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

Sun May 12 18:44:42 BST 2019

Hi,

I take this opportunity to give you my personal feedback about Kdenlive
vs Olive as I have been using Kdenlive professionally for the last 3
years and I have also tried Olive recently.

I have also been pretty much impressed by Olive, especially the GPU
features that make a smooth experience with almost every filter and
every transition. I believe that Olive is pretty promising, and I am
watching its evolution closely, but it is still not matching my
requirements in term of stability and features, especially in term of
color grading.

Kdenive, however, has been improving so much in the past 3 years and is
now pretty close to match all my requirements.

It is not using GPU rendering but its proxy and preview features are so
convenient that it makes any processing intensive editing never be an
issue. It has almost no limit in that regard, not even the limit of my
GPU capacities.

I would also add that scrubbing is always very smooth for me on
Kdenlive, while it is not yet on Olive (this is a must have for me).

Also, the color grading in Kdenlive is a real pleasure. I do an intense
use of blending modes as well as a few filters like saturation and
levels. I also use the Waveforme and Vectorscope graphs that work
perfectly on Kdenlive.

One thing that was really missing in Kdenlive is the ability to port my
timeline to Ardour, but I have done a python script to achieve that, as
part of my latest project, and I am going to share that as free software.

Here is my latest work (I am making a behind the scene video to show my
workflow) :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0a03NRpX3Y

I have mainly used Kdenlive for that video. It seems pretty simple
because there is no visual effects nor crazy transitions but believe me
the work I have done on the color is pretty advanced and process intensive.

So my conclusion is that while Olive is very promising, Kdenlive remains
a lot more suited to my professional workflow.

Cheers,

François

On 11/05/2019 17:27, Tobiasz Karoń wrote:
> 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