Kdenlive 24: Free & Open Source Video Editor

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers.com this time we're going to check out the latest version of the Caden live free video editor this will of course include highlighting some key new features but before that we're going to look at a installation and system requirements and also have an overview of Caden live workflow so let's go and get started right here we are on the Caden live website where version 24.02 point0 was released on the 11th of March 2024 new versions are published very regularly with a latest update to version 23 only published on the 19th of February and indeed version 24 was updated to version 24.02 point1 just 17 days after launch when we got a load of bug fixes however it was the moved to version 24 that was a very substantial upgrade with a lot of under the hood changes these included the adoption of qt6 and KDE framework 6 or in other words new versions of the underlying software technology as well as improved whand support for for Linux users and performance improvements for Windows Mac and Linux as Caden live now runs natively on Direct X metal and Vulcan on these respective platforms if you're wondering about system requirements these are modest with Caden live being an excellent choice of video editor for less powerful Hardware including most laptops as it doesn't need a separate graphics card and can be configured to run acceptably on any computer with 4 GB of RAM or more although as we can see on this page in the manual the published minimum system requirements are at least 1 2 GHz CPU core and 4 GB of RAM for standard definition writing to four cores with 8 GB of RAM for HD although it is possible to edit HD video in Caden live with a 4 gigabyte computer and I'll talk about how you do that later in the video If we go back to the homepage here we are as you can see we can donate to the project or we can click on download and we'll do that then there we are and as you can see we can now download for Windows for Linux or for either arm or Intel base Maxs and in the remainder of this video we're going to be using Caden live installed in Linux although I do want to point out the Standalone Windows version so if you want you can install Caden live in Windows but you can also use this Standalone version I just want i' show you that let's just click on that and I download the file we're actually downloading it to a USB drive a very fast sandis extreme Pro USB drive it's plugged into this computer and if we go across to that drive and just double click to extract the archive there we go we'll extract it also to the USB drive so what we now have is a USB drive with Caden live on it not installed just the files and if we navigate to the binaries folder like that and scroll down and we click on the Caden live XE like that there we go we're now running up Caden live on my Windows laptop running from a USB drive and I sometimes find it very handy indeed to be able to carry around a video editor on a removable media but I can plug into just about any computer and of course the Standalone version also means that you can try out Caden Live 24 in Windows without any kind of installation greetings here I am back again running Al lenux drro specifically KDE neon which is created by the same KDE community that publishes Kaden live and earlier I went to the Discover software Center and installed Caden Live 24 so if we go down to the menu here and we go to multimedia we can run up Ken live and we're doing so on a j4105 test system quite a lowend piece of Hardware that just meets the specs for HD editing in Caden live and I particularly wanted to use lower end Hardware to test out Caden Live 24 because in my view if you've got a higher end system and you want a free video editor you're more likely to pick something like d Vinci resolve as we can see we get a very traditional video editor layout in Caden live it's one of the reasons I really like it and we also have a range of layouts available we can go here to for example the logging layout like that for logging footage the audio editing layout like that the effects layout the color correction layout but we'll stick with the editing layout for now and indeed if you're new to Caden live I suggest you stick with the editing layout as you first learn the package as we can see over the top of the screen by default it's created a 1080p 25 frames a second project but we could change that if we wanted to we could go to project and project settings and select lots of different project settings but for now we'll go with the defaults and I think bring in some test footage so if we go up here on the left at the top and click we can add clip or fold like that and I've got four test Clips here in my video folder let's bring those in like that and there they are it'll sort them all out oh look we've got boats on the beach that's very exciting and down here we've got me on the beach even more exciting when I click on the clip it brings it into the clip monitor where we can play it by pressing the play button there like that I think in a second I'm going to say something very exciting to camera what's it going to be go on Chris say something so here I am on a beach in North Wales there we are I have a stop playback with the button there but we can start and stop playback as in most video editors using the space bar I press the space bar playback will start again specifically I'm in a and I can press it again to stop playback if I take my mouse up here we can see the audio where we can see that probably we want to start the clip about there and I can set an inpoint down here pressing on the inpoint like that in zone and we can now drag the clip down to the timeline where we've got the start of an edit and this footage will now appear in the monter up here we just play up here you'll see there we are this is the project mon here I am on a beach in North Wales there we are that seems to be working okay let's find a point to bring in another clip specifically I'm in the colwin bay you can see the the see out there the waves waves is a good point isn't it uh wav is about there let's just zoom in a bit on that we can click down here to go in on the timeline and we going to press G to give ourselves a marker like that markers are very handy in video