Episode: 1925
Title: HPR1925: Kdenlive Part 1: Introduction to Kdenlive
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1925/hpr1925.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 11:13:40

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This is HPR episode 1925 entitled, K then Live Part 1, Introduction to K then Live.
It is hosted by Gens and is about 18 minutes long.
The summary is, Gens narrates the first part on Seth Kenlon's Unintroduction to K then Live.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Anastos.com.
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Hello HPR listeners, I'm Gedis and I'm back again with another audio voiceover recording
of some creative commons material.
This time I'll be covering a series of six articles on the video editing application
K then Live.
These articles are the work of Seth Kenlon and as expected, Seth has agreed to them being
narrated as HPR episodes.
You can find them on the OpenSource.com website where Seth has been a regular contributor
of articles from around 2011 to the present day.
He described as an independent multimedia artist, free culture advocate and Unix Geek.
He's also one of the maintainers of the Slackware based multimedia production project, Slack
Media.
The KDN Live series was written in 2011, so the only things I'd like to point out, particularly
in this first article, is that references to any installation issues are probably no
longer applicable and version numbers stated would have of course moved on.
Everything else of course is still current and correct.
So here we go with the KDN Live Part 1 introduction to KDN Live.
The new Slash Linux has infamously been waiting for a good, solid, professional level, free
video editor for years.
There have been glimpses of hope here and there, but mostly the editors that have had the
look and feel of a professional application are prone to blockbuster worthy crashes and
those that have been stable have mostly been stable because they don't actually do
anything beyond very basic video editing.
KDN Live changes all of that.
At the Film Production Facility at which I work, KDN Live is the Linux editor in production
use and it performs and frequently outperforms the Mac Box is in cost, upkeep, flexibility, speed
and stability.
This article series seeks to illuminate for professional editors how KDN Live can replace
the proprietary tools nearly as a drop-in replacement.
A good video editor is one that is suitable for anyone wanting to edit video, with powerful
features that enable the video professional to do any task required of the job, yet with
the simplicity that allows a hobbyist to quickly cut together footage of a phone or a point
and click camera.
KDN Live can be both of those things, but regardless of the scope of your video project, there
are right and wrong ways of doing things.
Over the course of five articles, we will review the practical usage and the common set of
best practices that will ensure that your projects are successful.
Installing KDN Live is a complex install, no question about it.
It requires the MLT backend to deal with multimedia and for maximum compatibility with all possible
video codecs, it wants as many video decoding and encoding libraries that you can possibly
throw at it.
The easiest fix obviously is to simply use the KDN Live version provided by your repository.
The Watershed release for KDN Live in terms of stability and feature completeness was
the O.8 release.
All major distributions currently provide O.8 or above in their official repositories,
their official unofficial add-on repos or built services like Slack Bills, AUR etc.
First launch.
During the first launch, KDN Live will perform checks to discover what video codecs and
sources it has available to it.
You'll be given the chance to rectify anything you may have neglected to install.
The usual advice about troubleshooting applies.
Last month, while setting up the Fedora 15 editing workstation, there was an error with
the MLT-SDL module causing the new install of KDN Live not to launch.
A quick internet search for the issue provided the solution and we were up and running in
no time.
You'll also be asked to create a default KDN Live project folder.
This isn't anything you'll be locked into later and in fact, it's often best to separate
projects through distinct directories, but choosing a same default ensures that you
don't inadvertently dump important project files into a random folder without realizing
it.
Your workspace.
KDN Live uses Qt4 for its interface, so customization is easy.
It's pretty common for video editors to use a darkened theme to emphasize the video
rather than distract the eye with a bright glowing interface.
Also, the dark theme helps during color correction.
To change the theme of KDN Live, use settings menu themes.
The available themes come from the available KD-4 themes, which you'll find in your
system settings.
Since I'm often editing late into the night, I use the default theme during most of the
edit.
I find the light from the monitor precludes me from having to turn on a deslamp and still
prevents me from blindly knocking over my coffee.
