I have a project which, on the timeline, clearly and obviously ends at around 5:13.

When I render, I get 4:21.

It does the fadeouts I requested -- only, it does them a minute early. Why would it do that? It makes no sense.

I have spent over 4 hours today to extract 5 minutes from a raw video (including losing a kdenlive project to some seek-corruption), and at the end, I find I can't use the result.

What should I do?

hjh

Well, I upgraded to latest stable, and found that the old project loads as a 4:21-long project.

What.

So the older version *displayed* 5:13 but internally thought it was 4:21.

I'm just going to... well, I'm going to go rebuild my project for the third time today, and keep my editorial comments to myself.

hjh

So, here's what I think happened.

The original video is 29.97 fps.

When I opened kdenlive and dragged the video in, the project's default setting is 25 fps.

Kdenlive allowed me to edit to my heart's content. Timing was all correct on the timeline, and the video played at the correct speed. In the preview window, everything looked perfect.

Then, when I went to render, I realized that the frame rate is not what I wanted. So I went to project settings and chose a 29.97 fps profile.

BUT it looks to me like kdenlive already decided it was going to render 5:14 = 314 seconds * 25 fps = 7850 frames, and when I chose the different profile, it did NOT update the number of frames that it planned to render. So it gave me 7850 frames / 29.97 fps = 261.9 sec = 4:21.9.

So in my last attempt yesterday, I started over by going to project settings and choosing 29.97 first -- and then I got my complete video.

BUT if there is going to be frame rate confusion, then kdenlive should at the very least pop up a warning. Possible reasonable behaviors:

- "Error: Video frame rate doesn't match project." (Just fail, and ask the user to use an external tool to convert.)

- "Video frame rate doesn't match project -- do you want to convert automatically?" (Analogous to the way Cubase handles an audio file that doesn't match the project rate.)

- Or, if you use project settings later to choose a frame rate that doesn't match, offer to convert.

- Or, handle it transparently -- make sure that video rendering *always* matches the timeline and that an after-the-fact project frame rate change doesn't corrupt the timeline. (Analogous to the way Audacity does it -- real-time sample rate conversion during playback, and better SR conversion during export. What you hear is what you get.)

I wouldn't have minded so much if kdenlive told me I was doing something wrong. Instead, it just went ahead as if everything were perfect -- and gave a wrong result. The lack of a warning is really bad for user experience.

hjh