hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2080.txt

Episode: 2080
Title: HPR2080: Kdenlive Part 3: Effects and Transitions
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2080/hpr2080.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:03:03

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This is HPR episode 2008 entitled KVN Live Part 3, Effect and Transition.
It is posted again and in about 14 minutes long.
The summary is using Effect and Transition in KVN Live.
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Hello again Hacker Public Radio listeners, this is Gedis and I'm back again with Part 3 of Decadian Live video series.
This part looks at Effects and Transitions.
The topics include layout modes, fades, dissolves, slides and wipes, chroma key or more commonly known as green screen,
composited images and slides.
For the audio files out there who may be listening, just want to tell you that you may notice a slight increase in the voice quality because I'm using my audio technica AT2020 condenser microphone
doing a bit of experiment with that.
Anyway, here we go, so let's dive in.
It is expected that even the most modest video editor will feature a set of basic video transitions.
The challenge is to offer critical effects without becoming bloated and unfocused in scope.
Cardian Live manages to offer the most commonly required effects with all the standard options without sacrificing stability or quality.
The famous first words of every screen player fade in and in a way that is the most commonly used effect of all.
The classic fade would normally be considered a transition, but Incadian Live a transition is a visually effect that requires two video regions to function, while an effect works on a single region.
This is an important distinction to bear in mind since the terms are laden with preconceived interpretation.
Layout modes.
First, configure your layout covered in the first article of this series to have the effect stack and transition panel readily accessible.
To do this, go to the view menu and select effect stack and then transition.
This introduces two new panels into your Cardian Live interface.
If your interface now looks crowded, you can use tabs.
Since effects and transitions are applied to clips in the timeline, you'll never use your clip monitor which views clips in the project tree and the effect stack or transition panel which operates on clips in the project monitor timeline at the same time.
You can make the effect stack and transition panel a tab of the clip monitor panel by dragging the effect stack panel onto your clip monitor.
This is now available in a tabed view located at the bottom of the panel.
Do the same for the transition panel.
Fades.
To apply a fade effect, right click on the video region you wish to affect.
Select Add effect, fade, fade to black, and a fade to black transition will be applied to the end of the clip.
Scrub through the video by clicking along the timeline's SMPTE ruler bar or play pressing the space bar to see the effect.
Once you've applied a fade, you can modify its duration.
By either using the duration slider in the effect stack or you can click and drag the corner of the red fade indicator that appears on the video region.
Note that fade in and fade out in brackets not to black effects or audio effects not video effects.
It's easy to get them mixed up and you'll spend an hour wondering why your fades aren't working.
Armed with just these two simple effects, you'll most likely have all the functionality expected from a typical video editing application.
But for those peculiar clients and users who want more interesting visuals, KDN Live features quite a bit more.
Dissolves.
A dissolve is like a fade except that they do not fade to black but to another clip.
This then is a transition and requires two clips in order to function.
To use it, place one clip on video track 3, open brackets, the bottom as video track on default KDN Live setup close brackets and another on video track 2.
Overlapped the end of track 2 over the beginning of track 3, the concept here, as with any transition effect,
is that in order to gradually move from 100% of one clip to 100% of another, there must be some material that overlaps so that the incremental transition can be built.
Once you've ensured the clips overlap for some duration, right click on the region in track 2 and select add transition dissolve.
You can adjust the duration of a dissolve by overlapping the video clips further and stretching the yellow dissolve region to encompass more of the overlap.
Slides and wipes.
Another way of getting from clip A to clip B is the slide transition.
Being a transition, it also must be added not to just one clip but to two clips that overlap.
Place one clip on video track 3 and another on track 2. Make sure they overlap for at least one second.
Right click on the top video clip and select add transition slide.
Play the video to see the result. Notice that one clip slides into frame over the other.
If you've added the transition in a roundabout way, you might find that the wrong clip is sliding in.
If that happens during your experimentation, select the slide transition region in the timeline and click to activate the transition tab and click the invert checkbox in the transition options.
Different wipe effects can be seen with the wipe transition. Easily accessible now that you have the transition region by clicking the drop down menu in the transition tab.
Choose wipe to change the transition and notice the new options available.
You can choose from multiple styles of wipes and as with the slide you can invert them to control which clips supplement the other.
Chromachee aka green screen.
With so many effects and even entire sets being generated digitally now, there's been a huge demand for the blue screen or green screen effect, which is technically known simply as a chroma key.
