Hey,

Sorry if I'm not supposed to post this here but I didn't want to post a review on a third party website.

Recently started using KDen Live, and I actually really love it. For being free, it's extremely well made. Very easy to figure out without reading anything, simple GUI, and pretty much everything you could hope for as a new user. For reference, I am not an experienced user, and I am not a "hardcore" video editor (pretty much never, I just understand it so I'll do it for people if necessary).

I was working on a simple video for a friend, just an intro for him to put in his videos, and I was messing around with some of the effects & compositions. During the WIP I rendered the vid out a few times (to preview) and it was running fine, then I added the "distort" effect (Image Adjustment category), started adding keyframes, and attempted to view the result through the "Project View" window. It did play without issues the first few times, then I clicked on the timeline to move the playback / frame view... and it crashed.

At this point I thought "Aww, I hadn't saved for like 20 steps..." but I go to open the project and KDL says something like "We saw a crash, would you like to open the backup file?" so I do, and was amazed to see it had (auto) saved the project either right before, or during the crash because it contained everything I'd added so far (eg; the keyframes on the distort timeline).

However, the instant I clicked on the timeline, it crashed again. I re-opened the crash file, I tried opening the (manually) saved file, but all of them had the same issue. As soon as I moved the time slider, boom: instant crash. I thought to myself "Maybe I can get away with just rendering the project in its current state...?", and attempted to do so with multiple versions of the save, but every one crashed 4-5 seconds into the render with the error report; "Using AVStream.codec to pass codec parameters to muxers is deprecated, use AVStream.codecpar instead.".

I attempted to google this, and every result I found seemed unrelated (Other people with the issue only had the rendering issue, not the timeline thing). The fixes mentioned included; Disabling GPU support / instancing, and setting max threads to 1. Both of these were already set by default on my install, so not an option.

At this point I just deleted all the files and started from the beginning. It worked, and I used all the same effects, compositions, and source files... So I literally have no clue what became corrupt in the file, and if this is an unknown issue I'm very sorry for deleting the files (Can't reproduce). If it ever happens again I will make sure to document everything.

(Everything from this point is unrelated to the bug / issue I had)

After re-building the project, and rendering it out, I tried a few variations on the values in my Distort (effect)'s keyframes, but every render came out looking bad. It appears the issue is; It seems to be rendering different states of the distort in vertical segments / rows, which causes it to look like it's screen tearing (more than once) in a lot of the frames. When you pause the video, you can actually see where there's a clear horizontal line / cut through the image. I assume this is a known issue, and not unpredictable. Render example : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lazFoQ ... ktiNI/view

When I (just) considered posting something about all this, I thought to look for your forums. So I googled "KdenLive", went to your site, and was looking around for a few minutes for a link to the forum before going back to google and searching "KdenLive Forums". I went back to the main site to make sure I wasn't insane, and noticed the link to the forum about a page down on the intro page. I really don't understand why there isn't a link to your forums on the top bar of your site, maybe under "Contribute"? Obviously it's not impossible to find, just very confusing IMO.

After making an account on the forums (only lower case letters for username is VERY confusing), I go to log in and am greeted with the "Initial Login" screen; https://i.imgur.com/0KM7Dpg.png TBH this was the most confusing part yet. It says "You cannot log in using your nickname" but the default selected option... is my nickname?... Also, how is it "auto generated" if it's just the same thing? I'm sorry if this sounds offensive, but this seems like a very odd step. Maybe considered necessary due to matching nicknames, but... that's why 99.9% of forums don't let people create an account with the same nickname. Why would you if they're never going to be able to use it?

Thank you very much for your work on KdenLive. Sorry for having so many negative things to say, I honestly do love your software.