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Kdenlive First Project
Kdenlive First Project
org/user-manual/quickstart-guide/kdenlive-first-project
Kdenlive
Free and open source video editor for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and FreeBSD
Reference guide
Reference guide When you first start Kdenlive, you will have a window looking something like this :
Kdenlive 0.7.4
User login
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Password *
Log in
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Who's online
Online users The Clip monitor is used to preview clips and to select a section of a clip to add to the timeline.
LeHomard The Project monitor displays the final video - what your final edit will look like.
The Capture monitor allows you to directly capture video from a number of sources: A camcorder connected to your
Search computer Firewire port, a Video4Linux source (as a webcam or tvcard), or a screen capture (you'll need recordmydesktop
utility)
Search this site
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A status bar is located at the bottom of the timeline. This bar provides information about your project and also holds some useful
icons.
You can use it to select the update or razor tool, zoom the timeline, toggle on/off the thumbnails for video and audio, and decide
to show or not markers and snappoints. It also displays the timeline time of your cursor.
Now that you are familiar with the screen sections and buttons, it's time to create the basic configuration for a new project, add
pieces of sound and video to it, move these pieces around, apply effects and transitions and so on ...
You'll need to setup your preferred video profile (DV, HDV, ...) and your working directory. Also, you can decide to use or not
thumbnails for audio and video and if you want to activate the crash recovery option (recommended). Finally, this option will
check your system to find the critical components needed to run kdenlive: FFMPEG, Dvgrab, Recordmydesktop & Inigo (part of
MLT).
Now that you have some clips, you can add them to your project. Select the Project List tab on the project pane, and then click on
the "Add clip" icon ( ) in the top right to bring up the context menu. From here, select "Add Clips" to bring up a standard KDE
open dialog. Find your clips, select as many as you want to add (select more than one by holding the Ctrl key), and they will be
added!
Your added clips will now appear in the project list, along with their duration and a few other pieces of information (like a
thumbnail).
For the purpose of this Quickstart guide, and in order to show you the basic Kdenlive functionalities, we'll work with two of your
clips, adding a title at the beginning, a video transition between them and a video effect to a part of one clip. Finally, we'll render
the project to obtain a nice DVD ready to be burned and played on our TV.
To create a title clip, select "Add clip" icon ( ) and, in the context menu, select "Create Text Clip". A new window like this will
be presented:
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In this window, you can give a name to your clip, define the duration, the letter type, size and colour. You'll also have the
following icons:
To draw a box
You can now select the "Enter text" icon, write the title and click "OK". The text will appear in the window and you can drag and
drop it wherever you want on the screen. To improve your title, click the "Draw box" icon and, with the left mouse button pressed,
draw a box on the screen. Before doing so, you need to change the box colour in the same way as you did for the text. If the box
and the text have the same colour, they may interfere!
Don't worry if you can't see your text now! Select the box and try with the "Bring to front/send back" icons. Better now, huh?
By dragging and dropping the box and the text and by playing with the movement icons, you can obtain quite nice titles!
You can drag a clip directly from the project list. Select one of the clips that you have added to the project list, and drag it to
the timeline. As soon as the mouse reaches a track, the clip will appear on the track. With this kind of drag, the entire duration of
the clip is placed on the timeline. You can then edit the clip from the timeline.
The other way is to select a segment of a clip and then add this segment to the timeline. When you click on a clip in the project
list, the Clip Monitor will automatically load the clip. You can then press Play on the Clip Monitor and get an idea of which bits of
the clip you actually want on the timeline. Then, position the seek marker ( ) to where you want your clip to start and click the
"inpoint" button ( ). Move the cursor to where you want the clip to end, and click the "outpoint" button ( ).
Finally, you can move this cut-down clip to the timeline by clicking the video screen on the Clip Monitor and, holding down the left
mouse button, placing it in the desired point of the timeline. The selected zone between the in and out point will then appear
there as a clip (to be more precise, a subclip as we've selected only a part of the original clip).
Choose your way and, to continue with the quickstart guide, be sure to move two clips (or subclips) to the timeline. One to Track
#1 and the other to Track #2.
Resizing a clip changes its in and out points. If you reselect the clip and look in the clip monitor, you will see that the in and out
points on the monitor show the new positions. It is not possible to resize an audio or video clip past their length - if a clip is 30
seconds in length, then you will not be able to resize the clip so that it finishes playing 35 seconds into the clip! -. On the other
hand, you can resize text, image or color clips to increase or reduce their length as you want.
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When you are resizing and moving clips, there is a handy "snap to" feature, which will snap the edges of clips to other clips and the
current seek position. This is useful for quickly lining clips up with each other, but in some cases may not be what you want. You
can turn this behaviour on and off using the "Snap to" icons:
Another way is to select the clips that you want to delete, press the right mouse button and in the context menu select option
Delete Clip.
By this, you'll remove the clip from the timeline but it still appears in the "Project Tree" list. If you select the clip here and
proceed as above, you'll remove it also from the project. But do not worry, it still remains physically in your disk!
To split a clip, the normal way is to place the timeline cursor at the splitting point (you can adjust the exact position by playing
with the "Next frame" and "Previous frame" buttons in the "Timeline Monitor"). Then press the right
mouse button and in the context menu select option Razor Clip. (The razor cuts before the current frame, so the right strip will
contain the frame you're standing on.) With this option only the clip in the current track will be split.
You can split all clips at that position selecting the option Razor All Clips in the edit menu.
