I have two video tracks and I want to switch back and forth between them. In Premiere the alpha channel was keyframeable and I would do it that way, I can't seem to find a corresponding way to do it in Kdenlive.

Tried Rotoscoping (making just a big rectangle which shrinks and enlarges from one frame to the other) but it doesn't seem to have any effect, the Project Monitor only shows the video that's on top as if I was doing nothing.

What am I missing here?

Thanks for the help.

Quite honestly, all I would do is just place the timeline cursor at your chosen position and right click on the top clip. Select 'cut clip', then drag the left hand end of the second part to where ever you want. Just keep doing that.

Rotoscoping is a very power tool and has many possible uses. Below is a short rubbish video I threw together and shoved it on Utube a few minutes ago, just to give you some idea.

http://youtu.be/iBOCt_wziBM

Actually, also Kdenlive offers Alpha effects which are "keyframeable". You can find them in the effect list in the category Alpha.

However, why not using the affine translation or the composite translation? They both offer per-keyframe alpha control, as well as even swiping. Most of the time, translations should do the job, unless you need more complex, stacked effect handling. You should find some examples in the Kdenlive documentation, look for the topic of translations.

If you just need hard cuts, then simply use hard cuts. If you need composition, then take a look at Kdenlive's transitions.

I wouldn't like to make cuts on the clip because let's say I cut it and actually wanted to cut a little bit earlier... I would have to make another cut... it would just be a mess. Thousand little pieces of video, it would be very easy to lose sync with the audio track.

The effects I see under "Alpha manipulation" are Blue screen, Rotoscoping and Mask0Mate... Rotoscoping is the only one keyframeable.

I tried using transitions (is it what you tried to say? instead of translations?) but I couldn't understand how it works. The example on the guide shows how you can transition from a clip that's ending to another clip that's starting, but in fact I have two clips with the same duration happening at the same time (two different cameras filming the same thing).

Thanks for the suggestions.

EDIT: what I was looking for is the Affine transition. It does what I want. Thank you so much for the help!

Good to hear that you've found a way.

You should see several more alpha effects, such as alpha from a geometric shape, which can be rectangle, ellipse, triangle. Since you only see three alpha effects I would imagine that you got an incomplete installation.

Also, did you notice that after you made a cut, you can simply drag the beginning or end of a scene with your mouse: this moves the cut point without moving the clip itself? It's a fundamental function in Kdenlive. When dragging clip beginnings and ends they will snap to the playhead and to other clip beginnings and ends too, even if these are on other tracks.

Yeah I noticed that later. I was afraid it was going to move the clip, turns out it didn't.

So I installed it using just apt-get install kdenlive. Should I have downloaded the .deb from the website instead? Can I do that now to load the missing effects?

Anyway, it's software like this that makes it so much easier for us to do the switch from Windows. Stable, intuitive, fast, rich in resources.

If you don't have added one of the Kdenlive ppa repos then you will most probably be stuck with an older Kdenlive version as integrated by your distro. As Ubuntu lags quite behind, I'm using sunab's repos, the svn version has been quite usable for all these months. Also, the daily all-in-one tar balls work quite okay and don't touch your system.

I added this sunab repos and ran Kdenlive's suggestion of "apt-get" command, and still I only see those three effects I mentioned. I'm looking at the "Effects List" on the panel at the upper middle area on the screen, am I looking at the wrong place?

EDIT: nevermind, now I have everything. I had tried earlier and it didn't work, I think I rebooted the machine later and that may have done something. Thank you very much for all the help!