I recently completed a large number of projects in kdenlive. I typically had 2–3 video tracks recorded with a camera and another, higher quality audio track. I used audio from the camera to synchronise the tracks. I have some remarks.

1. This is an example of zoomed in camera track audio (top), and good quality audio (bottom) as displayed by audacity:

The 2 drum hit sounds I used for reference are clearly recognizable visually, and if I zoomed the timeline more I could perhaps sync them with <1ms precision

This is how the same section looks like in kdenlive:

It seems kdenlive waveform shows only 1 point per video frame. It makes it much more difficult to recognize the sounds visually. I found the best is to sync tracks by ear. In the picture the top track seems to be too late by 1 frame, but this is in fact the best sync. So it's impossible to sync tracks properly by eye, and syncing by ear is much slower.

I guess that the reason to choose this display format was that since project resolution is one frame, one needs to see only one point in the waveform per frame. As I demonstrate, this is not true. Moreover, I showed a very clean example with only 2 drum hits played consecutively, without other sounds. If there is any additional noise in the camera mic, or sound is more complicated (e.g. actual music playing) the waveform displayed by kdenlive is completely unreadable.

It would be a great improvement if kdenlive could display audio waveforms the same way audio software does it.

2. I understand there are reasons to restrict movement of video to 1 frame step, but the restriction applies also to pure audio tracks. One could get better synchronisation if allowed to move audio freely on the timeline with sub-frame resolution.

3. Typically kdenlive does a good job by normalizing the displayed waveforms, but sometimes waveform of the camera track is still very low. It would be useful to have a possibility to zoom the waveforms vertically, as needed.

4. As I was syncing the tracks, I often needed to move them back and forth by 1 frame. It's actually not so easy to do with mouse, especially if the timeline is zoomed out: move mouse a little bit to far, and the track moves by 2 or more frames. The process would be much more efficient if there were hotkeys allowing to move tracks by 1 frame forward and back.

is this still happening?

bartoloni wrote:is this still happening?

In kdenlive 22.04.0 it's much worse. I no longer can move clips with 1 frame steps, instead the steps are something like 1/3 seconds. I wrote another post with details: viewtopic.php?f=265&t=174860

can you fill an issue with these images (from these 2 posts) directly here? : https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kdenl ... ate=opened