It is called a chroma key because you are selecting or key a specific chroma or color value, which you can then discard entirely or use it as a mat
or any other number of operations. The chroma key in KDN Live is a two-step process. First, you must select the color you want to be used as your key, and secondly, you must composite the image.
The first step can be done obviously with the effect called blue screen, but it can also be done with the color selection effect, which turns out to have more options including choking and throttle in the selection.
To set up the effect, place some footage on video track 3. It could be anything from a shot of a greasy field to a digital tron universe that you want your character to be transported to.
This is called a plate shot.
Above this, on track 2, place the shot of your character in front of the green or blue screen.
Right-click on this region and select Add Effect Color Selection. In the effects stack, use the color selector to choose the chroma level you wish to key.
You can refine the selection with the hue and chroma sliders, the edge mode and other options.
The blue screen effect does exactly what's expected and replaces your selected chroma value with an alpha channel.
If you're using the color selection tool, it will do the reverse of that. It retains the color selected rather than keys it out.
However, there's a handy checkbox just under the color picker for invert selection, which loses the color and retains everything else around it.
Be sure to check this box if you're using color selection.
The less compressed the source video is, the higher the likelihood of getting a quick and easy chroma key, since you have more color depth available for subtle key.
Should you need to apply multiple chroma keys or other effects, the effects stack is called a stack for that very reason.
Effects upon effects can be added to a single clip as required.
If you had to, you wouldn't be the first composite artist to key one shade of blue or green only to add a second key for some other shade in that same spectrum.
Or to key out all blue in a scene and then add back in some element using a garbage mat.
Once you've successfully keyed out the color, you've essentially replaced the color with an alpha channel that is just waiting to become transparent.
The second step therefore is to add a composite transition between the top and bottom video regions.
Right click on the top region and select add transition composite.
The composite transition is added to only the first second or so of the video region by default, so extend it with your select tool to the duration of the clip.
You should see in your project monitor that the top of the video is visible, except where there used to be blue or green or whatever color you key.
Through which the plate shot is visible, now ideally the subject in the first clip will match the plate's color temperature and will have nice smooth edges and look integrated into the shot.
If that's not the case, you'll want either to add effects like a blue screen effect to key out the last visticles of a colored edge or do color correction to better match the shots.
In the next article color correction will be reviewed in detail.
Overall this is a powerful tool and provided me with surprisingly good results on even highly compressed video had shot on an Android phone.
This is significant since other editing applications couldn't even ingest that footage and even after trial and error chance coding to just get the footage into another editor, the chroma key was poor.
Composited images and titles.
If the material you are importing or compositing is an image or an image sequence, such as an export of sequential PNGs from Blender or Synfing Studio, then they probably already have an alpha channel.
In this case all you need to do is to use the ad clip option to add the sequence to your project tree.
As long as you've checked the boxes at the bottom of the file choose a dialog box, open brackets, image sequencer and transparent background images, close brackets, then the images will be imported as a single video clip with building alpha, meaning no color selection or chroma key is required.
Simply place the video sequence over a video clip, add the composited transition and move on.
Title in, in KD&Live, works much the same way as images or animations. You can generate titles from within KD&Live by right clicking in your project tree and choosing add title clip.
This will open a text creation interface where you'll be able to choose fonts, stars and even basic animations for the text.
You can use the text in its default form, open brackets, white text on a black background, close brackets, or you can add a composite transition between the text and some video clip to have a text overlay.
I've never been a fan of doing anything but the most basic title in with the built-in text tools of a video editor.
The editing apps of use seem to agree with me, since all features are sure to be integrated with external dedicated title in programs.
On free software there is SyncFing Studio, a traditional digital cell animation application, and Blender, the famous 3D modeling and animation application.
There is a YouTube series dedicated to teaching video editors Blender for motion graphic artists available here. See the YouTube link in this article.
Conclusion, KD&Live features all the standard tools a prosumer would ever need for video production, plus quite a lot more.
Its stability and feature set is firmly in the professional market and it integrates easily into the workflow of a busy post-production schedule.
With a little experimentation with the different effects, KD&Live will prove itself as a versatile editing application, with all the features demanding clients and producers expect.
And that's the end of KD&Live part 3 effects and transitions. Once again, your feedback and comments are welcome, and this has been Geddes for Hacker Public Radio, and I'll speak to you again in part 4.
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