Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Why Kdenlive? Well, I’ve tried most of the video editing applications in Linux, and Kdenlive is, in my opinion, the most full-featured of them all. Yes, it’s (technically) a KDE application, but it will run equally well in any non-KDE *buntu. Since it now uses more modern compilation methods, Kdenlive won’t pull in a huge pile of KDE libraries. Yes, it’ll pull some. But nowhere near as many as it used to!
Anyway, in this series of articles, we’ll start from the basics and work our way up to the more complicated stuff. I’m no video editing master, so this won’t show every facet of Kdenlive, but I’ll show you everything I know, and use.
Install
You may already have Kdenlive in your package manager. Have a look. If not, you can add a PPA and install Kdenlive with these commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kdenlive/kdenlive-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install kdenlive
That will add the PPA, update your sources, then install Kdenlive.
NOTE: As of writing this article (Jan 2017), I’m using 16.08.2. There is, for me, a bug in Kdenlive that if I render a video of about an hour I get a crash error message at the end of the render, referencing the melt library. If you also get this, don’t worry. The video is rendered and it will work just fine.
Layout
For this first part of the series, let’s look at the layout of Kdenlive. Obviously when you load up Kdenlive, it’ll be mostly blank. I’ve added a couple of pieces to show how it looks ‘in action’.
1. This is where you add the audio and video that you’ll need for this edit. I’ve added one video file (shown with thumbnail) and one audio file (shown with a musical note icon). 2. This is the properties window for whatever is currently selected. In this case the video portion shown in section 6 with the red outline. Note the two tabs at the bottom to switch between effects and video properties. 3. The list shows the transitions and effects that are available (via, again, the two tabs at the bottom of the window):
a. Transitions are used when two audios/videos overlap (more on this in later parts), and b. Effects change the audio/video. c. You can filter this list using the icons at the top of this window.
4. This is your preview window for whatever is selected. Select a video in section 1 and you can play it here to see it as it currently is. Select a time in the timeline (section 5) and you’ll get a preview of your edit(s). 5. This is your timeline showing three video lines, and two audio lines. You have icons there to lock/unlock the line, enable/disable audio, and (in video lines only) enable/disable video. Above the lines are icons for cutting and splicing, but more on them in later articles. 6. This is where you’ll do all the fancy stuff. Notice that one video is on line 1 and one is on line 2, and there’s an overlap. See the yellow box on the overlap? That’s a transition. See the pink triangle at the end of the video on line 2? That’s a fade-out effect. The fade-out can be altered using the properties in section 2. Audio is on a separate line and is edited in a similar manner. 7. This is the right-click menu when you right-click over an audio/video segment. I’ve shown it separate from them just to keep things clearer. This lets you right-click an audio/video segment and quickly assign an effect/transition to it, copy/paste, add markers, and so on.
Quick Example
Let’s finish this first part with a quick example. Let’s say you wanted to replace all the audio in a video with audio you have (maybe a voiceover, or music). You’d drag your audio and video pieces to the top left window. Drag your video to video line 1, and your audio to audio line 1. Click the icon to disable the audio in the video line 1. Want a nice fade out to the final video? Right-click the video line 1 and choose add effect > fade > fade to black. Right-click the audio line 1 and right-click. Choose add effect > fade > fade out. Done! You’d have something like that shown in the image.
See? It’s not that difficult after all.
In the next part of this series, we’ll look at cutting, and throw in some overlaps and transitions.