Hello,

Can I mix a transcoding task with a rendering tasks?

The way I understand the term "non-linear" video editing, this is exactly what kdenlive does: only change what has to change due to some additional effect to your video, other than that just remux the original source, and don't re-encode that part.

My first steps with kdenlive produced a nice video, but I'm fairly certain I re-encoded all of it, while the result just contains two additional fade-in/fade-out effects during the first/last few seconds. It's not what I intended.

meskisbear wrote:Hello,

Can I mix a transcoding task with a rendering tasks?

The way I understand the term "non-linear" video editing, this is exactly what kdenlive does: only change what has to change due to some additional effect to your video, other than that just remux the original source, and don't re-encode that part.

My first steps with kdenlive produced a nice video, but I'm fairly certain I re-encoded all of it, while the result just contains two additional fade-in/fade-out effects during the first/last few seconds. It's not what I intended.

Transcoding (in general terms) is the act of taking a source video and converting it from one format to another.

Rendering is the act of taking one or more source videos, extracting relevant sections, combining effects and transitions and creating a new video as output. When you render new content you can change the format (transcode) of the output to be different from the input sources. But, in that case you are still rendering content - the change of format (transcode action) is incorporated into the rendering process.

The two concepts are somewhat like apples and oranges. Similar but they accomplish separate tasks at different points along a workflow.

Usually you will render new content and then transcode that content into different formats (i.e. Hi-Def --> Low-Def, Streaming Segments, MP4 --> WebM etc). While you can use KdenLive to transcode content there are dedicated servers that are employed to transcode large files as a batch process within a workflow.

My first steps with kdenlive produced a nice video, but I'm fairly certain I re-encoded all of it, while the result just contains two additional fade-in/fade-out effects during the first/last few seconds. It's not what I intended.

Then Kdenlive is not the tool you want. Kdenlive is for all those tasks where rendering is unavoidable. For instance, my raw footage regularly is 45Mbit/s ungraded H.264, often in 2.7K resolution. Most video players and playback devices will heavily choke when confronted with such video data. Rerendering is thus necessarily in any case, as I need to not only uncompress the special luma compression of the camera used, but also to color grade, adjust brightness and contrast, also saturation adjustment, and sharpening. The final result I usually render to 1080p25fps 8Mbit/s H.264. You see, transcoding doesn't help here, except for either preparing input footage or deriving different output files from one rendered master output video.