Just thought I'd share. This is a project that was edited in Kdenlive 0.7.5 and aided by a number of other open source applications. It's a product promotional video meant for distribution on YouTube and on our company website.



The opening segment with the product and the big red ruby spinning around is all 3D CG done in Blender. The product was actually solid modeled by a product engineer with some proprietary solid modeling package, but it was imported into Blender for renderings, color choices, label designs, and stuff like this video.

The live video was shot with a Canon HF100 in 1080 30 frame progressive. It was transcoded to DNxHD using WinFF for batch encoding. The .mov files were imported into Kdenlive and edit wonderfully.

The audio in the live shots got screwed up during filming due to camera operator error and bad acting. (That would be me, and uh, me.) Rather than reshoot it all, I re-dubbed the audio to those portions using Audacity to try and align the lip-sync.

I wanted to do a smooth zoom for two of the still shots used. I have to admit I turned to Adobe Premiere Elements on a Windows machine to get those brief clips. I will also admit that I used to be impressed with Premiere Elements, but compared to Kdenlive it's inflexible and infuriating to try and figure out how to use, and the output choices are incredibly limiting. Hope to never need to open it again.

The YouTube version was rendered in Kdenlive to 1280x720 using h264 and AAC. I had to redo it once because the sound is 48kHz but YouTube redoes it to 44.1kHz after you upload, and it sounded horrible. Kdenlive's resampling was much better. The final HD version on YouTube due to their re-coding does not retain nearly the image quality of the rendered file, but it's not bad for web streaming.

I guess I didn't do anything too terribly fancy in Kdenlive effects wise. But what I really need in an NLE is a good efficient cutting tool that can handle the formats I need. In Kdenlive everything is pretty much where you would expect it to be, the interface is clean and just gets out of your way so you can work. Power plus ease - it's amazing how many apps get one or the other but not both.

Anyway, just loaded up 0.7.6 so I'm anxious to give it a go. Thanks to the devs and the community for all their hard work.