A story of a former Kdenlive's user (switched to Olive)

Sat May 11 16:27:36 BST 2019

Hey!

I've read Harald's e-mail and I thought maybe I'll share my Kdenlvie
experience with you as well.

I've been a heavy Kdenlive user for about 18 months, when I switched from
Blender VSE, seeing it's not being worked on and I cannot expect the bugs
that cripple my workflow to be ever fixed.
About two months ago I've upgraded from 16 to 32 GB of RAM to help myself
with editing videos in Kdenlive.
A month later I immediately gave up using Kdeinlive, after I've discovered
Olive.

Olive is a very young project (about 20 months in development at this
point). And it made me realize how painful it is to do my work with
Kdenlive (or Blender VSE to be fair).
Olive uses OpenGL for all image processing. It uses GLSL shaders for
effects and compositing. I was even able to create a Despill effect myself
to get a better Green Screen compositing.

That being said I have a feeling that my trouble with Kdenlive will not
lead to any progress, and I prefer to have issues with Olive that has a
promising start and a community I can get in touch with easily.
Also - it gives me an order of magnitude better experience than anything
else right away, so why shouldn't iI use it?

A minro problem was for the past year (or something?) I couldn't log into
my KDE account, because they enforce using your real name as login, and I
have diacritics in my name, I also can't use a password that I'd want so I
had once to contact an admit to even log in, and I just don't have the tim
deal with that.. That made me feel like the KDE community is making it
harder for me to communicate.
Why can't I use a login and password of my choosing? I find that a strange
decision and I'm just out of the KDE forums until that's changed.

I've stopped reporting bugs, also knowing that the refactoring is a
priority.
I think Kdenlive has some great functions, but is also a huge mess.

There are three groups of effects based on keyframing (no keyframing, a
table keyframing, and a timeline keyframing). The effects are affecting the
image in ways they shouldn't - transform and wipe will change the color
balance, whic is visible on the RGB parade - I show that in my rant video).
The performance is abysmal if you want to do any compositing (which I do a
lot).
If you want to just "cut the tape" and don't need any effects or
compositing - Kdenlvie may be acceptable. But not if you want to do
anything more complex.

There's a UV Mapping compositor, that's useless, because the whole pipeline
is only 8-bit. Which gives you 256x256 pixels addressable.

GPU support is non-functional and crashes Kdenlive every time for me.
Multithrraded rendering or even playback is broken and gives me white
frames every time.

My recent two serious projects got random audio sync issues and audio
clicks (randomly different with each render). That was the last straw for
me, and I snapped.

Here are the two last videos I've made with Kdenlive:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpMP8uGGpzI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulks8T6z6BU

The issues created by Kdenlive in my work has cost me too much time and
beard hair. Even my wife is relived that I'm not using it any more.

I bless the Heavens for Olive, as I can retain my sanity and make videos
that I love.

I think that as long as Kdenlive is coupled with MLT - it'll be inhereting
it's problems.
I don't know how that looks on the inside, but I guess Kdenlive is probably
doing a lot of work just to workaround MLT's limitations and quirks.

Also - Kdenlvie has a long legacy, which is holding it back.
Olvie has non of that - and kowing it's developers and community - it migth
become a tool even better than some of the industry standards like Adobe
Premiere (which also has a lot of legacy and quirks).

Anyway - I've expressed my issues and frustration in a video:
https://youtu.be/ym1brc2OcYQ

After I published this, I one of the developers of Kdelvie cam to Olive
Disocrd and we got in touch talking about the issues.
I've send him my latest projects so he can investigate the audio
clicks/desync issue (I couldn't reproduce it in a simmle project).

I've decided to take that video down after a week. As I though maybe it's
sending a needlessly negative message, but since I've decidd to make it
public again, as there'struth there that has to be said, even if it's not
nice to listen to.
I hope you can undesrtand that.

I hope Kdenlive can be reborn, but I am afraid a lot of things just need to
be replaced entirely if it's going to ever become a truly modern video
editor.

In my honest opition (being completely unaware of the Kdenlive's internal
structure) it'd be better to just go back to the drawing board and design
an entirely new achitecture taking into account all experience of Kdenlive.
That experience is probably the most valuable asset you guys have.

I don't think you're gonna do that, as you've invested so much time and
effort into it. I'm thinking about the "sunken cost fallacy".
I'm a really sorry to say that - but I don't elbie any more that time spent
on improving Kdenlvie is a time well spent.
The end product is no good for me, and Olive is already allowing me to do
the same work faster, better and suicidal-thoughts free.

Some more facts from my experience of the past months comparing Kdenlive
and Olive:

Kdenlive is compositng in a single CPU thread (possibly in multiple if you
odn't use any effects - so let's ignore that), while my Ryzen 7 1700 CPU is
at 10% load, and my Nvidia GTX 1060 GPU is completely idle.
When I render vidoes with Olive, my CPU is at 60-70% with all threads
active, and my GPU is at 30-40% load.

When I work with Olive - I can finally see in realtime what I'm doing, with
proper compositing, even without using Proxy.
In Kdenlive if I use 2-3 layers at a time and a few transporm effects I'm
down to 3 FPS and I'm guessing what the video will look like. And I use
proxy in Kdenlive or it's down to 1FPS.

Olive (in alpha stage) has solid crash recovery (I never lost any work from
a crash yet) and crashes about 5-8 times less than Kdenlive 18 on my system.
I've been begging for crash recover in Kdenlive to be implemented, and I
had to give up my parallel rendering script when it was added, because that
broke.

Yes, I've coded an external tool to help me render Kdenlive projects
faster. but a new version of Kdnelive changed something and I couldn't get
it to work evr again.
Still - loosing 30 minutes of work is worse than rendering a video all
night, so I've picked my poison.

I hoped that maybe this will be implemented in Kdenlive itself at some
point:
https://github.com/unfa/kdenlive-multirender

Now I don't need to hack together stuff like that because Olive just
utilizes my hardware. It renders my projects in near-realitime.

I have nothing but love for you guys. The frustration is only for the
issues I experienced and how they made my work needlessly painful.
Experience working on my last Kdenlvie video made me consider using some
proprietary software - for the first time in my life.
That's how bad that experience was. And I know I've checked all the other
open-source NLAs too already. They are all like this. Stuck in the 90s.
Only Olive isn't.

I also felt I need to share my perspective publicly (in that rant video),
because many people regard Kdenlive as "open-source state of the art NLA"
and that's just not true and (in my opinion) very harmful to the image of
what the open-source commnity can create.

I saw The Linux Gamer and Wendell benchmark Kdenlive once on some insane
hardware with multiple GPUs and I was grinding my teeth - because Kdenlive
can't use that hardware at all and there's no point even having a GPU for
Kdenlive.

Please forgive me if I have hurt you with this e-mail. That was not my
intention.
I wanted to share this, becasue I hope you can benefit from my story.

I wish you all the best,
- unfa
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