editing and let's at that point cut to for example waves on Sand this clip here we'll pull that down there drop that on the timeline and hopefully I've got it right the the sea out there the waves coming in there's even some wind turbines bit further out to see that's working pretty well but I don't think we need the extra audio here so I'll click on this clip right click we can do all sorts of things here but here I'm going to ungroup Clips which will disconnect audio and video right now separate and I can now delete the unneeded audio just press delete on the keyboard that audio goes away and let's also finish that clip around there let's just zoom out a bit to see the end let's just pull that along something like that go back in again which is all just very rough to show you what's going on and we'll have a nice long dissolve on the end of the clip so let's just uh play this there the waves coming in there's even some wind turbines a bit further out to sea and in this video I'm going to be telling you about what's coming up here on explaining computers here on YouTube and I think we'll finish things around there let's go to the cut tool there cut off the end of this like that and select that end of clip get rid of that clip like that and there we are we've created a simple edit and you might have noticed you we dissolve the playback wasn't perfect let's just show that again and in this video I'm going to be telling you about what's coming up yes that wasn't a perfect dissolve in terms of preview but I'll show you how to fix that in the next segment of the video but for now we'll stick with this test edit we'll go up to project and we'll go to render to render out the project I'll just make this a bit bigger on the screen so you can see things a bit more clearly here I've got things set with more options ticked if you take it off you have a fewer options I always like to see everything going on although to be honest you haven't got to change a lot here as you're getting used to Caden live the defaults are pretty good here it's defaulted to outputting video in MP4 container with an h264 video Codec and AAC audio codec and if you want to know all about containers and codecs there's an explaining computers episode all about video formats codecs and containers anyway for now we're going to render out our clip but in fact I haven't given it a name have I so what I'm going to do is to come out of this I should have got this right shouldn't I never mind we'll first of all save our file as something we'll give it a name let's call it a test edit like that that will do and if we now go back into project and render it's going to use the name test edit to render this out to my videos folder as you can see like that we could have edited up there but it's always a good idea to give a name to your project and so if we now click on the render to file like that it'll start rendering out our video so let's just speed on through and there we are it's finished so I'll just uh close this down like that and we'll go to the dolphin file manager and go to videos let's go home and to videos like that and there is the file we've just created so let's play the file so here I am on a beach in North Wales specifically I'm in the colwin bay you can see the the SE out there the waves coming in there's even some wind turbines bit further out to sea and in this video I'm going to be telling you about what's coming up here on and as we can see that all worked just fine I've demonstrated the basic workflow for editing in Caden live now as we saw a few minutes ago on lower-end Hardware timeline playback in Caden live is a to be not smooth in more complex parts of the edit and to remind us of this let's just disable the audio over there because I don't want to be talking over myself as I keep replaying this clip and if I do play the clip and we get to the mix we can see we don't get smooth playback however all is not lost because Caden live offers three tools to improve timeline performance on lower-end hardware and the first is to change the preview resolution which we can do for either the clip or the project monitor here we'll go for the project monitor if we go down here and use this drop down you can see we can change from one to one which means it's playing back here to ATP footage all the way down to 360p even 270p and if we change for example to 360p that means this monitor is now 360p rather than a 1080p scale down and if we now play this back things should play a little bit better not perfectly better so that's one possible solution it's not quite working for us here and of course if we actually maximize that mon you can see now at least if you're watching HD that we no longer have a HD playback on that particular monter so this is one possible solution it's not one I use very often but in some circumstances it might work secondly we can improve performance on lower-end Hardware or indeed on higher-end Hardware when doing very complicated edits by using what's called timeline preview and what this does is to render all or part of a timeline to achieve smooth playback so if we go to timeline and timeline preview you can see we can turn it on or off or we could add a preview Zone if we don't want to render the entire timeline to improve playback and to do that what we need to do is to take the selection Zone this is the selection Zone we can move it around as you can see we can also uh extend it or contract it by going in there a bit fiddly but it does work but let's here just move it across our transition here which is causing us to trouble we can make it a bit smaller well let's do it like that and if we now go to timeline timeline preview and preview Zone you see we get a little red section added in there and if we now go to timeline timeline preview start preview render you will see it's starting to render a preview down there so we'll just speed on through until that's completed and there we are it has and if we now play back this edit surprise surprise we're going to get a very very smooth transition there we are because we're using a timeline preview however you might not want to do this and there is yet another option so let's first of all just get rid of what we just done we'll go to timeline preview and remove all preview zones like that timeline preview and uh we will stop