Rendering does not use full CPU

Tue Sep 24 12:46:54 BST 2019

Well, maybe DogFilm didn't express his opinion in a polite manner...

But must say I agree with his point.

Kdenlive is a wonderful tool, and when it works - it's capable of many
great things. But I wound never call it professional, because that brings a
whole new level of expectations, which Kdenlive currently cannot fulfill.

There's a lot of problems with Kdenlive. Performance is one of them. A
wonton soup of effects spread across 3 (!) different categories - two
different ways of doing keyframing and one which doesn't allow it at all.
Effects such a transform that can visibly shift your color balance when you
start zooming in (yes), strictly 8-bit pipeline which is very limiting is
some cases, Effects that are fundamentally broken (UV Map is useless in the
8-bit color pipeline, because you can only address 256x256 pixels - it'd be
better to remove that effect). GPU and even multi-threaded rendering which
is flaky and tend to break stuff. There's also like 5 different effects
that do the same thing - image transform. You can never be sure which one
will work ore which to use. Why not have just one that works all the time?
Audio dropouts and randomly messed up timing with each render (yes!) and
much much more.

Kdenlive can't utilize a modern PC's hardware - no matter what you throw at
it - 4 Titans, Threadripper and 128 GB of RAM - it'll be no faster than on
a Core Duo and integrated graphics and 8 GB of RAM. It can't play back
smooth 1080p video even when no effects are used. That's not what you'd
expect from a professional video editing software in 2019.

I don't say that Kdenlive is useless, but I think it's certainly not a good
idea to call it "professional" - because that is simply misleading, creates
unrealistic expectations, and sets the user for a disapointment - and can
potentially scare them away from using any libre software in the future.

Olive has much less features, but what is there is clean, well
thought-through and works every time (unless you hit a bug - it's alpha
software). Kdenlive is called stable, yet has many redundant or downrigth
broken features, many of which are flaky. I prefer the Olive's approach -
and I do recommend it to people as the best available libre NLA at this
point - but it's not perfect. Though it's "professional" tagline on the
website is misleading just in the same way and they should change it.

I don't think it's a good idea to bash the software or it's developers -
many use Kdenlive and are happy with it, it's making progress and has done
a lot of work to fix the problems, but it's not there yet.

I wish it all the best, but I would not recommend it in it's current state
to anyone who cares about the quaility of their work, because it'll degrade
with complexity and provide them with a lot of frustration.
If they don't care at all about quality - no problem, Kdenlive is fine.

I don't want to make anyone sad, I just don't want people to be delusional
about Kdenlive.

- unfa

wt., 24 wrz 2019 o 12:51 Martin Moores <moores.martin at gmail.com> napisał(a):

> I'm sure the list will appreciate this being your last post
>
> How rude, insulting and thoughtless your comments are here.
>
> Feedback is one thing, which I have no doubt is appreciated, but your
> messages are not helpful at all.
>
> As you have found, there are other options out there, great if they work
> for you, go and champion and recommend them to others.  I just hope their
> mailing lists are ready for you when you find the next problem.
>
> Free software is just that at the end of the day, you seem to have higher
> expectations.  There are endless commercial options, with paid support,
> where you may be better suited
>
> On Tue, 24 Sep 2019 at 11:41, DogFilm <videobrain at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Thank you very much for having the guts of speaking freely about these
>> things!
>>
>> It is in fact very needed that developers are not only open, but thankful
>> for negative feedback, because these users are the only ones helping you to
>> make your software better! Clueless noobs that never have seen a pro
>> editing desk but praising kdenlive as "professional" are the problem, not
>> people pointing out the problems!
>>
>> If I had the time I could add several hours of Kdenlive pain videos to
>> your collection, however I need to keep constructive and have enough things
>> to do, even if it would be fun...
>>
>> I think the most important message is to warn creative people not to
>> waste their time - this is needed as a contrast as long as anybody is using
>> the word "professional" to describe kdenlive. Not because of hate against
>> bad software, but out of compassion for fellow video editors that might
>> lose a lot of time.
>>
>> It must be warned very strongly to not use this software in any
>> professional context!
>>
>> I had another test session this weekend with Kdenlive and it was a
>> horrible experience.
>> I felt that this must be kind of a joke software.
>> I think it was finally my last session with Kdenlive.
>> I feel very stupid to have wasted time again with this.
>>
>> Olive looks great, hopefully these guys will be successful!
>>
>> Good Luck!
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 23, 2019 at 8:49 PM Tobiasz Karoń <unfa00 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I don't want to go on another rant here, but I've made a whole video
>>> about why Kdenlvie is "not very good" at this point:
>>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym1brc2OcYQ
>>>
>>> Frei0r effects force single-core frame processing. And I used a lot of
>>> them.
>>> GPU acceleration is flaky and never did anything more than crashing for
>>> me. But some claim it works for them.
>>>
>>> Have you tried Olive? It does all frame processing on the GPU - it's not
>>> "optional" is the basis. It's snappy!
>>>
>>> I think Kdenlive would need to replace it's compositing engine with an
>>> OpenGL-based one to get decent speed - but that's no small task.
>>>
>>> Granted - I haven't really tested the 19.x branch too much, so thinks
>>> might be better, but I've heard stability suffered a lot - which is to be
>>> expected after a major core rewrite.
>>> It's all growing pains I guess.
>>>
>>> I hope Kdenlive's gonna come out of this stronger and better :)
>>>
>>> pon., 23 wrz 2019 o 19:29 jdd at dodin.org <jdd at dodin.org> napisał(a):
>>>
>>>> Le 23/09/2019 à 19:23, DogFilm a écrit :
>>>> > Rendering a clip does not use 100% of CPU.
>>>> >
>>>> > If I render stuff with ffmpeg directly (nothing to do with kdenlive)
>>>> > ffmpeg uses all cores with 100% cpu load. Kdenlive is about 50% for
>>>> each
>>>> > core.  So render time could probably be doubled.
>>>> >
>>>> > Yes, "Render Project" dialog was set to "Parallel Processing".
>>>> >
>>>> yes. I don't know the technical under the hood, but kdenlive is
>>>> desperately slow.
>>>>
>>>> avidemux3 is very fast for simple tasks, DaVinci Resolve seems to be
>>>> also very fast, but I don't know it really (and of course it's not open
>>>> source, it's only free like a free beer :-()
>>>>
>>>> jdd
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> http://dodin.org
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> - Tobiasz 'unfa' Karoń
>>>
>>> www.youtube.com/unfa000
>>>
>>

-- 
- Tobiasz 'unfa' Karoń

www.youtube.com/unfa000
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kdenlive/attachments/20190924/5d2c8cfa/attachment-0001.html>