[Kdenlive-devel] Field report on using 0.6 svn version from 2008-01-06

[Roland Kaeser]

Hello all

I just had the pleasure to cut a short film (about 3 minutes) using the 0.6-svn version from 2008-01-06 (created by packman (packman.links2linux.de). First of all: You all guys made a very good program. I just can make congratulations. The features and the usability gives kdenlive the potential to become one of the killerapps of Linux. As I wrote above, I'm using a version from January so its possible that things I will speak about are already implemented. 

I found also some problems in using the program:

1: The program stability. I recognized a lot of crashes or other problems regarding to stablility issues around internal functions. 

Sometimes the preview-window remains black when moving the seek marker across the timeline unless I switch to the cut tool and back to the positioning  tool.

When adding sound effects to the clips such as the volume effect, often when changing the volume on a certain clip the program mutes the whole clip. Sometimes it helps to restart kdenlive to get rid of the problem, sometimes its required to remove the clib, restart the app and add the clip again to solve such problems. 

Creating text or image clips and using it on the timeline almost brings kdenlive to crash after short time.

Using some of the video effects (such as automask) brings kdenlive immediately to crash.

Sometimes, while recover a previous session brings kdenlive also immediately to crash or freeze.

The text clips (specially when setting a transparent background) are mostly unuseable because they produce just a black screen. (when laying it above a video clip) or remains just invisible. 

2: It seems to me that kdenlive has problems in handling the beginning, ending and cutting positions of the clips. When I cut a clip (cut off frames from the end of a clip) I afterwards can  already resize the remaining clip to its previous full length. 

3: It seems that the multithreading programming behind the export functions have some bugs in it. When I export the timeline to a moviefile or dvd, the export progress bar moves until 99% and 1 second before ending of the job and holds on. The background process, used to render the export remains in memory when the programm has ended and consumes a lot of cpu power. 


4: I miss just a few functions in kdenlive to have a (for me) fully working app to cutting my movies and (maybe) making some compositing work on it. These functions are:

    1: Changing the transparency of the clips using the "rubberband" concept (like the volume effect). 
         This would be one of the most powerful functions to me.

    2: Having a keyframe based crop tool which allows to create effects like in twenty four (24) (the action
        series)

    3: Having a effect to move a picture clip around the screen using keyframes.

    4: A extension to the text clip to move the text around the screen and resizing it (using keyframes) to
        create simple text compositing effects like in the opening theme of "Boston Legal"



I think on the bottom line, kdenlive is already a very powerful application. I think the biggest current issue is definitely the stablity of the program. Taking a look to this issue would make the program available to a wider base of users. I personally have some friends in a "movie club". Its a kind of society of people who likes to create their own short movies. Some (the most of them) are using some embedded systems like Casablanca to cut their movies. It would be a very good chance switching them directly to Linux (by omitting windows)  as base system and let them use kdenlive for cuting their movies. 


I would You give just a short overview about the experiences of a "regular user" with kdenlive and hope that it helped You a bit getting a insight view of the needs and problems of the users out there.

Many thanks

Roland Käser





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