it so it's not doing anything here because the final thing we can do is to use what are called proxy clips and what this does is to create lower quality versions of our video footage but it used the timeline playback although the original footage is still used to render the final film and the way to do this is to go to Project up here and to project settings and to go to proxy and we can enable here proxy Clips like that which will generate proxy clips of videos Beyond a certain size we'll just make sure that it's going to go beyond 1,000 pixel so 1080p footage will certainly have a proxy created because it's 1920 pixels wide that's okay and we can now see proxies are being created there little lines under our footage let's just let these continue There we go all Clips are now proxy Clips some were proxy Clips very quickly because I've been experimenting before recording this part of the video but the good thing now is if we now go back to our edit and play again once again we should get a nice smooth transition because here we're using proxy eclipse and it's worth pointing out if you do want to use proxy eclipse the easiest way to do it is go to settings and to configure Caden live and go down to a proxy Clips as you can see and enable proxy clips for all new projects and okay and if you do that you haven't got to think about all this all of your new projects will automatically use proxy Clips it automatically be generated and you you'll be able to get good timeline performance even on Modest Hardware so now that we've had a decent look at Caden live operation let's turn to what's new in version 24 as noted earlier a lot of the improvements are underlying technology changes which improve performance and stability as well as providing a more robust foundation for the future however there are also oo some specific additions and new features such as support for multiple subtitles and if we go across with a clip monitor you can see at the top now of a drop down which allows us to select the most recently selected Clips such as for example lot of ducks it's always nice to select lots of ducks this said far more importantly we finally in K live24 got the implementation of easing interpolation modes for key frames and if you're wondering what that means it means if we add key frames to effects we can add more more interpolation modes and there's lots and lots of effects here in a Caden live loads and loads of effects under loads and loads of categories under styze for example lots and lots of things and we can take any of these effects and drag them down to a clip or we can use the favorite button here more useful most of the time so for example we could take transform and drag that down to the the stag deer clip and we now select that and go down to effects composition we can see the controls for that effect if we select for example this clip the effect isn't there on this clip it has been added and we've got a key frame at the start let's add another key frame say where we are right now we can just click to a add key frame like that and what should we do let's for example change the size to 47% always a good number and we'll move the deer up to the top we've now got a a picture in picture effect and that'll move between two key frames we go back to the first key frame over there and it'll move across to a position over there and now in Caden Live 24 we can click over here and we've got loads of new using interpolation modes now admittedly we still don't have ease in and ease out which is what I most want and we don't have a graph editor but it is good to see that Caden live is moving towards the implementation of these critical features staying with effects it's now also possible to add an effect to multiple clips at the same time so if I select multiple clips which we do by holding down the shift key and dragging like that and now got a three clip selected what should we select let's take for example charcoal drag it down to one clip and it's added to all the clips it's on the Ducks it's on the deer and it's on the uh on the on the beach it's a bit weird I probably wouldn't use that effect but you can see the principle and we can also now turn effects on and off for a clip either by using the panel over here or by using a toggle on the time now we can tick over there and check over there and check over there and all the effects are gone for Clips oh and something else to show you is if we select lots of clips and turn them into a group then let's do that and the group The Clips often useful to group clips together then I move as a as a block in the timeline once you've done that in the past you had to ungroup the clips to a change what you were doing with those clips you don't anymore you can now hold down out and I can now take a particular part of that group and move it around or edit it that type of thing which is a useful thing to be able to do and so as we can see there are a few little things to make life easier here in Caden Live 24 along with a more fundamental underlying technology changes Caden live is a great application particularly if you need to edit video on less powerful Hardware indeed recently I needed to spend a lot of time away from home with the only computer I had available being my dual core i5 laptop and on this computer I used Caden live to edit a lot of the video content I posted on this channel in January and February 20 24 and this has left me with a deep respect for Caden live even though I normally edit in Premier Pro or Dent resolve which I couldn't run on this laptop and so although I've used Caden live before I've used it a lot on raspby Pi example I've now got an even greater appreciation for it it really is fantastic free open-source software but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed Please Subscribe and I hope to talk to you again very soon [Music]

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 56,542

Keywords: Kdenlive, Kden live, free video editor, open source video editor, Linux video editor, Windows, Mac, Linux, best video editor, top video editor, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, Kdenlive demo, Kdenlive proxies, proxy clips, timeline preview, Kdenlive 24, features

Id: sYF43ruAHXk

Length: 19min 52sec (1192 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 14 2024