Hey guys! I am new to using Kdenlive, and have a couple questions. I am using Ubuntu 14.04 with the proprietary drivers.

1. Does Kdenlive have the ability to render using the GPU?

2. Would a newer version of Kdenlive render quicker?

Like I said I'm using Kdenlive 0.9.10 on Ubuntu 14.04 with the proprietary drivers. I'm trying to render a project and it seems to be taking forever....I have a 1 1/2 hour project and it's taking forever to render (Like 14 hours), when I have a friend with the exact same hardware using Lightworks and he said that he can render the same project in 1 hour. Why is that? Thanks!

I switched profiles in 0.9.10 to MLT "properties" (predefined settings)... which are actually very oriented towards quality/size and not speed. You can speedup the render by removing the "properties=blablabla" argument in the profile you use, falling back to encoder defaults that are faster.
In recent development, I introduced a "speed" cursor that lets you tune this compromise

GPU rendering is for the moment only for some effects, not very stable, not much faster, and encoding (the heaviest part usually) is still on CPU ; I don't know if MLT now can use ffmpeg's hardware H264 encoders...

Thanks for the reply! That was really helpful, thanks! What I am wondering, is why Lightworks can export a 1 hour video in 40-50 minutes, but it takes Kdenlive 7 1/2 hours....

When I convert a 1 hour file using Handbrake it takes around 40-50 minutes, but it takes Kdenlive 7 1/2 hours?

Maybe because of the rendering settings as Vincent explains? You can always create your own rendering profiles in Kdenlive itself, see the documentation. This way you can use faster rendering presets.

Comparing your Kdenlive project to Handbrake or some other editor is always in the danger of comparing apples to oranges. Your project may consist of a lot of transitions whereas Handbrake only does transcoding. And since there are many different profiles we don't know what your other editor is set to.

Thanks for the replies! Answered all of my questions. Thank you!!!

just out of curiosity, which rendering profiles are you using?

gpu vs cpu export

I use:
gpu gt630 384 cuda
cpu i3 3240

Details:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1JgO3x ... TinDFsBscL

but I'm interested in something similar to the AMD HD 5770 or r7 260x video cards