Hi,

this question is not trolling. I would like to know: is anybody using Kdenlive for serious, professional, every day multi-hour work on any video project?

I would like to know if this is just a "prototype" app or if I can seriously start using it for some project work.

If anybody is using it in a real life workflow, please raise your hands, THANKS! I would be happy to read anything about your experiences with Kdenlive.

Thanks for your attention!

I believe the Professionals Video Editors Only Please thread covered this question a while ago already. What do you think?

What I think? Sorry, in the current state totally not. I spend way to much time just "playing" around, but in the moment I started to work seriously there are so many very basic problems, I would not trust this software one second of professional time. It is really a shame, Kdenlive looks so good and I believe there is some real potential, but it would be suicide for every project to bet on this as a production tool. I am away for now, hopefully there will be some development in the future and I will certainly test every new release, but what I see right now is definitely not usable.

--- comment withdrawn --- I saw your other posts....

Hi lenko - Can you be more specific and constructive about your experience with kdenlive?
where did you have trouble? what do you think needs to be improved for more professionals to use it?

I use Kdenlive professionally on serious projects (my website).
In general I like Kdenlive - it does everything I need, though some workarounds and a little bit of trial and error are required, and it takes longer to do things than with the commercial NLEs.

For me, the areas where I find it doesn't match up with Final Cut / Premier / Avid are:

- fast workflow: it takes too many clicks and keyboard shortcuts to get some things done, which slows everything down. This is being improved though - for example, Steve's implementation of Ripple Edits will be in the next Kdenlive release. Mass tweaking/deleting of effects takes forever, effective switching between windows requires the mouse,
- setup & organisation for larger projects: lack of multiple timelines within a project, no nested timelines, no nested folders
- integration with other parts of a post production workflow: no fluid way to send an edit on a round trip to an audio editor/ compositor and back again, eg using interchange formats like AAF/EDL/OMF
- no in-timeline rendering. proxies generally work fine for smooth editing, but with many graphics and effects, things still get stuttery. Showing an in-progress cut to a client doesn't work well within the NLE, so I have to render a clip out and play it back.
- better keyframing of effects would be nice.
- titles workflow could be improved. Though I just use Inkscape and Synfig and ignore kdenlive's titler entirely


what I like about kdenlive:

-Free/Libre, I can install it on other computers to teach people video editing.
-it allows me to use linux! (it's by far the best F/LOSS editor)
-responsive devs and community
-FFMPEG is super-powerful as a base
-color tools work well
-exports fail much less than they did with FCP
-import - seems to accept basically any format I throw at it

I use it everyday, in fact, all my YouTube Channel videos had been made with it (180 videos in total).

Of course there are still some things missing and a couple of features I would like to see implemented but they aren't anything I can't sort out with the help of GIMPso there's that.

Just as a reminder, Kdenlive has seen an important revival this past few weeks and there's a lot of work to do (being refactoring the most tedious one) so we need to be patients.

I use it for my youtube channel. My video is not "professional" because I am inexperienced as an editor, filmer, etc. It is not my primary job or talent. But it is for the promotion of a professional business, and the content has a viewership of about 3000 unique views a day. Here is some stuff done with kdenlive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtEDoMV ... ug50pRNQv0

The plusses of kdenlive

It's free.

It works in Linux

It is simple. I do not have to be a professional video editor. I open something like blender, cinelerra, and I am clueless. I have operated, and repaired Neve 8088, Neve VRP desks, and when I sit down at other programs I am absolutely clueless.

Ability to use proxy clips.

Amazing plugins that are SIMPLE for things like picture in picture, audio panning/limiting, speeding up, slowing down. All at your fingertips quickly.

Uncluttered interface.

Good flexible options for rendering.

It works. Most do not work out of the box, crash instantly, or are missing absolute basic functionality. It is the closest thing to a functional program.

The minuses

No hardware accelleration. GPU heatpipe is cold when playing back video.

Not great use of CPU. A six core 3.8 GHz haswell desktop has issues seeking through huffyuv or x264 qp=10 that's on a raid 0 array of two samsung 840 SSDs.. that's sad. I am often waiting 3 to 10 minutes after seeking at full CPU and RAM usage to seek, and I if I seek 3 minutes in again, same thing.