During color correction, the bright theme is distracting.
Good neutral themes for color work are Obsidian Coast and Wanton Soup.
You'll probably want to use KDN Live in full screen mode.
A near-keyos mode is available by right-clicking on the Windows title bar and selecting full screen,
but within its main window there are several different components.
These sections can be popped out of the main window, tabbed, rearranged and floated.
All available components of KDN Live's visual workspace can be seen via its view menu.
The layout of KDN Live is up to you and your own workstyle.
You can choose to emulate the default layout of whatever video editor you might be used to,
or you may find the layout that works better for you.
Once you've created one that you like, you can save it via view menu save layout as.
A typical layout will have at least these panels.
The project tree, otherwise known as the bin or clip browser in other video editors.
The clip monitor, a place to preview raw footage before committing it to the final edit.
The project monitor, a place to watch your edited footage.
The timeline, the destination of all selected clips you use in your project.
We'll review what each of these panels is used for and how to use them, but first let's
import some footage.
Importing footage.
Before importing footage, you should save your project.
This may seem strange given that your project is currently empty, but given your workspace
and name and location on your hard drive, will establish the default skeletal structure
for all KDN Live projects.
KDN Live like most professional grade editors generates lots of cache files and metadata.
Starting your work without determining a place for all those temporary files to go, simply
means that you'll be dumping temp files into your default KDN Live directory and then
abandon them once you save.
Save your test project in its own sub directory.
I generally keep my KDN Live project directories in a forward slash KDN Live directory, with
the default location being its own sub directory called forward slash KDN Live forward slash default.
This tends to work quite well and lends itself to being able to offload all projects into
backup drives without worrying about whether or not that project is actually self-contained
or whether I need to search through files to locate dependent media.
Keeping the project self-contained, even if it means replicating media, is quite liberating
and should be used unless you are working in an infrastructure with stores of shared media
that don't need to be saved along with your project data.
Any standard path for your projects is also helpful in the event that you need to migrate
projects from one system to another.
If the file paths are always forward slash KDN Live forward slash project dash name, then
KDN Live losing track of media files is less likely.
The path for your default KDN Live project folder can always be changed via project menu,
project settings, project folder.
Now that you've saved your project, you can import footage.
There are several ways to do this and KDN Live can handle them all.
Since most cameras record to solid state media now, import in footage often consists of
little more than putting your camera into USB storage mode, plug it into your computer
and dragging and drop in the camera's directory into your KDN Live project folder.
Note that carrying over the entire directory tree is essential.
Since many cameras use complex, marked formats that require metadata about the clips in
order to actually play the clips, do not just drag over the streams or clips folder.
Once you've copied the footage to your hard drive, you can add those clips to your KDN
Live project via project menu, add clip, or by right-clicking on the project tree and
selecting add clip, you may be notified by KDN Live that the current project setting
is not the same as the footage that you've just imported.
This is telling you that your project setting has defaulted to, for instance, DV, NTSC,
but that you've just imported CIF-sized clips.
If this is the case, then you should accept KDN Live's offer to change your project profile
to match your clips.
It's best to edit in a native environment and perform any Tranks coding only when exporting,
so regardless of what you actually intend to create, you should try to edit in the format
you shot, or else Tranks code up, open brackets, a topic will cover in more detail in article
file of this series of close brackets.
Otherwise, you'll be capturing footage from some external source, like a tape-based camera
or even a theory a webcam.
All of these options are accessible via the View menu Record Monitor.
The Record Monitor is a robust video capture front end.
It currently defaults to Firewire and will warn you if DV Grab is not installed on your
system.
But don't panic, you can change this.
Click the wrench icon to configure what back end Record Monitor attempts to use.
The Configuration menu for Record Monitor should give you a choice between Firewire in
brackets DV Grab, Video for Linux in brackets USB and accordingly building webcams on laptops,
screen grab in brackets via Record My Desktop and even third party capture cards.
Choose the appropriate back end.
Once you've set the default capture device, return to the Record Monitor and select from
the pop-up menu on the lower right, the back end you'd like to use.
