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Linux video editing and Kdenlive tips and tricks for a returning user? (lemm.ee)
submitted 10 months ago by OR3X@lemm.ee to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Just recently switched back to Linux after more than a decade away. (I'm currently running Mint Cinnamon if anyone is curious) On Windows I was using the free version of Davinci Resolve for all of my video editing. I quickly discovered that the free version of Resolve for Linux doesn't support H.264/H.265 so after trying every Linux video editor I could find (even Blender) I've settled on using Kdenlive. I've been having a good time getting everything dialed in and learning Kdenlive. I was able to get hardware acceleration working with my Nvidia GPU, and I really appreciated that it could natively utilize the proxy clips that my DJI Action 3 generates when recording. I've been reading all kinds of tips and tricks articles but most of it is just basic stuff. Anyone using Kdenlive have more advanced tips to share? Particularly anything around title generation and animation as I've found Kdenlive's system to be a little clunky. Let's talk!

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[–] fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It might be quite hard to give full tutorials - I suppose it depends a little on what you're trying to do - and are your titles intro sequences or other onscreen graphics etc?

The titler within Kdenlive is perfectly functional for static text/shape work, but you may find it easier to produce things externally - I certainly found myself producing the majority of titles in Inkscape - both onscreen graphics and intro pages etc. Basic stuff, i just put the full page in, faded in and out as appropriate. Kdenlive will take SVG and PNG, so you've got transparency for different layers of title component.

For bits with moving/sliding/fading components (like in an interview, a coloured bar slides onto the screen in the bottom left, then the person's name fades in, then their position/workplace fades in, then it all fades out together) - I'd do those with individual components in Inkscape, imported as separate svg files and layered up in Kdenlive, then individually positioned, cut and faded in/out as separate clips (My timelines are normally 8-10 tracks high).

More complex motion graphic work I used to render out in Blender, but I think these days I'd probably use Natron for some of it.

Also, copy and paste as much as possible - work with reusable templates where you can.

If you've got a better idea of what sort of thing you're aiming for (maybe an example of what you want to (re)create?) - I might be able to offer a few pointers at least :)

[–] OR3X@lemm.ee 3 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Yeah, the Kdenlive titler is perfectly workable, and I've already created a template or two for quick re-usability. I was being a bit nit-picky ecause everything else has honestly been great. I guess I'm just more used to Resolve where you can have premade title templates that have their own animations already built-in and dynamically adjust to the size of the content. This makes adding titles a snap as opposed to Kdenlive where I have to add my template, then add the content, then manually resize the elements to fit the content then add to the timeline and finally apply animations. What takes maybe 30 seconds in Resolve can be a 3-5 min job in Kdenlive. This could probably be cut-down a lot as I become more efficient though. My title needs aren't really that complicated.

[–] DeathByDenim@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I've been using Glaxnimate which integrates with Kdenlive. It's a tool for animating SVG elements. It's a bit clunky I find but it's nice in that you can have shapes and text follow animation path with different time curves. It can be used directly from Kdenlive which is pretty cool.

As for other tips, one I use a lot is Timeline Preview Rendering. If you have a whole pile of effects, playing in the project monitor can become very choppy. With the prerendering, you can just render that section and it will play smooth while still allowing you do edit the audio.

Finally, for getting the footage from clips, I use I and O to set the start and end of a part of the clip I want and then with Ctrl+I I can create a zone that shows up in the Project bin. I use that a lot to get the fragments I want first and then build the fill timeline later.

[–] OR3X@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I saw the option for adding a new animation in the project bin, and installed Glaxnimate with the intention of giving it a shot, but the software manager in Mint only has the Flatpak version available which obviously won't work. As for timeline preview rendering, it's awesome! I use it to pre-render all of my titles and transitions before I record my voice over so the project monitor doesn't stutter and throw off the timing on the audio recording. Works a treat! Speaking of voice over, I REALLY wish there was an option for a sidechain compressor input. As it stands now I record my VO, then render out each of the audio channels and then import into Audacity to apply the audio ducking and other effects before importing it all back into Kdenlive. It's a bit of a headache but it does work.

