I was hoping someone can help me out here.

I'm editing a video project with Kdenlive. I'm putting together a highlight reel of an MMA fight. Since it's a highlight reel I'm making, I'm taking, like, 3 second cuts of clips that we originally shot with Sony Vixias in AVCHD. For some reason, Kdenlive is rendering *some* (not all) of those cuts of the clips as if they're being fast forwarded.

The original video was shot at 30 FPS...but it seems like Kdenlive is "forgetting" the frame rate and randomly rendering some of the cuts as 60 FPS.

I'm running Kdenlive .0.9.6 and I'm rendering the project to MPEG4. What's especially weird is that not all the cuts are being fast forwarded -- only some.

Any ideas?

I am really desperate to find a solution to this problem! So I'm offering a bounty to the person who helps me solve it -- one $25 gift certificate to Starbucks!

Who doesn't like coffee?!

You know that guy with the long beard who's stranded on that tiny island with two palm trees with a shark swimming around it?

I'm that guy right now.

I've never had to use the AVCHD format so far, as I'm only facing mp4 source footage. I remember several posts in this forum about problems with the AVCHD format. I don't know whether this can cure your problem, but maybe you can first transcode your source footage into some format that kdenlive and mlt are able to handle without choking? There are probably better formats than mp4 but it may worth a try. If you keep the file names, then you should be able to change the extensions only in the kdenlive project file using an ordinary text editor. Just my two cents I don't know whether this can give you scuba equipment so you can enjoy watching the shark in its element... ;)

Assuming the project frame rate is 30 fps, did you try to render to something lossless? If it works, you can transcode lossless to your target format. If it does not work either, we at least can believe that encoding mpeg4 is not the troublemaker.

How do the fast forwarded clips render, if you put them into a new project? Try two or three. Does the result change, if you render different parts of the fast forwarded clips in your real project (shift the cut point one second backward or forward)?

You could also check the .kdenlive project file for some XML content that is different from the other cuts that do work. Maybe there is a framerate setting for some reason.

In addition to the scuba equipment, I could give you a rasor - you do not want to get entangled in your long beard if the shark gets hungry while you are watching him.

FFmpeg has had problems with AVCHD and probably still does, particularly interlaced AVCHD, not sure if yours is.

Previous posts on kdenlive.org with problems with AVCHD I don't think got resolved completely. Taking the .MTS files? and remuxing into an mp4 container didn't solve the problem, using a tool like MKVMergeGUI helped on some occasions but remuxing doesn't change the video stream, just repackages it in hopefully a better container.

I'd assume using FFmpeg to transcode the AVCHD will not work either due to problems handling it, so maybe need to look at alternative codec suites to do the transcode to some lossless intermediate codec like utcodec or h264 lossless, ffv1 etc.

If it were me I'd look something like avisynth under wine with http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=162930 or http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=167435 and transcode or Eyeframe which uses ffmbc, http://eyeframeconverter.wordpress.com/ which may handle it better.

I believe I've solved the problem. I simply upgraded to the latest, greatest FFMpeg last night.

Well that's a good surprise, bug fixes for AVCHD. :-)

So who gets the coffee? ;-)

I solved my own problem. So I'm going to go buy myself a cup of coffee!

smokinglizard wrote:I believe I've solved the problem. I simply upgraded to the latest, greatest FFMpeg last night.

I have been having this problem for a few years. What version of FFMPEG solved it for you?
I didn't know melt used ffmpeg.

The latest update to KDEnlive on Linux Mint 13 breaks encoding for my MTS files altogether now. It's been a good run for about 5 years now. I have worked out an avconc script that encodes them and doesn't have this freezing issue.