[Kdenlive-devel] AVCHD

[jb]

On Tuesday 07 February 2012 19:13:41 Stefan Naumann wrote:
> Hey there - again.
> 
> I recently got the SVN-PPA for Ubuntu of KDEnlive and the current version of
> KDEnlive. I might repeat myself - but it's still not really usable for me.
> The recording option ... I think it works with Terratec Grabby
> (Video4Linux2) - why don't you let the user freely decide the codecs and
> formats in which he wants to record.??

If you have the last version of Kdenlive, recording codecs and formats are 
fully customizable. In Kdenlive settings > Capture > FFmpeg, there is an 
"Encoding Profile" combobox which lets you decide the ffmpeg encoding 
parameters. You can click on the configure button next to it to manually enter 
whatever parameters you want.

> And the second point: AVCHD. (H264). I always record in H264 for it
> resulting in smallest filesizes with high CPU Load while decoding. :D I see
> it's a pretty hard video codec, but as far as I unterstand it there is one
> image fully defined and then only the changes based on the one full
> picture. If there is a change, that is too big or o heavy there will be
> another full frame. (i-Frame (????)) I see that even Adobe Premiere has its
> problems with this codec, but it is in my humble opinion the best one for
> sake of my harddiskdrives. Adobe (apparently) searched bad to the last
> i-frame and builds all later changes on top of it ... so it is pretty slow
> loading a random position in a video. But KDEnlive is too slow to
> accomplish a nice editing envirornment. The video in Timeline is too slow
> --- for 5 seconds then there is ja jump to the real position after the 5
> seconds. I can understand it hanging for a while, when I clicked on a later
> point in time ... searching for last iframe ... but if it is always so
> slow... that's just unusable ... I hope this critics are not taken
> personally - And maybe I helped you to make an even better editing
> experience for video cutters all around the world. ;) (nice sentence, ain't
> it)

As explained by Simon, you can't expect fast h264 video editing in the near 
future, it is anyways in the hands of the FFmpeg project, we cannot make it 
better in Kdenlive. Proxy clips should help you:

In the project settings, enable proxy clips, and to have them automatically 
created when adding a new clip, also enable the "Generate for videos larger 
than..." option.

You can also manually enable / disable a proxy clip from the context menu of 
the project tree. 

Encoding options for the proxy clips are fully customizable from Kdenlive 
Settings > Project Defaults > Proxy Clips > Encoding Profile

That should make Kdenlive usable for most users.

regards
jb