Hi!

I've been trying to use Kdenlive several times on different distributions (Ubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, KX Studio) and desktop environments (KDE, Gnome, Xfce) over the years.
And it sems like a great tool for what I want to do (multicam video editing), only I never was able to get it to run stable. It was always crashing randomly and frequently - making all of it's great features useless to me. I wonder if it might be a hardware problem? Maybe my machine just hates Kdenlive no matter what distro I run?

I've heard somewhere that it runs well on Debian with Gnome.

I'd like to ask you what are you running and how Kdenlive is behaving.
I want to find a way to use Kdenlive as I have a big* project to do, and making it in Blender seems like the only option now, but I'm afraid to even start...
*multicam musical gig recording with 5 video sources about 45 minutes long.

My hardware is:

ASUS K52J
Intel Core i5 (64-bit)
nVidia GeForece 310M / 1GB / CUDA
8 GB of RAM (Kingston)

uname -a output:

Code: Select all

Linux unfa 3.2.0-23-lowlatency #31-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT Wed Apr 11 02:24:03 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

lspci output:

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00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor DRAM Controller (rev 18)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 18)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset HECI Controller (rev 06)
00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 06)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 06)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 06)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev 06)
00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 6 (rev 06)
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 06)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev a6)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 5 Series Chipset LPC Interface Controller (rev 06)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset 4 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 06)
00:1f.6 Signal processing controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset Thermal Subsystem (rev 06)
02:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)
03:00.0 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. SD/MMC Host Controller (rev 80)
03:00.2 SD Host controller: JMicron Technology Corp. Standard SD Host Controller (rev 80)
03:00.3 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. MS Host Controller (rev 80)
03:00.4 System peripheral: JMicron Technology Corp. xD Host Controller (rev 80)
03:00.5 Ethernet controller: JMicron Technology Corp. JMC250 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 03)
ff:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture Generic Non-core Registers (rev 05)
ff:00.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture System Address Decoder (rev 05)
ff:02.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Link 0 (rev 05)
ff:02.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Physical 0 (rev 05)
ff:02.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 05)
ff:02.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Reserved (rev 05)

I use Kdenlive on Slackware. It's a stable environment that leads to a stable Kdenlive experience. I run it on both i5 and i7 architectures, with anywhere from 8gb to 24gb RAM.

As with any video editing application, crashes do happen sometimes, but I wouldn't call my editing experience crashy or unstable by any means.

I also make sure I am using reasonably-sized video sources. In other words, if the source footage is very very large in resolution and file size, I create proxies for an offline edit. That greatly increases stability.

I limit the total time of my timeline, as well. I always edit with a few scenes per timeline, never using just one timeline for the entire duration of the project. At the end, I string all the scenes together in a timeline and export.

And finally, of course, I don't apply fancy effects or colour correction until the end. No use in taxing my system with extra processing and rendering until picture lock.

Oh and I don't edit much sound in Kdenlive. Temp tracks exist, but heavy sound editing is done in a sound application mixture of Qtractor and Audacity.

Hope that helps.

Thank you, klaatu! I'm gonna try out Slackware (14.1, DVD, 64-bit) soon.

So you're making one project for each scene and then "master" edit separately? That's how I go with making music albums, but with one long uncut video I don't know it that'll work. Anyway - good advice. I just wonder if you're using lossless formats for rendering scenes before master editing? That must take lot's of disk space...

Finally I'd like to ask you, how do you go about making proxies? I'd also want to do this, but I don't know where to begin.

• Kdenlive's built-in tools or external file tricks?
• How to convert? (ffmpeg?)
• What format work best?
• How to swap for full-res rendering?

If you want to cut your movie in several projects and master them at the end, you can add the kdenlive subproject files as a clip to the mastering project - a greate feature of kdenlive. Just add the .kdenlive file. Then all the tracks of the subproject will be reduced to one track and very handy, render will work without loss of quality.

kdenlive can also automatically create proxy files for you, just enable proxies in the project settings.

If you want to combine proxies and the "project as a clip" feature, you have to disable proxies in the subprojects before finally rendering the master project, otherwise kdenlive will ignore the HD material and use the proxies of the subprojects instead - this is a known bug.

Wow! Kdenlive projects as a clip? This sounds amazing and brilliant.
I hope to get all this working for me.

re proxies - http://userbase.kde.org/Kdenlive/Manual ... roxy_clips