Episode: 1950
Title: HPR1950: Kdenlive Part 2: Advanced Editing Technique
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1950/hpr1950.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 11:45:11

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This is HPR Episode 1950 entitled, K-Men Live Part 2, Advanced Editing Technique.
It is hosted by Gens and in about 18 minutes long.
The summer is, we discuss Advanced Editing Techniques and review the tools you'll be using
on a video editor.
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Hello again HPR listeners, this is Geddes, but with Part 2 in the series covering the video
edited in application K-DN Live.
This time in Part 1 we looked at installing, first launch, your workspace, importing footage,
3.editing and lastly the basic tools.
This time round we'll be looking at Advanced Editing Technique and Part 2 covers the following
topics.
A brief history of the editing workflow, editing in the timeline, audio splits and grouping
clips, basic navigation in the timeline and that's rounded up by notes on video formats
so let's jump into Part 2.
In the previous article in this series we reviewed the different methods of importing
footage into K-DN Live and best practices in organising project files and the layout
and tools provided by K-DN Live.
In this article we will discuss Advanced Editing Technique and review most of the tools
you'll be using on a day-to-day basis as a video editor.
A brief history of the editing workflow.
The initial edit of a movie is called Ruff Assembly and it literally consists of each
take of each scene from action to cut lined up in a row and timeline, inscripted order
one after the other.
The Ruff Assembly might last for hours and is really just a good way to review all the
footage available.
After this basic edit a new cut is created and it is called simply the first cut.
It's usually based around the master shot, a wide shot that encompasses all of the action
of the scene as it appears in the screenplay.
Close ups, two shots and cutaways are then added to a higher video track so that the end
result is one continuous scene within search shots of more detailed actions and reactions.
This edit is revised into a second cut and the process continues from first cut to the
editor's cut, a director's cut and the producers or final cut.
This model might not be imposed on you depending on your industry but its logic then applies
and can help you organise the sometimes monumental task of making hours upon hours of footage
into presentable content that people will appreciate sitting through.
The Ruff Assembly is often done as described in the previous article.
Add a clip to the project tree, load the clip into the clip monitor, mark an in and
out point and then add the clip to the timeline, rinse and repeat.
This same technique may be used for the first cut but after that many people find it
in practical to work out of the clip monitor and choose instead to refine their edits in
the timeline directly, editing in the timeline.
After your shots are all lined up in the timeline you'll find the need to adjust their
in and out points.
This can be done in three different ways.
The best way to refine an edit point of a clip in KDN Live is to place your playhead
on the frame you wish to cut in or out on.
For instance if a character is blinking in their close up just before you cut away from
them but the next shot has their eyes wide open then you'll probably want to trim off
a few frames before you cut, that is you'll cut out earlier such that their eyes are open
before and after the cut, it's basic continuity.
Place your playhead on a frame where the characters eyes are open and then make sure
that snapping is on.
Timeline menu, snapping, snapping like any graphic program causes edges of objects to magnetically
pull towards one another.
Everything is a feature that you find yourself turning on and off very frequently, I generally
assign it a handy keyboard shortcut.
I use the completely arbitrary control D, simply because I find that my left hand is always
on the keyboard as I edit with the mouse in my right hand.
But you can choose anything, the end case seems a popular choice with graphic apps and
other video editors, but that's never seen convenient to me.
In the shortcut, by going to the settings menu can figure shortcuts.
With the select tool, roll over the nearest edge of the video region.
It should highlight itself with a flashing green arrow.
Click and drag this video region to the left and you've just adjusted the output for
your edit with frame precision.
A more efficient variation on this is to place the playhead on a frame and then you shift
R to place a splice in the region, then select the access footage and delete it as desired.
One more step toward maximum efficiency is doing the same action with two clicks and one
keyboard press only.
Position the playhead on the frame, select the clip and hit the one key on your keyboard
and the end point of that clip will be sent to the position of the playhead.
Alternatively, you can hit two for the out point to be repositioned at the playhead.
