Kdenlive 0.7.4 Fills in the Blanks

As per my previous post on Kdenlive, the Linux non linear video editor (NLE), I just wanted to post a brief update. The new version 0.7.4 has been released, and for me, as I had hoped and expected, this cleared up pretty much all of the little bugs and install snafus that were bothersome in 0.7.3.

I would tentatively have to say that Kdenlive is now the best NLE on Linux. And with packages now available from a special repo making install a breeze, a lot more people on Ubuntu should be able to take a look at this great app.

Improvements

The install went flawlessly using a Launchpad PPA repository with packages for Ubuntu Jaunty. There is a post on setting up the dominik-stadler repos -

http://www.kdenlive.org/forum/kdenlive-074-launchpad-debs-jaunty-and-intrepid

Starting the app, it correctly detected the upgrade and launched the configuration wizard. All necessary components were detected and codecs were present.

Major operational improvements are that AVCHD seeking is now possible without playback problems; stability is excellent; rendering to h264 both in one pass and two pass modes seems to be fixed now. The frei0r effects package now longer conflicts with anything, so all effects are present.

The independent render process that I raved about is now even better: before, all renders started as soon as you launched them, all in parallel, and this meant a very slow process was even slower. Now, much more logically, the first render completes before the next is started, (serial rendering) meaning that you will be able to finish and watch one much more quickly. Nice.

To correct an error in my previous post, I discovered that it's actually quite possible to composite a transparent title over many tracks, it's just that the process for doing so is murky. Documentation and the manual are currently quite poor and incomplete for Kdenlive, so it's often a matter of just putzing around and trying all the buttons and hunting for ways to do what you want to do. The good news is that things are mostly logical and the layout is nice and clean, so it's fairly easy to guess and figure things out.