflow was first load the clips, wait for thumbnails creation and proxy creation to be completed. The crashes happen there - not sure why?

Then the clips were put on the timeline, changes made, titles added, and last rendering which was a big fail. I send you a short clip that also lets you to easily verify the quality of the result.

Thank you ...


update:
- Installed a new Ubuntu system and Kdenlive. Now Kdenlive does not crash any more when adding video clips (and creating proxies). The Kdenlive installation took 4-5 times longer (compared with doing it in my other Ubuntu system), installing lots of libraries that were still missing in the new system.
- On the old Ubuntu system I believe that Kdenlive depended on so much libraries outside its direct control and that were not explicitly checked and henec some libraries were not good any more. Maybe something that Kdenlive developers could consider is to package and keep inside the Kdenlive environment more libraries that it needs. The few mega bytes of being less space efficient would be greatly awarded by more robust, self-contained Kdenlive environment.

"Maybe something that Kdenlive developers could consider is to package and keep inside the Kdenlive environment more libraries that it needs. "

This does not really fit with the Linux philosophy. So I doubt this is going to happen.

Hello gwarham, that's interesting.

- My Kdenlive on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 32b never managed to render to the very end of the project. Having (tried) to "clean" and reinstall Kdenlive gave some improvement, i.e. how many clips Kdenlive could add (and proxy) at a time and for how long it would render - but at the end it never rendered the full project. At the moment I believe that problems came from prerequisite libraries that do not ship with Kdenlive and that are not verified at installation time for being at the good version, ultimately causing stability issues. Prior to Kdenlive I tried all the different video editing software and believe this left a mess behind on the PC.

- A new installation made was with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 64b, that had no problem when adding and proxy'ing clips, and rendered to the very end! I am still in the exploration phase, but rather attribute this to the clean install and not to 32 or 64b.

PS the 64b install seems to process video much faster(though not sure if it comes only from the architecture or if the slower performance on the other system was caused by one of the bad libraries) - how do your systems compare for processing time?