It's a very convenient and fast way to adjust the ends of your clips and it is one of my
favourite features in KDN Live.
If it's not frame precision that you need, you can opt to use the Razer tool, which
currently does not respect snapping.
This makes the Razer tool good for initial cutting.
When you know that you like a shot but need it to be more or less half as long, grab
the Razer tool and click on the video region at the point you wish to splice.
A splice mark should appear and new thumbnails will be generated on the video region to demonstrate
that it has been divided into two sections.
The final way of adjusting the length of a video region is precise but in elegant.
If you double click on a video region you'll get a pop-up dialog box and land you to
modify the clips position in the timeline, the clips in an out points and so on.
Not only should you not require a dialog box for this action, there is also no way to
quickly input the new values.
You must select each portion of the SMPTE timecode, type in the new values, move to the next
field and so on.
If you absolutely need to cut off for instance six frames from the beginning of a clip, then
this might be a nice and exact way to do that.
But aside from that, it's in practical and clunky.
Keep in mind that the workspace resolution counts a lot when seeking frame precision.
If you're zoomed out from your timeline so far that it is only able to account for
every ten frames or so, then any tool is going to snap to the nearest tenth frame.
When you're so deep into your edit that every frame counts, zoom in on the region you're
about to cut and make sure you're cutting on the frame you think you're cutting on.
Audio splits and grouping clips.
Since most modern video devices also incidentally capture sound, most of the video clips you
import into a project will have an audio stream in them.
By default, KDN Live displays this audio stream as part of the video stream.
You'll see a video region with its thumbnails overlaid with thumbnail representations of
the audio stream's sound waves.
If you've recorded to a separate audio device, you can keep the audio embedded in the video
as a reference sound and you can turn it off by clicking the mute track button in the
track label on the left.
If this is your primary audio track on the other hand, you might want to separate it
from the video region so that you can manipulate it separately.
To do this, you can do one of two things.
1.
Right-click on the video region and select Split Audio.
2.
Set this as a default action by clicking the separate audio and video automatically button
on the lower right of the bottom timeline control panel.
After you split the audio from the video region, you have regions on two tracks now.
A video track and an audio track.
The two regions are grouped together, indicated by yellow clip colour with blue space spanning
any extra tracks between them.
This means that if you shorten on length and one, then the other will also be shortened
or lengthened.
If you move one, the other moves and so on.
Sometimes that's exactly what you want, other times you want to manipulate them separately.
A classic example would be when doing the classic over the shoulder conversation scene.
A close-up of one character, intercut with the close-up coverage of the other.
On each character's close-up, you want to use the audio associated with that clip.
But if at one point you want to do an insert shot of a character's silent reaction, then
you wouldn't want to cut their audio track, but allow the other character to continue
talking off-screen even though the focus is on the silent character.
For this two work, you'll need to ungroup the clips.
You can do this by right-clicking on the clip and selecting ungroup, or using the keyboard
shortcut control shift G.
This removes the invisible link between the audio and video, allowing you to, for example,
cut and remove a piece of the video without affecting the audio.
You can always group clips together by selecting clips.
Use the select tool while holding down the control key to add to your selection, and
right-click on them or use control G to choose group clips.
Basic navigation in the timeline.
If you're spending your weeks in the timeline, you'll want to know a more efficient way
of navigating it.
There are all the usual video editing conventions in KDIN life, or be it in some variation
in keyboard assignments.
The now classic Anubikriter's J-K-L keyboard sequence is also present in KDIN life.
To play your timeline, you may press L once for standard speed, twice for double speed,
three times for triple speed, K stops playback, press J for reverse playback, double J for
double speed reverse, and triple J for triple speed reverse.
You can also move by frame or by second.
The left or right arrow will advanced or rewind by one frame.
Shift left arrow or shift right arrow will move forward or back by one second.
To move your playhead to the beginning of a video region, use the home key for the end
of a region use end.
To move along the timeline by splices, use alt left arrow or alt right arrow.