[–] DeathByDenim@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Oh, I see what you mean about the Glaxnimate Flatpak. I just tried it out.

You can get it to work, but it's a bit of a hack. You first need to create a script containing:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/flatpak run org.mattbas.Glaxnimate $@

Let's call it glax or something like that. Then make it executable:

chmod +x glax

Then in Kdenlive, go to Settings -> Configure Kdenlive -> Environment -> Standard Applications, change the one for editing animation to point to that script. Should work now. At least, it did for me!

And yeah, shame about the audio processing.

[–] OR3X@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

ahh, that makes sense. I'll give it a go.

EDIT: Hmm, didn't seem to work for me. I created the script and made it executable then put the path to the script in Kdenlive's settings. I can right-click in the project bin and click "create animation" which gives me a .JSON file but I see no way to edit it. Double-clicking it just shows me its properties and right-clicking and selecting "edit clip" does nothing. Interestingly if I execute the script from terminal it starts Glaxnimate as expected. I also went ahead and created a similar script for Pinta as my image editor since I'm also running the Flatpak version of that and had the same result as Glaxnimate when trying to edit images. I also entered the path for Audacity as my audio editor, but it's installed as a system package so I pointed Kdenlive directly to the binary and got the same result when trying to edit audio files. Maybe I'm just not understanding this, or I have something setup wrong in Kdenlive... Any ideas?

[–] DeathByDenim@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Hmm, no sorry. All I can think of is that maybe Kdenlive itself is a flatpak version in which case it wouldn't be allowed to run external programs like Glaxnimate (or Pinta). I guess in that case it requires some magic with Flatpak overrides.

[–] OR3X@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Nailed it. I didn't even think to check that... I'll have to see if I can find a workaround. Thanks!

[–] DeathByDenim@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Yeah, tricky! You might be able to do something similar to getting native messaging extensions to work on Flatpakked Firefox as described here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1621763#c5

[–] fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 1 points 10 months ago

Very interested to hear about Glaxnimate - I'd not heard of that one and will definitely have a look - thanks for bringing it to our attention :)

[–] RiderExMachina@lemmy.ml 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I would say one of the few downsides Kdenlive has is the lack of the premade templates. I feel like there's gotta be a site out there for those premade templates that us hobbyists can download and use, but hopefully they'll just bake that in directly in the future.

The other issue I have is the effects plugins aren't always up-to-date, so not all plugins work with the latest version.

[–] fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Not the easiest thing to find, but there is a site for templates and stuff here: kdenlive templates.

There's not loads on it, and quality may vary. Note that quite a few of these are more like snippets of a project to copy and paste in, so might take a bit of fiddling to get running, compared to just picking "swooshy title #3" and putting your own text in it - but in some form it exists at least :)

[–] OR3X@lemm.ee 2 points 10 months ago

Appreciate the link, thanks!

[–] fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 1 points 10 months ago

I get what you mean - it's quite "roll your own" rather than "pre-made" - and the same for quite a few of the effects and motion settings.

Note that you can save template versions of effects or motion settings if you need, so after you've used it a while, you might have a reasonable library of things you need - but you're right, there's a bit of a lack of "drop in, ready to go", particularly for quick titles.

Something like a "jiggly funky colourful text shaking about" effect can be a day's work, rather than a 2 minute "write your own text with this pre-made sequence".

Just in case they're useful, there are a set of downloadable templates Kdenlive downloadable titles here, but I'm not sure it's quite going to cover what you're after - but worth a browse in case.