You may need to click the Connect button on the left of the Record Monitor in order to bring
the capture device online.
Finally, press the Play button to preview the external video and record to save it to
your hard drive.
3.Editing The editing process was invented and refined
more than a hundred years ago and is still just as applicable as ever.
The first of these editing principles that we have inherited from men and women dealing
with hundreds of feet of ceilaloid film is the 3.edit.
To perform a basic edit on your footage, click on a clip in your project tree.
It appears in the clip monitor for you to preview.
This is aching to a film editor, taking a stripper film from the film bin and running it
through a Movola, a small hand-cranked personal film projector.
Once you've played the clip past the introductory footage, actors getting ready for their shot,
the clapboard or slate and so on, set an in point for that clip by hitting the i key
on your keyboard.
Allow the clips to continue playing until you find the end of the action you want to
use in the clip.
Mark out with the o key on your keyboard.
You've just set the first two points in your 3.edit.
The third point is where in your timeline the clip should appear.
If this is your first clip in your movie, then probably the logical place for it would
be 0000000IE, the very beginning of your timeline.
To do this quickly, press V, which will drop the video between the in and out points of
your clip into the selected video track of your timeline.
By default, this will be video track 1, but you can select a different one by clicking
on the track label on the left of the timeline.
On many other video editors, the video playhead in the timeline determines where the clip
is dropped.
In KDN Live, you get a dedicated target tool for this purpose, meaning that you needn't
move your playhead from its parked position just to drop in a new clip.
The target tool appears as a small white box in the top of the SMPTE ruler bar of the
timeline.
You can also do a drag and drop add by grabbing the video thumbnail from the clip monitor and
dragging it down to the timeline.
The basic tools.
There are 3 basic tools in KDN Live.
The select tool, the razor tool and the spacer tool.
This is a fairly standard albeit basic tool set.
There's no ripple tool, edit tool, or any of the power user tools that some editors
might have become accustomed to on other editing systems, but I've found that adapting
to the simplified tool set is almost natural.
For the amount of use most of the specialized tools actually get, it's probably difficult
to justify maintaining the associated code.
I noticed the lack of some specialized editing tools when I first launched KDN Live, but
in practice, haven't even noticed them missing.
The select tool is exactly what you'd expect.
Click to select a clip, drag to move a clip.
Use it for related tasks as well, such as selecting the active track, creating guides and
markers, extending or shorten in video clips in the timeline, control clicking to select
multiple clips at once and so on.
The razor tool creates slices in a video region in the timeline.
In theory, this isn't really a necessary tool, since you can always just use the select
tool to shorten a video clip manually, but in practice, it's nice to be able to target
a point at which you wish to cut out or in, make a slice and then delete the excess footage.
If you shorten a clip with the razor tool and delete the excess footage that you've
just sliced off, you will be left with a gap between your new outpoint and the beginning
of the next clip in the timeline.
To get rid of this empty space, you can right-click on it and select Remove Space.
Note that you need to remove space on both the video track and audio track if you're
using separate audio.
Rather than using the Remove Space function, you could manually move the video and audio
regions over using the space tool.
This tool simply selects everything to the right of where you click.
IE, it selects all video and audio regions in the future and allows you to either move
them to the left or right in your timeline.
It's a common task, although unfortunately, the space tool is quite rigid in how it
selects.
It will select and move every media region on every track.
Did you ever decide that you want to select all regions on, for instance, only one track?
Then you'll need to either lock all other tracks or you'll need to zoom out and just use
your select tool to manually select the regions you want to grab.
Conclusion
KDN Life excels at a very difficult task, importing media from a myriad of different sources,
organising them into projects and allowing them to be manipulated in a variety of ways.
This uses a friendly, powerful, simple and yet capable of so much.
It is easily a drop-in replacement for industry-standard video editors, as usual continue to discover
in the fourth comment articles in this series.
And that's the end of KDN Life Part 1 introduction to KDN Life.
See you for part 2.
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