And finally, you can jump to the beginning or end of the timeline with control home or
control end.
By using these navigational tools, you'll find that for very long stretches of video
editing, you won't need to bother with your mouse, which, as any unique school knows,
is the real key to efficiency.
It's on video formats.
Video editing is a fairly intensive process, so for best results, you'll want to have
a nice, powerful video editing computer with plenty of CPU cores, plenty of RAM and a
nice GPU with a robust and reliable video driver.
That said, it is possible to edit on even a modest laptop, mostly depending on what
kind of footage you're trying to edit, regardless of what you're editing, consider
the format of the video you're using.
If you've just imported a maxed video file, then more than likely, you'll want to
transcode it for editing.
My main workstation at the studio where I work can easily handle HD footage, yet I continually
run into started playback when I import maxed footage.
If I transcode it to a high quality lossless Matraska file or to something similar, I can
edit it smoothly and quickly.
The opposite end of the spectrum sometimes has the same issues in an old way.
Some smartphones and portable devices record video in such a highly compressed format that
KDN Live is forced to spend too much energy decoding it to something that can be played
back at a normal frame rate.
I avoid this the same way, transcoding early in the project's life, and leaving the
HD compressed or maxed footage as backup source files.
To do this, go to the file menu and select transcode clips.
Select the clip you want to transcode.
Choose what profile you wish to transcode into.
Lossless Matraska is quite nice, although depending on the source footage it may be overkill.
Make sure the add to project box is checked, and then commence with transcoding.
Note that for transcoding purposes, an FFMP command is provided.
If you have hours and hours of transcoding to do, feel free to steal the FFMP command and
do the transcoding as a bash script in the terminal.
For example, to transcode a folder of .mtsmuxedvideo to something more easily managed by KDN Live,
open a terminal and navigate to the folder containing the source files.
You may wish to issue your command as $4i in asterif.mts colon, do $ sign, open brackets,
FFMP paste the KDN Live command here, close brackets, done.
This will cycle through each MTS file in the directory, run it through the FFMP command
and save it in the same directory without affecting the original file.
To safeguard against even accidental file clobbering, you could establish a folder called transcode
and make sure that the final argument in the KDN Live FFMP script is .4dslash, transcode,
4dslash, %1.mov, rather than its default of just %1.mov.
What code you use when transcoding will depend on the project and its intended destination?
If you require full quality for maximum output potential, then you should probably transcode
to lossless mattresscap.
If you are full confident that the video is testing for a limited distribution at a fixed
maximum resolution, you might choose to transcode to DN times HD 720p or whatever resolution
would be appropriate for the destination.
Never transcode to something that will lose information before you edit.
Leave that for the final render and compression.
To further reduce strain on the computer system, KDN Live has a built-in proxy or offline
in traditional editing terminology system, but I have found it unreliable so far.
In theory, you should be able to establish proxy clips by enabling proxies in the project
settings, and then by right-clicking on the clip in the project tree and setting it
to generate and use a proxy.
Unfortunately, the proxy generation has crashed every time I've tried it, so I've been
unable to utilize this feature as yet.
Keep in mind that whatever footage you place in your timeline is occupying RAM.
If you attempt to edit a 1-track 30-minute project, then you'll find your computer provided
it can handle the video format itself, will perform quite well.
Start adding new tracks, compositing 2 hours of footage at a time, and your computer will
start to feel like it's working harder.
Keep this in mind when constructing your projects, don't hesitate to split the very complex project
into separate KDN Live project files, and edit on a scene by scene basis until you are
ready to string your project together into a complete piece.
This technique will be detailed in the final article of the series.
Conclusion KDN Live editing tools provide functional and efficient
editing options, as well as flexibility to suit your individual work style.
Feel free to modify and customize your environment as much as you want, and try out the different
tools to see what provides you with the most precise and satisfactory results.
And that's the end of KDN Live Part 2.
This has been Gettys for Hacker Public Radio, and I hope you'll listen again to Part 3.
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