TL;DR: what is the recommended workflow to create a short video from several long clips containing mostly garbage except for many short sequences I want to use?

Detailed description:
I have been using kdenlive occasionally for about three years, my main focus is aerial videos from an RC plane on-board camera. An example:


(click the image to view the video)

The footage from the onboard camera is obviously long and mostly garbage - I don't use FPV, so the camera is on all the time. For the above two-minute video I had about an hour of raw clips. So I need an effective way how to quickly view the source clips, cutting or marking the interesting sequences, and then reshuffle them to the final video, adjusting the cuts to the background music, and discarding the sequences which are OK but look similar to the already used sequences.

What is the recommended way to do it in kdenlive?

So far I tried the following workflows:
1) import the clips to kdenlive, add them one-by-one to timeline, cut the obvious garbage out, add the background music track to the beginning of the timeline, and then dig through the non-garbage sequences (which are still several times longer than the planned video duration), selecting the ones which match both the music and fit to the video itself. This is not very efficient: I need the fast, preferably keyboard-based way how to say "cut here, discard the previous part, and move the remaining part and the timeline cursor back to where the discarded part originally started". Otherwise I am constantly switching between the select and cut tools, and moving the scenes back in order to not have the timeline with lots of blank space. In kdenlive in the current Fedora, I even cannot set the cursor in timeline while the cut tool is active, which hinders the workflow even more (kdenlive prints "qrc:/qml/timeline.qml:894: TypeError: Type error" to stderr when I click the time row while the cut tool is active).

2) the UNIX way: open a terminal with vim, and another one with "mpv *" to view all the source clips, hit shift-O to see the timing information in mpv, and then just write short notes while watching the clips, something like this:

Code: Select all

002.avi
1:13 hand launch
3:15 the tower from the south
4:31 low pass in the mist against the sun *

003.avi
...

I mark the most interesting sequences with star or exclamation mark. I found out that I am able to write the notes almost without pausing the video. This is really fast and allows me to filter out not-so-good or near-duplicate sequences, because I have a textual description. But now I need the way to add the selected sequences to the timeline. I tried to use the clip view and "Insert zone to the project bin", but it is still inefficient - I did not found how to select the zone with keyboard while playing the clip, and the timing information is not visible by hovering the mouse over the time bar in the clip view (it displays the time where the clip is paused, so navigating to - say - 4:31 of the clip is possible only by trial and error).

Thanks for any hints.

-Yenya

You can do that in the projecte bin.
1. Select a clip
2. set the in/out point
3. hit CTRL+I (or click on the left most icon "insert zone in project bin").

On the same clip select the next part with in/out (step 2.) and continue with step 3. And so on. On the end you get a series of subclips which you can put on the time.