Kdenlive: Breakthrough in Linux Video Editing

In my view, it has for a number of years now been the greatest failing of Linux: video editors have been a joke. No one who is serious about video editing could really be happy in the least with the sorry state of non-linear video editing apps. There have been some decent entry-level standard def programs, such as Kino. If you were masochistic enough to play along with the quirks and straight-jacketed file format limitations of Cinelerra, well, you could spend many happy months trying to get that to work. Sure there are some nice conversion utilities like Avidemux and Handbrake and (for you command line lovers) ffmpeg and mencoder. And high definition? Well, please just forget about it, unless you really like self-torture and inevitable failure and aggavation. Trying to edit 24p HDV in Cinelerra? Been there, done that, and have very little hair left for my trouble.

The depressing truth was: any of a number of sub-$100 mid-level NLE's for Windows or Mac such as Adobe Premier Elements or Ulead Studio or Pinnacle would run circles around anything available on Linux. And the other rock in my sandal was that, for all the advances of virtualization and Wine, there's no way an NLE will run at decent speed in a VM or on Wine. Video is just way too demanding. So it was dual booting or keeping around a completely separate (and fairly highly spec'ed) Windows or Mac machine. Not happy.

I personally have always felt that I can't recommend Linux to a lot of people because of the lack of a decent video solution. You can't expect normal non-geeks to dual boot or keep two computers.

Kdenlive

Well, I'm happy to report that our forty years in the desert for the Linux video faithful is coming to an end. Thanks to the developers of Kdenlive, as of version 0.7.3, video on Linux is no longer a joke. This is Free software, GPL, and it's impressive. Kdenlive is poised to take it's place with Blender, the Gimp, Inkscape, Audacity, and Scribus as the essential creative apps on any Linux desktop.

Now let's be clear what we're talking about: the full version of Adobe Premiere or Avid Media Composer or Apple Final Cut Pro are not quite in Kdenlive's sights just yet. But few people really need all of that firepower. Good mid-level editors can do a great deal these days, and have enough bells and whistles and effects and corrections to make most people happy, and that's really what's been a huge gaping hole in the Linux quiver.

Let's get to the truly impressive thing right away: it's almost shocking how modest the hardware requirements are for Kdenlive. You can edit not only SD, but HD - real, tough HD like AVCHD codec out of the latest solid state cameras - on a decent dual core machine. I'm not talking about proxy files, I mean direct editing. That's pretty astonishing. In this way, believe it or not, the Linux solution may actually trump that of Windows or Mac. I found that on Windows XP with Adobe Premier Pro 7, my dual core Athlon 64 just really wouldn't cut it. With footage out of a Canon HF100, one of the most popular of recent AVCHD camcorders, I could not view footage in acceptable frame rates to edit comfortably. I had to move to an Intel quad core to got acceptable responsiveness. But with Kdenlive, I'm back on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty with my 3 year old dual core, editing AVCHD happily.

Now, I'm not saying that Kdenlive is quite the equal of my previous favorite NLE, said Premiere Elements. That app is quite polished and mature and stable. Kdenlive is not quite at that level yet. But it has a lot going for it. A beautiful clean modern interface, a decent and growing set of effects, as many tracks as you want of audio or video, and pretty incredible input and output format support.

So what's lacking? The DVD menu's and the titler function are pretty bare bones. There's no function to record a voice over while editing. Cut edits can't be set to automatically slide the following clips backwards on the timeline, you have to take an extra step and do that manually. At this point it doesn't seem to be possible to composite a title over multiple tracks. Judging by the rapid rate of current development however, I would guess that these and a few other little failings will be remedied shortly in future updates. And in the best tradition of Free software development, it's incredibly easy to chat with the actual developers and submit feature requests.

On the other hand, there are actually some things that, like the aforementioned advantages on modest hardware, seem to outstrip the proprietary solutions. Another such advance is the separate render pipeline. You can actually set up a render - or multiple renders - and then go back to editing. On all the proprietary editors I've tried, your app is completely tied up during render - which can take hours for a longer movie. But in Kdenlive you can set up multiple renders at once and then leave the machine to do them all. Say you want a full resolution file for local playback, and a smaller or shorter version for YouTube or Vimeo. Just set up the renders and come back when they're all done. You can change your mind and stop one render while the others continue. (I'm doing two while I write this.) This is some very slick work indeed.