Before start, be sure that you have your two videoclips in tracks #1 and #2. Also, move (as explained before) the title clip that
we've created previously to the start of track #0.
If we want to apply a transition, we need to overlap the required clips in different tracks. So first thing to do is to move the clip in
track #1 to overlap with the title in track #0, let say by 2 seconds.
To better control this overlap you can change the timeline zoom using the viewer tool . Click on the
magnifying glass and select a small scale or click on the ruler and drag left.
Once done, click on the title clip and press the right mouse button. In the context menu select Add transition -> Crossfade. A
yellow bar will appear between the clips in tracks #0 and #1 indicating your transition has been added to the project.
To have a real time view of how your transition works, you can click the seek marker and drag it over the transition area. If
everything is OK, you should see in the "Timeline Monitor" how the title clip dissapears at the same time the video clip is displayed.
To edit a transition and change parameters, you can double click on it (the yellow bar). In this way, it will become red and the
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focus in the "Project Panel" will change to the "Transition tab". In this tab you'll be able to change the transition parameters if
needed.
As the Crossfade is an easy transition, the only parameters you can change are the transition direction and the track where it
applies.
If the Invert direction parameter is selected, the upper track clip is shown first and the transition is applied until the view changes
to the lower track clip. If the parameter is not selected, then the direction is the other way round.
The track to apply the transition is normally the next track after the one where we created the transition. But you can change this
behaviour by selecting others in the Track Selection List. This is a powerful feature for advanced transitions, but for the moment
we'll not use, so be sure your selection is Automatic – Use next video track.
You can play now creating a new transition between clips in tracks #1 and #2 in the same way as explained above.
Effects are ways to change your original clip. Kdenlive comes with different effects that can be applied to the audio and others
that can be applied to the video. The small number of standard audio effects can be easily increased if you use the Ladspa plug-ins
(see this page to know how to load them).
To know in detail all effects and how they works, you can have a look at this page.
In this guide we'll know how to apply a "Greyscale" effect to a clip. This effect, as the name indicates, will take out colors from the
video and display it in black & white (well, really using black, white and different grey tones! ).
Normally, except some of them, the effects apply to a full clip so, if you want to limit the effect to just a part, you need to create
"subclips" as explained before in this page.
So let's go to clip in track #2. Select it and click the right mouse button. In the context menu select Add Video Effect -> Greyscale.
You'll see immediatly how the colours in your clip dissapear and are replaced by grey tones!
In the same way as transitions, you can also edit the effect parameters. To do so, select the "Effect Stack" tab in the Project Panel.
Unfortunately, the Greyscale effect is so easy that has no parameters!
But in this tab, you can also find some useful icons to organize the effects:
to move the effect up in the list (that means it will be applied first to the clip)
You can see also that behind the effect name there's a checkbox. If you uncheck it, the effect will not be applied but still remains
in the effect list with the selected parameters (if any!). This is useful if you want to use it later on.
And behind the "Parameters" tab, you'll notice another one titled "Keyframes". For some effects, you can select as many keyframes
as you need in the clip and for each keyframe you can define different parameters. This is useful if you want, for example, mute a
part of a clip. You can do so in two ways:
- Creating a subclip and applying the "Mute" audio effect to this subclip - Or using the "Volume" effect. This can be applied to the
full clip and, by defining different keyframes you can adjust the volume, for example, to start muted, then increase progressively,
then continue at normal level, then decrease progressively and become muted, continue muted for a time and start again
progressively ...
To know more about keyframes and how to work with them see this page
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You have a title clip in track #0 with a crossfade transition between it and the other clip in track #1. Another transition (this one
costum made by you!) between this clip and the one in track #2 and a greyscale effect applied to this clip.
Now follow some steps to create a DVD with this project. With Kdenlive you'll be able to easily create a DVD video structure and
burn it (if you have installed the program k3b). You will also add a simple menu with chapters and even with an intro movie if you
like.
- Select the menu option Render -> Export to DVD. - You'll be presented with a window to enter export details:
- In this screen you should enter the folder name where the DVD structure should be created and the DVD format (PAL/NTSC). Be
sure that the option "Render file now" is selected.
As you can see, in this screen it's also possible to define the DVD chapters and also to create the DVD from an existing video file
(.VOB), but for the moment we are not going to use these options. For further details see this page.
- Press the "Next" button. In the following dialog you can select to create a DVD menu or not. If you want to, check the "Create
Menu" option and the rest of the data will be accessible.
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You can choose to use a plain colored screen for your menu (click on the color box to select it), an image file or even a movie file
(enter the path and name if selected). Also, you can define a pause between chapters if you have created such.
In the "Buttons" tab you can define the title text, font and size and the different colors for the button depending on status (not
selected, selected, pressed).
In the "Intro" tab you can indicate a video file to be presented before the menu appears in the screen (like an introduction video).
- When you've entered data, press again the "Next" button. Kdenlive is now ready to generate the DVD using the program
DvdAuthor. Click on "Generate DVD" to do so.
A message will appear telling you to continue working while the video is generated. You can see progress in the "Status Bar".
When the process is finished, you may choose to work with the generated DVD externally (you'll find the Audio & Video directories
in the specified path) or return again to this screen by selecting menu option Render -> Export to DVD. If you decided to go on
with Kdenlive, you'll have options to directly burn your video (using k3b), preview it (using Xine) or edit again the structure (using
QDvdAuthor).
Congratulations! You've created your first video with Kdenlive. Enjoy it and continue reading to know more about this program and
its advanced features.
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