Hello,

It's my first day with Kdenlive. I want to create a video that includes video and and some photos. The photos need to be cropped and zoomed and also I need to create a Ken Burns effect with a zoom animation.

I think the Position and Zoom Effect is what I need for that. There is just one huge issue. When I zoom, it always takes the top left corner as the origin. That is completely impractical. Who cares about the top left corner? I need the center as the origin. To find the perfect position and zoom, I need to readjust several times. And after changing the zoom, I always have to click on "Center Horizontally" and "Center Vertically". So every readjustment are automatically three clicks and a lot of mouse movements. A work that is usually done in 5 seconds takes sometimes 30 seconds, and that two times, for the beginning and endframe of the picture, because of all this clicking and mouse movements.

Is there any other solution? If I always need a minute for something that could be easily done in seconds, I can not use Kdenlive. It seems like a tiny issue, but if there is no solution, probably I can't even use Linux anymore, because my work depends on (simple) video editing.

Besides that, I really like Kdenlive so far. So is there perhaps a solution how to resize pictures with the center as origin? Perhaps another effect or anything else?

Thank you!

Hi,
I don't think there's a way to zoom for the center, but I never really had an issue with it personally, it's just 2 more quick clicks. It won't solve you issue here but check out the "Transform" effect, it can be quite nice. Sorry I couldn't really help.

When using images only sometimes, then it's probably not an issue. But my videos have a lot of photos, and the resolution is not the same as the video. So first I need to find the perfect starting resolution. With Gimp I would just take a corner and scale it as desired. But with Kdenlive, it is not live. So I first need to change the zoom. But now the picture moved, so now I need to click on "center horizontally" and "center vertically". Now I can judge, if it is ok. When it's still 10 pixels too big, I need to do the same again. Zoom, center h, center v and check again. Now I took 5 pixels too much. So again, zoom, center, center, check.
With a live rectangle tool as in Gimp, scaling it properly would take perhaps 2 seconds or less. But because it is not live and every little change needs to be centered again afterwards, it takes ages. And for many photos, it's just a pain.
I tried Openshot or Shotwell and one of them has some nice filters, like "Zoom from 75% to 100%." Also the zoom takes the center as origin automatically. That would solve the whole issue with just one or two clicks. But other tools as keyframes are not as powerful as Kdenlive.

I just tried the Transform tool. It also takes the top left as the origin. But thank you for your idea.

I just tried the "fit to width" and "fit to height" buttons again. Before I ignored them, because the picture just jumped into nowhere, so I thought they are buggy.
Actually they are working, but they don't center the new picture automatically. Perhaps it's complicated to code it properly and I have my deepest respect for all the developers behind this great project! But from a user perspective, it just makes no sense. Adjusting the size to the width of the video, but taking the top left as the origin and thus having a completely wrong location in 100% of cases. After
fit to width
the app should automatically activate
center horizontally.

And accordingly
fit to height
should automatically trigger
center vertically.

I just makes no sense that the user always has to click "center v" and "center h" after all tiny changes. If at least these things could be activated by shortcuts, it would help a lot. But it all needs to be done by a slow mouse that needs to find all the tiny buttons after all changes.

You can actually change it live by grabing the red squares on your monitor. And I think it's a matter of getting used to, I personally don't always center my images, i think i use the "aign to the left" and all as much.