[–] SmoochyPit@beehaw.org 5 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Davinci Resolve doesn’t support H.264 or H.265 on Linux??? I was planning on installing it soon, that’ll be a huge problem for me…

[–] OR3X@lemm.ee 5 points 10 months ago

Correct. I was disappointed to find this out as well. Supposedly it's due to these codecs requiring a paid license to use. With windows the license cost is baked into the cost of the windows license itself, but of course that doesn't exist with Linux. It CAN work on Linux if you purchase the studio version of Resolve, but I wasn't ready to shell out $300 for a video editor when I'm only producing content for Youtube as a hobby and for the fun of it.

[–] vole@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

Completely tangential tip, but in the very-limited video editing I've done recently: I've used Davinci Resolve, rendered as .mov, and then used ffmpeg to render to my actual desired format. e.g. h264 w/ aac audio so I can upload to Youtube:

ffmpeg -i input.mov -c:v libopenh264 -profile:v high -c:a aac -pix_fmt yuv420p output.mp4

I do think that finding the right flags to pass to ffmpeg is a cursed art. Do I need to specify the video profile and the pix_fmt? I don't know; I thought I did when I adventured to collect these flags. Though maybe it's just a reflection of the video-codec horrors lurking within all video rendering pipelines.

edit: there may also be nvidia-accelerated encoders, like h264_nvenc, see ffmpeg -codecs 2>/dev/null | grep -i 'h\.264'. I'm not sure if the profile:v and pix_fmt options apply to other encoders or just libopenh264.

[–] OR3X@lemm.ee 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

haha, yeah figuring out those ffmpeg flags is an absolute nightmare. My problem there isn't so much the output format from Resolve, but source format I'm using. My camera only has the option to record in H.264/H.265 (consumer grade, what can you expect?) which Resolve can't properly import on Linux. I could take the time to transcode them with ffmpeg before editing, but I'm usually working with ~2 hours worth of video per project and I don't really want to wait all day for a transcode job to finish before I can even begin editing. On top of that my camera (rather neatly) generates its own proxy files while recording, and I've found leveraging these is necessary for getting good timeline performance on my aging rig. Now I could let Resolve generate its own proxy clips like I have in the past, but that's more time waiting around before editing. I was SUPER stoked to see Kdenlive can natively utilize the proxy clips my camera generates.

[–] vole@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Oh wow, I didn't know (free) Davinci didn't support using H.264 as source media, that feels rather limited.

[–] drwankingstein@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

using openh264... well that's a choice. I would recommend to everyone that they use x264 whenever possible, and make sure to specify output crf and likely preset when you fo

[–] vole@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

thanks, I'll try out the libx264 encoder next time

[–] drwankingstein@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 10 months ago (1 children)

A couple other things, you generally want to do pixel format conversion before the codec, is specified. You should be able to get satisfactory results with ffmpeg -i input.mpv -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:v libx264 -preset medium -crf 24 -c:a aac output.mp4 Play with preset a bit since that is where your Quality/Compression : Speed ratio comes in, CRF is the quality it handles. So you set CRF for a ballpark quality you want, then change the preset, slower = higher compression, faster = lower compression.

you can find more info here https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.264#a2.Chooseapresetandtune but generally you don't need to muck about with profiles or tunes or anything else

[–] fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 1 points 10 months ago

You're probably aware already, but others reading this might be interested that you can access the same format conversion with Handbrake and WinFF if you prefer GUI tools. Remember your settings once and save them as a preset.

[–] OR3X@lemm.ee 3 points 10 months ago (2 children)

For anyone who's curious, I went ahead and created a "default" project with the title I normally use already setup on the timeline. That way when I start a new project I can just copy the default template and my title with animations is already there ready to go. Just need to modify the text and it's good. It's not a perfect solution, and certainly wouldn't work for someone who desires to use different or multiple titles per project, but it's good enough for me. Here's what it looks like: https://youtu.be/dlGUT0c46Ts

[–] PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks 2 points 10 months ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

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[–] fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk 1 points 10 months ago

Nicely done :)