The reason Kdenlive has come together at this point is really thanks not only to the Kdenlive devs, but also to key advances in other projects. In true open source Gnu Linux fashion, these projects effectively divvy up the extraordinary complexity of dealing with digital video: ffmpeg, which handles all of the format and codec matters, as well as MLT, the Inigo renderer, libdv, QImage, and lets not forget the KDE toolkits that serve as the basis for the user interface. (But don't worry, the app runs just fine on Gnome without adding a huge number of KDE libs.)

Another prerequisite to get the kind of performance I'm talking about on a mere dual core machine: you'll want to make sure you have a recent, decent Nvidia graphics card, as well as the latest proprietary nvidia drivers in the 180.xx series or later with all VDPAU libs as well. A large part of the success of HD editing (and playback for that matter) is due to an advance in the Nvidia drivers and graphics API called VDPAU. This offloads much of the video processing to the video card. Very smart. Not all video software has been re-written to take advantage of VDPAU by any means. But Kdenlive, ffmpeg, and mplayer all have recent builds that allow fairly modest machines, even singe cores, to, for instance, play back HD 1080 video in H.264 codec full-screen. (You might even be able to get away with a single core, though rendering/encoding would be quite slow. VDPAU only works with playback, not encoding.)

There have been some hiccups along the way, as I can attest to having followed the development builds for a couple of years now. But as of May of 2009, things are finally coming together. Kdenlive 0.7.3 is very much worth checking out, though with the brand new version of Ubuntu just come out and lots of changes to all the dependencies and to Kdenlive itself, there are some packaging and install and stability issues remaining. But new releases have been coming every couple of months, and the remaining bugs are being knocked down with admirable persistence. I would say that by the next release 0.7.4 most of these packaging difficulties should be ironed out. If you're editing HDV or SD video, I think you'll be extremely happy now. For those of us with AVCHD cameras, editing is generally solid in my experience, but the odd glitch remains.

So go download Kdenlive and give it a run. While you're doing so, marvel at one more thing: the entire packages of Kdenlive, it's dependencies, and the frei0r effects package all add up to a mere 19MB. You read that right: nineteen megabytes. Kdenlive starts up in five seconds on my dual core. (Adobe Premiere Element occupies a minimum of 300MB on disc and takes 35 seconds to start on a Vista quad core.) Really makes you understand how ridiculously bloated commercial software has gotten to be.

And spread the word: video editing for Linux with Free software is finally here.

It's Not the Cost of the OS - It's the Cost of Apps

I'm a professional sculptor and product designer, a photographer, and an amateur musician, among other interests and hobbies. And I use computers intensively for most of it. And I use Ubuntu Linux and absolutely love it.

Here's one fallacy that some people seem to have about Linux: people are drawn to it because it's a no-cost operating system. I have news for you, the cost of an OS is just the tiny little beginning of what the proprietary software world has in store for you. It was really the unsupportable cost of apps that first put me onto open source applications, to begin with, and then onto Linux itself.

What, an artist with no Mac?

A lot of people familiar with my work are surprised that I don't use a Mac, since most artists and design and media people seem to gravitate towards that. Macs are unquestionably great machines. But for a number of very concrete reasons I've never been an Apple fan. Apple is the most proprietary of all computer companies, and that alone has always rubbed me the wrong way. In that sense, Apple and the Mac system are, in root philosophy, the exact opposite of the Free-libre software movement. And I should state up front that I'm pretty much in agreement with Richard M. Stallman's views of why software ought to be free-libre and open source. But one of the other aspects of Apple is that the hardware comes from only one company, and they really don't like people opening up their cases. Some do, I'm sure, but there certainly are not a lot of people who go out and build their own Macs and install their own OS's and hard drives and network cards, like I do. That's not what Mac's are really about.

At any rate, this puts me in an awkward situation. The worlds of graphic design and multimedia production are drenched in proprietary-ness. Photoshop and all things Adobe have an ironclad grip on most pro graphic designers. Video and audio codecs are a proprietary patent-laden minefield. Beyond that there is the world of architecture and engineering, where companies like Autodesk are a virtual monopolies in their professions.

