I'm a very novice and inexperienced user and I noticed few kdenlive weaknesses that should be improved in the feature. The list is no way near complete, I just list what I noticed myself:

1. Easy mass rendering

It's quite often we get many movies from vacations and we want them render to some smaller sizes or specific formats. Currently I needed to:

- put video on timeline
- manually name it (very, very time consuming)
- hit render to a file
- delete from timeline
- repeat for the dozens of times

Having 40-100+ videos to manually render them is very time consuming and inconvenient. Sure, there is some batch script that supposedly can do mass rendering but... I just couldn't figure it out how it works (I couldn't find any video info how it can be done and forums, sites where too vague about it), so it's useless.

I can't figure out why there is no option to mark many videos, choose a format, quality and hit "render them all" - all names should be preserved or specified with chosen format. That was the main thing I was looking for, googling, reading and... nothing. No one said a word about that. Maybe script can do that but how would I know?

I bet such feature (easy mass rendering) would be a hit and a nice way of attracting casual users to the program. This is important because such unprofessional users can promote the program if it's friendly and useful. Photoshop is not only great and powerful but it's UI is friendly and intuitive hence its massive popularity despite its complicated interface.

2. When adding effects or transitions, Properties should open automatically.

At the moment if someone doesn't have turned on in View-Properties, then dragging effects onto timeline does little, it shows only name of the effect on timeline and nothing happens. I suspect that by a default Properties is on but if someone turns it off by even accident, it should be switched on by adding any effect or transition. It doesn't happen now. The effect is, a novice user like me can't use any effect and transitions because nothing is showing and user gets frustrated why isn't it working. A small thing but makes a world of difference.

3. Rotating videos should be easy - if a video is rendered automatically in wrong position.

I love the fact that rendering in 99% of cases just positions video correctly automatically. Sometimes it doesn't, in fact, sometimes it rotates automatically a video that has correct position so we need to rotate it manually. A major pain in the **** and complicated task.

At the moment we must find it in effects which isn't easy. Then we must adjust some options, hard to know which ones. Then the video is too small (black frames around it), automatic adjusting just brakes it every time, moving video aside viewing frame or too small. None of the automatic options could simply adjust the size properly, they all did it incorrectly. It was very hard to find out how to manually adjust the frame, because automatic options were changing it's shape to bigger then it should be and in wrong position from no reason.

Those simple task were very complicated and hard to do. Sure, kdenlive shouldn't be like openshot, but many UI design solutions can be much friendlier. The sole fact that there is no settings (at least I didn't find any) for AUTOMATIC naming of rendered videos shows how far kdelive is from well designed, professional programs. Such small things matter, because those decide of the overall usability and popularity of a program.

> Easy mass rendering

Code: Select all

mkdir Making-of Erledigt ; for j in  *.mkv ; do ffmpeg  -i "$j" -vf scale=-1:432 -sws_flags lanczos -c:v libx265 -preset fast -x265-params crf=20 -map 0:0 -c:a libvorbis -ac 2 -aq 4 -map 0:1  -c:s copy  Making-of/"$j" && mv -v "$j" Erledigt/ ; done

Thanks for your useful remarks.
Maybe you could file bugs so they could be tracked...
1) Batch transcode is easy in Kdenlive:
Select your clips in bin, right click and use transcode action...
But it is true that the offered presets are not for space saving purpose, you will have to define a new one that suits your needs.
There are pure transcoding tools, like handbrake, winff, or probably many others.
But loading into timeline and rendering through MLT is quite inefficient for both human & machine time.
2) Never noticed as properties is always enabled by default?!
3) Shooting rotated videos was not common until recent times. MLT relies on metadata for detecting this, maybe they are not always properly set/interpreted...

One of the things that make me a bit annoyed at trying to use kdenlive for editing is how difficult is to do simple things, like zooming, panning, drawing things on screen, etc. All is based on this strange system of key frames where you're not sure what is actually happening. As an example, I spent about 1 hour trying to figure out how to make a rectangle showing something (not masked) appear over the video, only to give up on it and spend another 30 minutes trying to understand how zooming and panning works. Why simple things like this are so unintuitive and hard to do?

People have spent time to write a manual or recording tutorials on youtube
It's true that our keyframe system is a bit incoherent across transitions & effect, transitions & compositions are messed together: those things are changing in the next version \o/

Have you seen the manual.
https://userbase.kde.org/Kdenlive/Manua ... in_effects

https://userbase.kde.org/Kdenlive/Manua ... n_and_Zoom