I'm relatively new to Kdenlive and have been having some issues with titles that I'm asking for help with.

As background, I started looking at Linux editors last year to help me sever my last ties with Windows. I looked at Kdenlive but found it a little daunting on first inspection. Then I heard about OpenShot and initially that looked very promising. I did a slide show project with it (which is the primary kind of project I work on, along with transferring old VHS tapes for friends and family). I quickly discovered that applying pans and zooms for the Ken Burns effect wasn't working very well. The movement was not smooth at all. I was told that this was an MLT issue and was being addressed. So I put my projects on the shelf for several months. Then OpenShot came out with release 1.2.2 which included a new version of MLT. However, I was very disappointed to learn that this new version did not take advantage of the fixes in MLT and that my Ken Burns effects looked as bad as ever. So out of desperation, I took another look at Kdenlive. I was just in time to get version 0.7.8 with MLT 0.5.10 and was encouraged to see that pans and zooms looked much better than with OpenShot.

So I redid my slide show from scratch. The more I worked with Kdenlive, the more I started to appreciate it. It's fast, powerful and flexible. I think the design is very well thought out. It does just about everything I need pretty well. However, there are still a few rough spots and, for my purposes, they mostly still involve the Pan and Zoom effect. Using that effect on JPEGs works satisfactorily, although I still have to employ the Box Blur effect to nullify the “shimmering” on pictures with medium to high resolution.

But titles are another matter. I'm using scrolling titles at the end of the project and I just can't get them to look decent enough to be presentable. The two issues that I'm still having are: the scrolling action is not completely smooth, and the text “shimmers”, somewhat like the hi-res photos do. I can live with the not-so-smooth scrolling. It's still way better than what I got with OpenShot. There are just occasional minor twitches or hiccups as the text scrolls up the screen. But the shimmering text is really bothersome. I've got it to the point that it looks pretty good on my computer and monitor as well as on a TV when played from a DVD player, but the results can be quite a bit worse when played on other computers without decent video cards or even good computers when played with Windows Media Player.

I've tried just about everything I could think of: rendering with every profile under the sun, using both Kdenlive titles and SVG files created with Inkscape, using bold fonts, thin fonts, using the Box Blur effect, etc. The Box Blur effect takes all the shimmering out, but makes the text look, well, blurry.

So I guess I have two questions for the community:
1) Is there another way of doing scrolling titles that works around or eliminates these issues?
2) Is there any hope that these issue will be corrected in a future version of Kdenlive or MLT?

Thanks in advance. I want to use the scrolling credits at the end of my project to sing the praises of Kdenlive and the other open source software I used and I'm oh so close.

Re: "There are just occasional minor twitches or hiccups as the text scrolls up the screen."
Maybe the player is dropping frames. All you can do to help prevent that is use an fast-to-decode format, perhaps MPEG-2, and not something that uses Flash player. Can you convert the video to still images and show 3 frames in succession that demonstrates that the displacement from A-B is noticeable different than B-C?

Re: shimmering
Maybe we need a better low pass filter than the box blur we are using. I do not know enough about the image processing behind this. It will take me some time to research and discover this while I am busy attending to other matters.

Re 2) Of course, there is hope for improvements, but we could use some help.

Re: "Maybe the player is dropping frames. All you can do to help prevent that is use an fast-to-decode format, perhaps MPEG-2, and not something that uses Flash player".
That agrees with what I'm seeing. I get fairly decent and similar results with MPEG-2 and NTSC VOB. I tried uploading several formats to YouTube and they all looked very shaky.

Re: "Can you convert the video to still images and show 3 frames in succession that demonstrates that the displacement from A-B is noticeable different than B-C?"
I tried this but I'm not sure I did it correctly. I converted my rendered MPEG-2 output to an image sequence and then stepped through the resulting PNG files at a place where I had seem some hiccups in the scrolling motion when I played my file. I never saw any clip successions that didn't demonstrate even displacement. But I think that's not surprising because when I play my file over and over it never seems to stumble in the exact same place.

Re: "Of course, there is hope for improvements, but we could use some help."
I wish I had some skills to offer any help other than bug reports. But thanks for all your work on Kdenlive and MLT and for taking the time to answer our questions and offer advice.

"I tried uploading several formats to YouTube and they all looked very shaky."
Why? I specifically asked you not to use Flash player (and I do not yet trust html5 video playback either). You never said if you played the MPEG-2 with any other media player and got the same results.

I didn't ignore your advice. I had already tried YouTube and every other format under the sun before I posted my first message. I was just saying what I had seen with my YouTube uploads agreed with your explanation.

I've played the MPEG-2 version on Movie Player and VLC on Ubuntu and and Windows Media Player and VLC on Windows. The first three looked comparable (at least on my machine). The last one looked worse.

"I never saw any clip successions that didn't demonstrate even displacement. But I think that's not surprising because when I play my file over and over it never seems to stumble in the exact same place."

That VERY strongly hints that the problem is in your playback, not in Kdenlive.

Hi, I logged on as we're trying to find software developers who are experts or have experience in Kdenlive/MLT FFMpeg as we're struggling with the text motion in kdenlive current development project. We're trying to create text templates and its proving very difficult. If there is an expert out there that is a software developer and who knows Kdenlive, or can make text templates in Kdenlive that reflect the quality of Final Cut Pro (ie text motion/appearance on screen) we'd like to talk to you please. Can you email us direct on info@the-mindspace.com (a holding site for a start up in the video technology space). Thanks very much.