I am a primary school teacher and have a small group preparing for a multimedia competition. They are to create various 2-5 minute clips on varied subjects. We normally meet with other schools who usually arrive carrying their Macs with accompanying software. We however, arrived last spring with our trusty AMD run laptop with mini-cam. I had convinced the organizer to let us audit and compete (but for no prize) along with the other groups. The deal was, seeing that we were not using Mac and that none of the other teachers/judges were familiar with Linux and Kdenlive, that we could participate in a non-competitive mode. I was really using this venue to prove to my school and school board admin that our school (best described as an inner-city school with disadvantaged kids) could compete with software that our poor kids could afford. Basically a proof of concept session.

The kids did well and used the effects that were available for Kdenlive. The Macs do have admittedly, sexy effects for their software. Anyway, as the time neared the end of competition, all groups were told to start rendering your videos or risk being assessed penalty marks for the competition. This is where we really lost out. When my students went to rendering (it did work, as I tested it at home ... but only with a 1 minute clip as well as practised at school with 1 minute clips), their 3 minute project took too long to render. The competition would not accept Theora output, they pretty well accepted any other format that could be played from a USB stick.

Would anyone suggestions as to which format we should be using. It doesn't look like the quality need to be too high, but the rendering speed is really what killed us. It just took too long compared to the Mac's rendering times.

BTW ... the sessions was considered a success and I am hoping to take the kids out again next spring but to compete for real this time!

Sorry for the long post.

Marc

Sorry, I forgot to add:

Kdenlive v.7.7.1
Mandriva 2010.1

if it has to be able to be played from a usb stick then i am assuming it's either windows or a mac that will be playing it. we know the mac people are most likely rendering to .mov files that were encoded using h264 video codec and aac audio i am assuming (HUGE assumption). i would think that you could encode to h264/aac audio as well (.mp4 container). not sure what the time comparison is between h264 and Theora as I have never encoded to Theora. a 2 min clip for me (source video is dv avi type 2 uncompressed) rendered to h264 at around 6000k single pass takes around 5 mins (If i remember correctly). don't think windows media player by default can play mp4 files or mov so they must use quicktime?? (again, HUGE assumption) Obviously you'll want to test this at home prior to competition, just render a clip that is long as what you'll be doing in competition and see how long it takes. Good luck

MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 render considerably faster than H.264; however, these may give compatibility issues with some players. If you are just using SD, then Raw DV is fairly quick and playable by QuickTime, but might not fit on the USB stick

Like snostorm said, we really need to know your options to give much solid advice. The x264 used by Kdenlive for H.264 rendering is highly tunable, so it is possible to create a fast rendering profile for that as well (see the ffmpeg libx264-faster.ffpreset).