Random crashing.

I could totally see myself paying $1000 for a working version of kdenlive, and maybe some rudimentary yearly fee for the right to updates. Seriously, I like this program. I have tried other "proper" Windows & Mac video editors and is a huge learning curve to get the same workflow I just picked up in kdenlive natrually. I'd rather stick with this, I hope something comes of it and a paid version gets released with proper driver support/usable fixes for the bugs someday.

i use it professionally as well.

check it out: http://vimeo.com/gunga

the thing is you must be willing to deal with bugs, workaround them and submit them to the devs.

I use this software to mount al the videos about digestive endoscopy in my hospital. I don't have any problem. It works like a charm.

I'd really like to use it professionally, but it's just too darn buggy.

Although I have a "day job", I do a lot of editing on both a voluntary and paid basis. I don't consider myself high-end, but have to produce real results for real clients.

I'm a linux person and have used kdenlive and cinelerra for a long time for my work, before switching to FCPX about 1.5 years ago. Am a big supporter of the linux based NLEs and love what they produce considering most of it is a labour of love.

All software has bugs. There are things about FCPX that annoy me, but also there are some really neat little things that help produce output quickly. Conversely there are features in kdenlive I reckon are really good. No NLE software is identical in features - it's easy to pick wholes in anything as complex as NLE software.

The biggest benefit going to FCPX (or any product similar) for me was the multi-cam feature. This one feature has saved me buckets of time when I have numerous cameras to sync then angle edit. All the proprietary software have an army of paid developers. The open source projects don't have these resources, but still turn out a great application considering this.

For me, linux is a superior OS compared to mac OSX (I only edit on the mac). Still use kdenlive for small tasks, and I think it is a great application.

So, yes I have used it for pro work. Still use it for small tasks. I keenly follow the progress and hope it keeps on improving.

I have edited a Video Art short film in FullHD 3D with handwritten subtitles and a 5.1 surround soundtrack in a previous version (0.9.x) of kdenlive with a nice result.

Since neither AVCHD 2.0 (MVC) is supported on Linux yet and kdenlive only being able to render 2-channel audio, I had to use some workarounds but I nevertheless enjoyed to work with kdenlive a lot. Without much experience with other video editing tools, I found it pretty stable and performant, but especially very intuitive to use.

I've tried some other video editing tools on Linux as well but gave up after a few minutes, either I didn't get along with the usability, something critical didn't work or they just crashed all the time. I also had a MacBookPro with FCP at my disposal but really preferred to use an Open Source tool on Linux, I never regretted that decision and I am still happily editing the occasional small Video Art film or my own spare time stuff.

Just the current 15.04.1 doesn't work for me, I seem to have the same problem as thender describes under "Minuses": searching in a video clip (clicking on some other position in the timeline) takes ages, but for me with 100% CPU, with a 50fps FullHD h.264 video. In previous versions I could "scrub" the timeline quite nice with such material. So something seems to be completely broken, at least on my setup.

I hope I get this fixed soon because I have something to edit and for sure I want to use kdenlive again.

Unfortunately 15.04 received too few testing before release, and now the reports are coming we lack availability to handle them
I would say for few month it is safer to keep a 0.9.10 around the corner for serious projects.

Could you give more details about scrubbing problems :
distro version, FFmpeg version, MLT version, video driver version ?
does it fail with any source codec or is it improved by transcoding the source (just for a test case, I know it is a too long process for general use)

Thanks,

Vincent

Thanks for your reply Vincent, I had created a bug report on this issue some time ago and added the details you asked for there: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=348938

The problem seems to only occur with the 1080p 50fps AVCHD material from a Panasonic video camera, if I transcode such material to i.e. DNxHD 1080p 50fps 120Mb/s it works like a charm. Even if I just remux it to i.e. mp4 (ffmpeg -i 00028.MTS -c:v copy -c:a copy 00028.mp4) it works fine, but of course not as fluent as with DNxHD. Also other material such as MPEG-2 works fine.

So I should have just transcoded that material, for me it is a good solution because it is virtually lossless and scrubbing the timeline is so fluent.

I'll be happy to help with kdenlive where I can, I'm currently getting into C (probably won't help for kdenlive), but I can debug, test, ... just let me know!