Hi everyone,

First of all a big thanks to all the developers of this amazing application. I can't believe they can do this all for free!!

I'm working on my first project which which I am trying to create a DVD of a recent family holiday. After looking at a few different apps and playing around with both Cinelerra and kdenlive I've finally settled for kdenlive.

I have a JVC GR-D350 video camera and managed to capture all the footage to my PC using a program called dvgrab. From what I've read I believe the format is "DV RAW", but please correct me if I'm wrong. My video camera has a 16:9 mode so I've been shooting all my footage in this mode since I figured that most TV's now are wide screen.

Question: Is this the best mode to be shooting in, or should I still be using 4:3?

I've read somewhere that wide screen resolution, if that's the right word is 720 x 576 (PAL). When I run ffmpeg -i against one of the AVI files created by dvgrab I get the following output which seems to confirm what I thought.

input #0, avi, from 'cruise-002.avi':
Duration: 00:00:28.20, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 29833 kb/s
Stream #0.0: Video: dvvideo, yuv420p, 720x576, 25 tbr, 25 tbn, 25 tbc
Stream #0.1: Audio: pcm_s16le, 32000 Hz, 2 channels, s16, 1024 kb/s
At least one output file must be specified

When I started this new project in kdenlive I chose the profile "DV/DVD Widescreen PAL" from the "Project Settings" dialog box as this seemed the most appropriate to me. I assumed when I made this choice that it referred to the format of the input media and not what format I wanted to output it in.

Question: Is this assumption correct? Did I select the right profile for my project?

The confusing thing is that when using kdenlive if I right click in the project monitor window and select extract frame and then open this in GIMP it says the image size is 1024 x 576. How can this be when the source material is only 720 x 576? After seeing this I changed my project to use the "1024x576 16:9 PAL" profile.

The program itself seems quite easy to pick up and now cut / edited added transitions / effects etc to my footage and am ready to render. I selected a small 3 minute section of the project to test the rendering. I have recently purchased a cheap DVD / DIVX player for home. So I thought I would render the file to XVID and then play this on that player to make sure it's all working the way I thought that it should.

In the rendering dialog box I chose the following options:
- File Rendering
- XVid4
- XVid4 8000K
- scanning was left at auto

This completed without error and played back fine on my computer monitor. However it will not play back through the DIVX player.

When I had rendered as above under the previous profile it played back but on my TV it looks like I can see interlacing, kind of what you would see when you played back an interlaced video on a progressive scan computer monitor (at least my understanding anyway). What I'm seeing is very jagged line running horizontally across the screen when the camera pans left to right or right to left. When the camera is not panning left or right, or panning, but slowly the image looks quite good.

I've tried a few different rendering options, but nothing I've tried to date fixes it. I have a feeling that it might be due to the new project profile I created so will try reverting to the DV/DVD Widescreen PAL this evening and trying again.

In the meantime if anyone reading this could help me out with a suggestion of how I can fix this I'd be very grateful.

Cheers,
David

Further to my comments above I tried burning a DVD this evening to see how that would play back on the TV. The process went smoothly in kdenlive. I then burnt to DVD and played on my standalone DVD player and the results were perfect.

It was the exact same scene that I burned to xvid, but this time when the camera pans left and right the video image is nice and smooth with no jagged, comb like edges to the vertical edges of the objects on screen.

Any ideas how I can get the Xvid render to play back like that on the player. I have other Xvid encoded files (not done by me) that play back perfectly on this player.

Thanks again.

First of all, the answer to a lot of your questions is "yes" - you are on the correct track and seem to be understanding. When you used the "DV/DVD Widescreen PAL" project setting and extract an image as 1024x576, the program is being smart for you by converting the anamorphic widescreen source into square pixels so everything looks right when you view that pic on its own. Then, when you selected the "1024x576 16:9 PAL" project setting you switched your project from an interlaced output to a progressive output. Kdenlive does smart deinterlacing, but the quality of that process is not very good at this time, which is why you saw interlace artifacts in your xvid output. Then, when you chose to output DVD, it automatically switched back to interlace output for you. When you watch interlaced video on an analog monitor it should look really smooth as you experienced. It may be possible that your player supports interlaced MPEG-4. To try it, in the Render dialog, set Scanning to Interlaced, render a new xvid and try it.