using kdenlive 0.9.6 (ubuntu 12.04)

All photos I put in the timeline are blurred after rendering h.264 (mp4). Even if the fotos are cut exactly to project settings 480p with 854x480 pixel. Even in a blank new kdenlive project. Why?
As way around I display the photo on my desktop, make a screenrecording of the photo using recordmydesktop. With handbrake I convert it to m4v and insert the m4v to the timeline - and then the photo within the m4v video is displayed fine, not blurred. But its a annoying work ...

how can I insert a photo so that kdenlive renders it without blurring?

tia
Eckard

Having done a Kdenlive project that contains hires photos and using the recent sunab-svn 0.9.7 version of Kdenlive I didn't notice any problems in this respect. I rendered to H.264 footage and the stills are crisp and of the specified final resolution.

Did you make sure when rendering that the option to render from proxies actually is off?

Next, you didn't give details what format your original photos are in? Maybe there's a catch lurking? In my project, I used hires jpeg photos and rendering went through smooth as desired.

i remember that I rendered 1 year ago some small videos with fotos! With same version on ubuntu. And fotos weren't blurred! After that I rendered videos with 720p and some people in this forum told me to use "proxy" to work easier in the timeline because my laptop is not so fast. And since that time I use always proxy and maybe since that time fotos are blurred. But turning off "proxy" doesn't help. I event tried with a blank new project with "proxy" unselected and used new photos. Maybe my kdenlive version 0.9.6 has the bug that after once "proxy" is activated there will be never be possible to render photos without proxy ...in any further project.

I try to find the souce file for my videos of two years ago and render again to test if now even theses old projects now render fotos blurred only.

Maybe that somewhat ubuntu-updates disable correct rendering.

BTW: the photos I use are taken with a ordinary digital camera or are screenshots and saved with gimp as ordinary jpg.

Just to be on the safe side: did you check in the rendering dial8g that rendering from proxies is switched off? Note, dontmix this up with proxy generation! Make sure you didn't check it by accident!

You can easily tell when a proxy clip is in use for a specific clip (includes photos): you'll see a black P in a yellow box sitting in the bottom right corner of the clip thumbnail in the clip list. However, this shouldn't affect the rendering quality unless you check the aforementioned option in the render dialog.

TheDiveO wrote:Just to be on the safe side: did you check in the rendering dial8g [...]

thx for that hint. But in rendering dialog there is no proxy setting option at kdenlive 0.9.6. But maybe I found the path to the solution! -> I'm customed to set "video" to 600 in rendering dialog, otherwise the video become huge size. And with size of 480p ( 854x480 pixel) my videos (standing in front of the camcorder an telling something or smooth screen recording, no action video!) are very sharp with video=600. But not the pictures if there are pictures in the timeline!! Even if they have same size as the project is!! It's crazy! It seems that I have to increase "video" value in rendering dialog to 12000 (!) to get a sharp video only if one simple screencapture-jpg or a person-jpg is put in the timeline and then hole video grows in size about 4 times compaired with video=600!

When I make video of the same picture using recordmydesktop and recording exactly the size of the project (e.g.854x480 pixel) the video can be set to video=600 and the rendered video is sharp - and smart small in file size. Crazy! I generate with that workaround a much bigger file - a video - of a tiny jpg and insert it to the project and the result is a extremly SMALLER mp4 video that inserting the jpg instead.

Is that feature normal in kdenlive? Are there somewhat settings? A bug? - I opened a new project, no proxie were set.

kdenlive seems to shrink the jpg (or png, ..) first according to video=XXX settings, and after resizes it to the right size. The result is a lost of information and a blurred picture in the mp4 stream.

egerlach wrote:

TheDiveO wrote:Just to be on the safe side: did you check in the rendering dial8g [...]

thx for that hint. But in rendering dialog there is no proxy setting option at kdenlive 0.9.6.

Oh yes it is, and has long since been there, all the Kdenlive versions I've used in the past three years. It's sitting next to "2 pass" and reads "Render using proxy clips". You don't need a screenshot, do you? Because this option isn't this prominently placed it is easy to accidentally hit it when trying to hit some other render option.

egerlach wrote:But maybe I found the path to the solution! -> I'm customed to set "video" to 600 in rendering dialog, otherwise the video become huge size. And with size of 480p ( 854x480 pixel) my videos (standing in front of the camcorder an telling something or smooth screen recording, no action video!) are very sharp with video=600.

Immediately above you can read "Bitrate", so this parameter is controlling the video bitrate in Kilobytes per second. This is the maximum bitrate for adaptive video codes, it is not a fixed bitrate. So, you are now telling the codec to limit itself to keeping this low limit per second, which may be boil down to maybe only 1/24th depending on the interpretation of this parameter. The effect is that the codec says "well, you get what you want" and thus needs to encode the rapid change within one frame to another with just a hand full of Kilobytes that are not sufficient to transmit your frame in the required quality. You may play with the encoder parameters to get better results for your low maximum bitrate. But don't ask me which one to tune (as I don't know), so please serve yourself.

TheDiveO wrote: You don't need a screenshot, do you?

Oh, yes I need it! Here is the screenshot of my render dialog:

There is no proxy setting option in german version.

TheDiveO wrote:Immediately above you can read "Bitrate", so this parameter is controlling the video bitrate...

Sorry I don't understand and I don't have time for such technical affairs. For me I have a workaround: make a video of each jpg .. and it works. I hoped there would be a easier way, but it seems that not. But no problem.