After many months of trying to get Kdenlive to work, I have finally gotten a pretty fully functioning version (0.7.2.1) going on Ubuntu Intrepid 64. I did a dist-upgrade from 8.04, and carefully cleaned out my local dirs of any previous Kdenlive builds. So now I have a fairly stable and complete install of Kdenlive and deps. I can see and use the transitions and effects.

Problems:

1. Most effects have no way to keyframe. No line appears on the clip in the timeline for adding keyframes, etc. Inexplicably in the Effects List window there are two Brightness effects. One has a slider control in the effect control screen, but no keyframe line. The other has a keyframe line, but nothing in the control screen. Out of the 48 effects listed, the only effects where a keyframe line appears are the aformentioned Brightness and Wave.

2. There is no longer a 'Cross-fade' transition. Has this been renamed to Luma, which seems to do about the same thing? Why? Cross-fade is a good word, everyone knows what this means.

3.  Other than Luma and Wipe, there are about 30 things listed under transitions and most of them don't seem to do anything in the way of transitioning from one clip to another. Like Composite and Transparency and Alpha Transparency. 'lighten' for instance does nothing to either track and has no controls. Most of the others seem to have no effect, make the screen black, or, like 'grain merge' and 'hardlight', affect only the top track and have no controls. ???

4. Composite is extremely important. But I can only seem to apply it once per clip and to composite one track with one other track only. This apparently makes it impossible to composite a single title over a sequence of multiple clips that have been placed on separate tracks to have transitions between them. For instance, say I simply want to fade in my video from black by having a black color clip, using the Luma transition, and have a title composited over this two track sequence. Can't do it. Am I missing something?