Thread: Kdelive

KDELIVE (the KDE Non-LInear Video Editor) is the project that has garnered the bulk of my ink thus far (a review is available at mostly because it has been a clear leader for quite a long time. It was the first multi-track in the current crop to attain usability.

Pioneered by Jason Wood and now maintained by a team of developers, KDENLIVE is a Qt-based editor that uses FFmpeg as its decoding engine and Dan Dennedy's MLT as its frame-server and EDL backbone. It's a powerful combination, putting this project in a position to handle HD as easily as garden-variety DV, and opening up its importable profile to include pretty much any video format you can watch on a Linux box.

The interface is laid out much like that of the late MainActor. It's familiar and easy to pick up, and if you're like me and really hate this paradigm, you can undock the interface components and reconfigure them until your picky little heart is content.
The underlying MLT framework supports infinite audio and video tracks, and there are a healthy number of built-in video and audio effects (although extensive keyframing remains problematic at the time of this writing). Its interface sluggishness mentioned in my prior review has largely been solved, as have the difficulties in working with interlaced footage when scaling. The titler subsystem now works and is very nicely compatible with installed TrueType fonts and a wide variety of raster graphics formats.



All of this is great, but it doesn't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world if it can't perform. That's where the drawbacks show up. It's still fairly crash-prone, and
the current migration from FFmpeg as the frame-server to MLT has broken a few things relating to a/v synchronisation with NTSC footage. These are known issues due to MLT bugs, which are, at the time of this writing, being fixed (and hopefully will be fixed by the time you read this).

There is still a way to go in a couple of other areas. KDENLIVE's audio toolkit is rudimentary, but its easy exporting dialogue-splitting means you can split the audio and push it over to Audacity or Ardour for sweetening once your edit is done.
The export GUI also presents a problem. As extensive as it is, it isn't friendly for creating new profiles, which means that you have to hand-tweak scripts or wait for new profiles if you want one that doesn't happen to come prepackaged. Fortunately, the plethora of profiles is quite staggering, including a wide range conforming to all the current riD broadcast standards.

The final weakness-and the most annoying to me' personally-is KDENLIVE's lack of support for importing image sequences. 'It's something that should be axiomatic in a system using FFmpeg as a back end, as FFmpeg is an excellent manipulator of image sequences and Bash has wild cards for such things built in. This alone bumps KDENLIVE out of the professional space, but with this exception, it is a highly promising work in progress, stable enough to use so long as you don't mind pressing Ctrl-S fairly frequently. Its most irritating issues are pretty much solved, and I've used it to complete several short and long¬form projects. It's perfectly serviceable for day-to-dayuse if you know your way around your footage. KDENLIVE is the only product in this round-up that supports video capture. Here's hoping the development team keeps up the excellent work!