Like most design professionals, I need sophisticated software. I had an expensive software habit to maintain: 3D Studio Max, AutoCAD, Adobe Creative Suite, CorelDraw, Cakewalk, Adobe Premiere - these programs run from a couple hundred dollars each to well over $3,000 for a programs like 3DS Max and AutoCAD. At one time I was running well over $8000 in applications on my one little machine. Plus the myriad little pieces of sub-$100 software and utilities all grind down your wallet as well. ACDSee is a nice photo browser, much better than what comes with Windows. It's about $80. Quicktime Pro has some nice Quicktime video coding features, $30. Need an MP3 codec for that audio or video editor of yours? Bingo bango, that'll be $15 bucks, thanks. Want some nicer DVD menu designs? Unlock this hidden feature of your video editor for $10. Etc, etc. And of course it's not just once, it's every couple or three years. The upgrade hamster wheel was getting real old real fast.

Now, I suppose if I had been just a video pro, or just a 3D designer, or just an audio recording producer, or just a photographer, I could have lived with it. I know a photographers who charges a couple thousand bucks for a day's photo shoot, so what's the cost of Lightroom and Photoshop in that light, right? But for a lot of people like me, computers are not a narrow-aspect tool. A professional sculptor like me needs a wide variety of applications, not just to design and produce sculpture, but to photograph my work, produce and print photo portfolios, edit a web site, produce promotional videos and advertising.

So what's the cost of a $200 operating system? Honestly, my last gripe was the cost of Windows. (Though that's probably because it was a hidden cost, built into the computer I was buying.) But still it's nothing compared to the hundreds or thousands of dollars a designer will spend on applications. I guess in the old days, when I was paying $3000 for a nice 'fast' computer, the cost of software seemed almost reasonable, or at least, not completely out of line. And I think that's how Apple users felt as well, because the extra cost of a Mac was really no big deal compared to software: it undoubtedly seemed well worth it.

Software costs now dwarf hardware costs

Times have changed though, pretty thoroughly: at this point you can get a pretty rocking computer loaded with RAM, a quad core processor, a great graphics card, and a gi-normous fast hard drive for about $700. And have room in the budget for a great big gorgeous color LCD to see it all on and maybe even a nice big graphics pen-tablet. Meanwhile, the cost of Photoshop and all the other creative software has not come down one iota. Something's gotta give.

So it was the lure of free-libre programs like the Gimp, Blender, Audacity, Inkscape, and Rawstudio that first drew me in. Actually, I think it was probably OpenOffice that was the first FOSS program I downloaded and installed onto Windows 2000. You see, with the relatively small amount of word processing and office type stuff I do, it seemed crazy to keep buying office software. (I used WordPerfect ages ago, and I've never used MS Office at all.) So I tried OOo and guess what? It was just brilliant, exactly what I needed and more. Wow, I thought, how can a program this good be completely free?

At that point, there didn't really seem to be a lot of free software for design. Gimp I found to be a strange thing I tried in lieu of Photoshop. But all the weird windows that opened up really confused me. So for a year or two, OpenOffice was really all I used. But then I discovered Audacity, and then - holy smoke! - Blender for 3D design. You mean someone wrote this free, brilliant program that can completely replace my $3,400 copy of 3D Studio Max - and it downloads in only 25MB??? Now I was really beginning to think that this 'free open source' thing was the real deal. I even gave Gimp a second try and actually liked it.

Eventually I got interested in actually trying Linux itself, the mothership of all open source. I bought a book with some live CD's of Mandrake, and then ran Fedora for a couple months, and eventually discovered Ubuntu Dapper. On balance it seemed to work better than anything, and what really got me was the pace of improvement, the great people in the forums and the community of people helping each other out, and mostly, the ease of finding and installing software. Software - the apps - that's what I wanted, and Ubuntu made it really easy to explore a lot of free software. You mean you just click on all the software packages you want, and it will download and install all of them with another click, and . . . keep them updated forever? f-f-wowww . . .

Can you really design things with Linux only?

Now, all is far from perfect in the world of Linux and design and multimedia software. There still is no first-rate video editing software, for instance. (And yes, I've tried them all and follow their development, I promise you.) Gimp still can't edit 48 bit color images or CMYK. There is nothing like AutoCAD on Linux. On the other hand, I can get an enormous amount done and NEVER worry about upgrades. In fact, I look forward to upgrades with relish.

IN THE NEXT POST: Linux - the OS - is plenty good enough already. It's the apps we need to be bootstrapping . . .