In case other have wondered too: Kdenlive 15.08 has a very unfortunate bug concening some transition parameters, such as softness and luma file. While the current transition settings are properly saved into the project XML file (in the new <transition> XML layout using <property> elements), these properties are not correctly read back. When you select the particular transition, some parameters (properties) are lost and reset to 0.

Unfortunately, I lack the understanding of the Kdenlive source to find and fix this bug. I can only hope that the developers are seeing this post and the bug report I filed some days ago. This forum post is for those searching for an answer why their 15.08 project files always loose some transition settings.

There is an awkward hack around for existing projects: edit them in a text editor and change the projects locale to en_US.UTF-8. Make sure to correctly replace any "," decimal dividers with "." throughout your XML. Do this only on a copy of your project file! Also, start Kdenlive only with LANG=en_US.UTF-8 set.

Hello,
I heard your call and just fixed bug 354208...
Enjoy
PS: the best way to reach us is through the mailing list I think

Thank you very much! This has been an annoying bug as I had to manually migrate five projects I'm currently working on to the en_US locale. And before that I was constantly trying to restore certain settings as they got lost whenever I needed to edit one of these projects, loosing the settings again when switching forth and back between these projects. So thank you again very much for squashing this annoying bug.