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State of Kdenlive

kdenlive.org

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Re: State of Kdenlive

#41

Post by ahartmetz »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #33

Kdenlive has some unfortunate performance regression when working with larger projects with many clips. I managed to track down a few of them while evaluating Claude Code a while back (mostly certain actions doing O(n) scans over all clips every mouse event needing debouncing), and got it mostly back down to tolerable levels again, but have been holding onto them because unsolicited drive by AI PRs are very annoying…

You can write a bug report for each problem and attach a patch with the corresponding hack. Best thing you can do short of providing clean fixes.

Re: State of Kdenlive

#42

Post by throwaway89201 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #33

Kdenlive has some unfortunate performance regression when working with larger projects with many clips. I managed to track down a few of them while evaluating Claude Code a while back (mostly certain actions doing O(n) scans over all clips every mouse event needing debouncing), and got it mostly back down to tolerable levels again, but have been holding onto them because unsolicited drive by AI PRs are very annoying…

Creating the PR, doing the explanation you just did, and closing it yourself might be a good option. Then at least your code lives somewhere that someone else can reuse if desired. Ideally combined with a linked issue that you do keep open.

Re: State of Kdenlive

#43

Post by SamPatt »

squigz wrote: post #37
BodyCulture wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful with any serious project, this software most certainly will crash and destroy your work. It crashes since many years and developers do not seem to care or are not able to understand how important stability for media creation software really is. Especially small and independent artists should absolutely avoid any software that introduces additional risk of project failure as one such crash scenario at an ad…

This argument would be a lot more convincing if you linked to issues or something.

I can second the sentiment, I have had kdenlive crash on me several times without saving.

I still use it because it's great for quick and simple things, and I save frequently, but it is extremely frustrating when it happens.

Re: State of Kdenlive

#44

Post by darkwater »

elteto wrote: post #36
nathanmills wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling FOSS devs "competitors" is such a corporate-minded statement that completely misses the point. FOSS devs all work together to achieve a common goal and don't see other projects as competitors, they see them as friends.

Competition for non-monetary resources is absolutely a thing. Developer time is scarce and other projects can absolutely see others as competitors in this regard. We have plenty of stories of project forks sprouting because of frustration/disagreement/etc and the new fork starts gathering more attention/contributions because of better governance, better devx, saner environment, etc.

Yes, but this is not a case of project hard fork, not even a soft fork. They are two completely unrelated projects. People contributing to KDE would probably not contribute to Gnome for a variety of reasons - and vice versa - and it's perfectly fine. One aspect of open source is biodiversity.

Re: State of Kdenlive

#45

Post by throw101010 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #33

Kdenlive has some unfortunate performance regression when working with larger projects with many clips. I managed to track down a few of them while evaluating Claude Code a while back (mostly certain actions doing O(n) scans over all clips every mouse event needing debouncing), and got it mostly back down to tolerable levels again, but have been holding onto them because unsolicited drive by AI PRs are very annoying…

I'd open a Draft PR and an Issue to explain the problems you encountered and how you've solved them for your own use cases... then leave it up to them to learn from it or close it.

I get annoyed with "drive-by PRs" only when they lack context or are clearly just a way to get some commits into a project (typos and so on), but any findings that can improve my code or its performance is welcome, in my projects at least.

Re: State of Kdenlive

#46

Post by kalaksi »

BodyCulture wrote: post #29
visiohex wrote: post #14

Kdenlive hits the perfect sweet spot for me. It's much more capable than basic editors like iMovie, but doesn't have the overwhelming learning curve (or steep hardware requirements) of DaVinci Resolve. Like others have mentioned, pairing it with OBS for screen recording and Audacity for audio makes for an incredibly powerful, 100% FOSS media creation stack. It's amazing to see how far open-source video editing has co…

Be careful with any serious project, this software most certainly will crash and destroy your work. It crashes since many years and developers do not seem to care or are not able to understand how important stability for media creation software really is. Especially small and independent artists should absolutely avoid any software that introduces additional risk of project failure as one such crash scenario at an ad…

> Especially small and independent artists should absolutely avoid any software that introduces additional risk of project failure as one such crash scenario at an advanced project state has a high potential of total destruction.

I can't really comment on kdenlive, but this sounds kind of overly dramatic to me. I mean, I hope you save and take regular snapshots/backups in case your disk, RAM or just human error destroys anything substantial.

Re: State of Kdenlive

#47

Post by riidom »

magic_hamster wrote: post #32

It will be a beautiful day when I can finally lose all my Adobe accounts and software. Kdenlive is definitely on the right track BUT having a real risk to lose my project after days and weeks of work is not something I am able to afford. I am following this with great interest and waiting for the right time to jump on board.

It sounds like you have no crash or corruption problems in Premiere at all.

Re: State of Kdenlive

#48

Post by f_r_d »

magic_hamster wrote: post #32

It will be a beautiful day when I can finally lose all my Adobe accounts and software. Kdenlive is definitely on the right track BUT having a real risk to lose my project after days and weeks of work is not something I am able to afford. I am following this with great interest and waiting for the right time to jump on board.

Where did you hear about loosing your work? Did you experience it? Did you report it? Kdenlive has a very robust project recovery system, even if it crashes you are able to recover your lost work. Also in any software you must continuously save.

Re: State of Kdenlive

#49

Post by MegaDeKay »

rpdillon wrote: post #40
BodyCulture wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful with any serious project, this software most certainly will crash and destroy your work. It crashes since many years and developers do not seem to care or are not able to understand how important stability for media creation software really is. Especially small and independent artists should absolutely avoid any software that introduces additional risk of project failure as one such crash scenario at an ad…

Arguments like this are much more compelling if you cite specifics rather than giving us your own conclusions.

Kdenlive being crash prone is a known thing, but for the parent to say the devs don't care goes too far.

Re: State of Kdenlive

#50

Post by jcrawfordor »

BodyCulture wrote: post #29
visiohex wrote: post #14

Kdenlive hits the perfect sweet spot for me. It's much more capable than basic editors like iMovie, but doesn't have the overwhelming learning curve (or steep hardware requirements) of DaVinci Resolve. Like others have mentioned, pairing it with OBS for screen recording and Audacity for audio makes for an incredibly powerful, 100% FOSS media creation stack. It's amazing to see how far open-source video editing has co…

Be careful with any serious project, this software most certainly will crash and destroy your work. It crashes since many years and developers do not seem to care or are not able to understand how important stability for media creation software really is. Especially small and independent artists should absolutely avoid any software that introduces additional risk of project failure as one such crash scenario at an ad…

For what it's worth, while I haven't found kdenlive (or shotcut, based on the same underlying toolkit) to be 100% stable, I've had significantly fewer lost-work incidents with kdenlive than I did with Premiere Pro. The frustration of Premiere's instability was the main thing that drove me to open-source software.

I've never used Resolve primarily so I don't have a good feeling of how they compare, but I have experienced a couple of unexpected, mid-work crashes in Resolve as well. I believe these were tied to my working on a machine with an Intel iGPU, which at least at the time seemed to be... discouraged, I'll say, by the Resolve community due to known stability issues. Possibly the root of evil with Premiere as well, but again, doesn't seem to be a major problem for kdenlive.

What I will say is that I personally prefer Shotcut to kdenlive. Both are basically graphical frontends to MLT, the actual media toolkit/editor (driven by XML files). Shotcut has a simpler, more user-friendly UI than kdenlive and also seems to be a bit more stable/performant. kdenlive is more featureful. I think most people should try both because it probably depends on your workflow which is more convenient.

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