Hi all,

two month ago Dan Dennedy posted a patch for playing videos backwards.

http://www.mail-archive.com/kdenlive-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg02093.html

Unfortunately he didn't get any response so far.

However, quite a few users seem to have a demand for such a function/effect.
http://www.google.de/search?q=+site:www.kdenlive.org+reverse

So I have a few questions:

- Is there hope, that we will get reverse playing in kdenlive?

- Has anyone tried the patch already?

- Does anyone has a workaround for turning the direction of an AVCHD or DNxHD clip
( i.e. using an external application before importing into kdenlive) ?

Thanks for listening!


Jonathan

You can use melt (the MLT command line utility) to do this.
melt -profile square_ntsc framebuffer:somevideo?-1 -consumer avformat:outvideo ...

Use the Kdenlive Render dialog's info panel to get the options to pass to the MLT avformat consumer. Ls /usr/share/mlt/profiles to see the names of profile presets - the same as Kdenlive's project settings.

Leave out the "-consumer avformat..." to preview the reverse effect.

Hi ddennedy,

thanks for this trick! Preview works perfectly, but encoding to theora gives me colorful snowstorm ...

Anyway, I have seen, that kdenlive 0.7.6 have this Speed effect again and there is a checkbox for reverse playing. I was very excited about that, but unfortunately it does not work, at least for me. Do I have to care about something special when using this effect?

Edit: With "does not work" I mean: The effect does not have any effect. Clip plays forward as before.

Thank you.

Dear Dan,

Your reply is not helpful enough for me. I'm an MLT/kdenlive newbie.
Reversing a movie clip still does not work in 0.7.7 (4139).
Could you please provide a _complete_ melt command line to, say, reverse a 640x480 inmovie.mpg into an outmovie.mpg?

I guess I'll be able to tune to my needs once I have a complete command line.

Thank you very much.

No Thomas, I am opposed to people blindly copying and pasting command lines with them understanding. If you can not figure it out from my post above, you must wait until it becomes a feature in the GUI.

Try this: melt -profile square_ntsc framebuffer:inmovie.mpg?-1 -consumer avformat:outmovie.mpg. I don't know if the 'square_ntsc' profile matches your .mpg file specifications. If the output quality is degraded, you may need to change the -profile square_ntsc specification.

--> Xamiga: Thank you so much. That worked perfectly.

--> ThomasU: glad it works for you. When I tested it I always stopped melt before it finished, and then checked the output file. All was OK. Now when I try to produce a complete file, melt always segfaults. Dan is right -- don't just cut and paste someones suggestions!!
(this is with .mp4's)

Finally, I can "close" this thread. As of version 0.9.6 kdenlive has the long awaited reverse clip feature.

This post is just a big, huge THANK YOU to all developers who made this possible. You are brilliant!

but WHERE is this feature? I dont see it (I have the specified version) :S

In the project tree, you right click on your clip, Clip jobs> Reverse clip. This produces a reversed copy of your clip, that you can then manipulate like a normal clip.
HTH