It's been a while I haven't used kdenlive. I see that the developers have made a lot of progress. It is much more stable, too. Congratulations.

There is one thing that has always puzzled me in the relationship between the project settings and the render settings. When rendering something, we are offered a large variety of formats and settings, most of which I do not understand, and I never know what to chose.

The project settings are:
Profile HD 1080i 25fps.
Size: 1920*1080.
Frame rate: 25/1.
Display aspect ratio: 16/9.

The project contains 1 title clip created with kdenlive, and video clips output by Blender 3D.
The Blender video clips are: 1920*1080, AVI-RAW (other video formats are available, but I don't know which is best to import into kdenlive).

So far, so good.

However, when I hit the render button, as I said, I am offered a choice that I don't understand. I select HDV -> PAL 1080 25p, which seemed the most logical choices given the settings above. But then the output video has the wrong aspect ratio/ size.
When I play the output clip I get:

mplayer render.m2t
MPlayer 1.0rc4-4.5.2 (C) 2000-2010 MPlayer Team
Playing render.m2t.
TS file format detected.
VIDEO MPEG2(pid=256) AUDIO MPA(pid=257) NO SUBS (yet)! PROGRAM N. 1
VIDEO: MPEG2 1440x1080 (aspect 1) 25.000 fps

The size has shrunk to 1440x1080 and there are additional black bands above and below the video.

I don't understand the logic at all. I guess that to do video editing, one must understand the differences between each codecs.

I don't know the difference between PAL and NTSC, and I don't need to know. I simply would like to understand the best settings to use so that I get a video file that I can play with mplayer and that has the same quality as the input video clips.

Your project settings are the same as mine. HDV is the wrong render profile to use so just ignore it and yes, I've been that way too.

I just stick to MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 but mainly MPEG-4 because the internet likes it, just in case I want to upload.

I click on the scanning box and select Force Progressive - Bitrate Video, I use 18000 - 2 pass gives a little better quality but takes twice as long so my first render is without it to see what the video looks like.

All that gives me 1920x1080 full screen.

Thank you very much, normcross.

It seems to be working this way. I am making good notes of the optimum settings.
Thanks again.

I have documented the optimal settings for our projects:
http://overshoot.tv/wiki/tools/kdenlive

HDV is a **** format for consumer grade DV cameras that record Hi-Def. The DV tape they use doesn't have the capacity / bandwidth for true HD, so it uses the anamorphic 1440x1080.

Don't use this export format unless you have to deal with hardware/software of some sort that requires it.

PAL = 25fps. (or 50 fields per sec if interlaced)

Also, use h264 instead of MPEG-4. (Both or MPEG4, but the former is MPEG4 part 10 which compresses much better than the latter which is MPEG4 part 2)

@FishB8 I could not actually remember why I stopped using h264 to render so I did a small test render. My ailing memory was refreshed. For me, anyway, I get occasional jerks in the video and the audio sounds terrible, really tinny. It's a bit like my speakers are laying in the bottom of two empty biscuit tins.

That's why I have stayed with MPEG4.

Apologies for resurrecting a zombie thread. I spent way too long trying to resolve a similar issue and during that searching sent me here. So wanted to help any future travellers...

In the end, I have no idea what the root cause is - but restarting Kdenlive magically worked... It's now happened to me multiple times, so potentially a regression in the latest version.

But if you're in the same boat - before tearing your hair out searching through settings - restart, restart, restart!

Hi gez

gez wrote:In the end, I have no idea what the root cause is - but restarting Kdenlive magically worked...

what are you talking about? the first user was selecting the wrong output...not a 16:9..
Also another one is talking about MPEG4 to not use the H264.. (but MPEG4 uses H264) probably talking about preistoric rendering formats.

what is happening to you? what Version of kdenlive?, what platform?

P.S. there are no differences when restarting Kdenlive, this was not a solution for nothing (right now) there are no reports talking about restarting Kdenlive to do something.