I am using the extremely capable composite transition for doing picture in picture video mixing, and it works very well.

I just wonder if I am missing a trick in how to drive it. Here is how I am doing it currently.

I start with my cursor in the timeline where I want an effect to start, for example I want to fade the picture in picture away to transparent.
I look at the cursor time, which is shown in minutes and seconds.
I multiply the minutes by 60 and add the seconds to get a time in seconds.
I multiply this by the frame rate of my video sources, to get a frame number.
I go to the effect stack and type in that frame number into the pos box, and add a keyframe.
I add 25 to the frame number, type that into the pos box, and add another keyframe.
Now I move the composite rectangle where I want it to fade away, and change the opacity from 100 to 0.

Job done.
Anyone know of a better way?

If there were some way of aligning the value of pos in the Transition tab to the current position of the cursor in the timeline, that in its self would speed the process up a lot.

can't you ajust the cursor time (the grey one) in the composite tab instead of moving it in the main timeline and calculating all that stuff?

ie:
set the grey cursor (effect tab) where you want in time, add keyframe, edit keyframe to set the position (or just set the opacity if it's what you want)= 5sec job

i don't know if my example is clear, but from your explanation it looks like your way is kind of complicated.

hope this helps

Rico

That slider does let me set the position but its way too crude.

I have quite a long video and need a time line that will zoom in. The slider in the transition tab always shows the complete duration of the video, unless I am missing something here?

it shows the complete duration of the transition not of the video.

EDIT:which version of kdenlive are you using? i'm using the last svn and there has been some work done on the keyframes so maybe we are seeing 2 different things...

ok finally home.. I checked on my system and here's how it goes:
when you move the grey cursor in the composite tab the project monitor updates and shows you exacly where you are on your video (only for the length of the composite transition), so you dont need any weird calculation to get to the exact frame, just point .. and shoot. If you want to change afterwards the position of your keyframe, just drag it along the effect timeline to a better spot.

Again, this is on the last svn, depending on your version it might be different. Don't worry if you can't compile it, 0.76 is coming very soon with nice aditions an huge stability improvements.

Thanks for that Rico, I can see how it would work well if the composite transitions was short. Perhaps the problem is I am miss-using composite.

I have two video sources that I am mixing, picture in picture style. At the moment I have a single composite running the full length of the video and use keyframes to enlarge and/or fade in and shrink and/or fade out the picture in picture according to the relative interest of the content of the two channels.

In this situation the gray slider is too coarse a positioning control, each pixel on that slider represents several tens of seconds in the timeline.

I thought about having a series of composite transitions, introducing a new one for each time I want to change the size of the picture in picture. The problem with that is achieving continuity of the zoom. I don't see a way of setting the size and position of the rectangle in one composite to precisely match the previous one.

ok now I understand the problem.

Instead of grabbing the slider to change it's position, if you put the mouse cursor over it and use the mouse weel, you'll manage to move the cursor frame by frame, or more if you want, it just depends of the speed of your weeling. Or does it change several tens of seconds as well?

For even more control of the speed of your scrolling, if you are on a laptop, install gsynaptics (i'm using it on ubuntu 9.04 i don't know what's your distro). This will install a control panel for your touchpad and allow you to enable "circular scrolling" on it. It's like having a wheel instead of your trackpad, you make circles with your finger over it to the left or right and scroll as much as you want with full control over the speed. It's like having a turntable to control your movie while you edit it, saves you lots of time for editing to check it in slow/fast motion just by rolling your finger.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbmOnmm0AMc here's an example on this video, what he's doing on his document, i'm doing it on the timeline.