Hello,

I just upgraded my system to Ubuntu 20.04 (from 18.04), and as usual, that comes with a major version upgrade of Kdenlive.

While I can get used to most of these changes, I'm having a hard time with the new timeline look, with the audio component showing all the time...

In the previous version, there were 3 "video streams" in the timeline (which included audio for that video), and 2 extra "audio only streams"... now it looks like there's only TWO streams, and when I drag a video clip in, it uses up both a video and an audio component. I find this extremely distracting, since I mostly work with no audio, and just overlay some track at the very end. I also can't seem to figure out how to do something super basic, like use the two video streams (lots of transitions between clips, etc.) and then add a completely separate audio file (e.g. background music), and fade/slice it at my whim, since the presence of video clips in the two video streams automatically wastes the two audio slots.

How can I get back my non-distracting view, and how can I get more than 2 video streams? I hope this is configurable, and we didn't just take a step backwards. I'd love to go back to the way it was before (3 video/audio streams + 2 audio streams), or better yet, find a menu that allows me to configure it so I can have 4 video streams and just one audio stream, which would work even better for my workflow.

Thanks!

Ahaa, it looks like under the configurations, I can add video tracks!

But then, I can't actually use those tracks because when I try to drag in a clip, it says "no available track for split operation"

AARGH!!! I found a reddit thread where someone said: "Look in Settings > Configure Kdenlive > Timeline - There is a setting 'Automatically Split Audio and Video' . When checked you get the behavior you are describing. When unchecked you get the 'old' behavior you want."

... but I don't see that setting. This is really frustrating. Not quite "Imma look for a different tool" frustrating, but maybe one notch down.

click blue-highlighted option

Thanks for the response!

All that does is change the ordering (so it goes V1 A1 V2 A2 V3 A3 instead of V1 V2 V3 A3 A2 A1), rather than making audio channels disappear and/or making video-only channels usable.

I did eventually find the answer to my question (or a workaround that has the desired effect). There's a TINY pair of icons on a clip (one with video, one with audio). They're not interactive AT ALL, and have no tool tip or any indicator that they do anything other than tell the user that the clip has audio, video, or both.

It turns out that you can click on the tiny icon when you drag the clip in, and it finally starts to work!

When trying to drag a clip into a video track the normal way (click-drag the clip from the project bin), it throws this obnoxious error:



However, if, when you drag the clip in, you click on this tiny video icon:



Then, it finally works as desired:



I don't know why it works this way, but I assume it's a bug. Dragging a clip into a video-only channel is unambiguous, so I don't understand why it can't just do what I tell it to do... but, at least my workflow is unblocked, and the new version seems to have fixed some really serious issues with the previous version I had (and re-introduced the "reverse" option on clips so I don't have to render a clip, bring it into the project, and do a separate clip job to reverse it), so yay!