Kdenlive (;

acronym An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or phrase. Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in ''NATO'' (''North Atlantic Treaty Organization''), but sometimes use syllables, as ...

for ''KDE

Non-Linear Video Editor Non-linear editing is a form of offline editing for audio, video, and image editing. In offline editing, the original content is not modified in the course of editing. In non-linear editing, edits are specified and modified by specialized sof ...

'') is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

video editing software Video editing software, or a video editor is software used performing the post-production video editing of digital video sequences on a non-linear editing system. It has replaced traditional flatbed celluloid film editing tools and analog video ...

based on the MLT Framework, KDE and Qt. The project was started by Jason Wood in 2002, and is now maintained by a small team of developers. With the release of Kdenlive 15.04.0 in 2015 it became part of the official KDE Projects suite. Kdenlive packages are freely available for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

, and

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

. As a whole it is distributed under the GPL-3.0-or-later license, while parts of the source code are available under different licenses such as GPL-2.0-or-later and GPL-3.0-or-later.

History

The project was initially started by Jason Wood in 2002. The development of Kdenlive moved on from the

K Desktop Environment 3 K Desktop Environment 3 is the third series of releases of the K Desktop Environment (after that called ''KDE Software Compilation''). There are six major releases in this series. After the release of KDE 4, version 3.5 was forked into the Trini ...

version (which wasn't originally made for MLT) to

KDE Platform 4 KDE Platform 4 was a collection of libraries and software frameworks by KDE that served as technological foundation for KDE Software Compilation 4 distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). KDE Platform 4 was the successor to ...

, with an almost complete rewrite. This was completed with Kdenlive 0.7, released on 12 November 2008. Kdenlive 0.9.10 released on 1 October 2014 was the last KDE 4 release. Kdenlive started to plan a move into the KDE Projects and its infrastructure in 2014. Port to

KDE Frameworks 5 KDE Frameworks is a collection of libraries and software frameworks readily available to any Qt-based software stacks or applications on multiple operating systems. Featuring frequently needed functionality solutions like hardware integration, fi ...

was finished with the release of 2015.04.0 as part of

KDE Applications 5 The KDE Gear (also known as the KDE Applications Bundle or KDE Applications) is a set of applications and supporting libraries that are developed by the KDE community, primarily used on Linux-based operating systems but mostly multiplatform, and ...

. The move to KDE is ongoing. In early 2017 the development team started working on a

refactoring In computer programming and software design, code refactoring is the process of restructuring existing computer code—changing the '' factoring''—without changing its external behavior. Refactoring is intended to improve the design, structu ...

of the program, and by June 2017 a first preview was available. By December 2017 the refactoring became the main focus of the development team with the release of the first usable preview. Release of the refactoring version was originally planned for August 2018 in the KDE 18.08 Applications release. The refactored version of Kdenlive was released on 22 April 2019 in the KDE 19.04 Applications release. On 20 September 2022, KDE began the first fundraising drive for Kdenlive, with the funds to be used to implement major features and bring Kdenlive up to the standards of more professional video editors. By 18 October 2022, the initial goal of €15,000 had been met.

Features

KDE's Kdenlive makes use of MLT, Frei0r effects, SoX and

LADSPA LADSPA is an acronym for Linux Audio Developer's Simple Plugin API. It is an application programming interface (API) standard for handling audio filters and audio signal processing effects, licensed under LGPL-2.1-or-later. It was originally des ...

libraries. Kdenlive supports all of the formats supported by

FFmpeg FFmpeg is a free and open-source software project consisting of a suite of libraries and programs for handling video, audio, and other multimedia files and streams. At its core is the command-line ffmpeg tool itself, designed for processing of vid ...

or libav (such as

QuickTime QuickTime is an extensible multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. Created in 1991, the latest Mac version, QuickTime X, is a ...

AVI Avi is a given name, usually masculine, often a diminutive of Avram, Avraham, etc. It is sometimes feminine and a diminutive of the Hebrew spelling of Abigail. People with the given name include: * Avi (born 1937), Newbery award-winning Americ ...

WMV Windows Media Video (WMV) is a series of video codecs and their corresponding video coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Windows Media framework. WMV consists of three distinct codecs: The original video compression technology ...

MPEG The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an alliance of working groups established jointly by ISO and IEC that sets standards for media coding, including compression coding of audio, video, graphics, and genomic data; and transmission and f ...

, and

Flash Video Flash Video is a container file format used to deliver digital video content (e.g., TV shows, movies, etc.) over the Internet using Adobe Flash Player version 6 and newer. Flash Video content may also be embedded within SWF files. There ar ...

, among others), and also supports 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios for both

PAL Phase Alternating Line (PAL) is a colour encoding system for analogue television. It was one of three major analogue colour television standards, the others being NTSC and SECAM. In most countries it was broadcast at 625 lines, 50 fields (25 ...

NTSC The first American standard for analog television broadcast was developed by National Television System Committee (NTSC)National Television System Committee (1951–1953), Report and Reports of Panel No. 11, 11-A, 12–19, with Some supplement ...

and various HD standards, including HDV and

AVCHD AVCHD (Advanced Video Coding High Definition) is a file-based format for the digital recording and playback of high-definition video. It is H.264 and Dolby AC-3 packaged into the MPEG transport stream, with a set of constraints designed around th ...

. Video can also be exported to DV devices, or written to a DVD with chapters and a simple menu. * Multi-track editing with a timeline and supports an unlimited number of video and audio tracks. * A built-in title editor and tools to create, move, crop and delete video clips, audio clips, text clips and image clips. * Ability to add custom effects and transitions. * A wide range of effects and transitions.

Audio signal processing Audio signal processing is a subfield of signal processing that is concerned with the electronic manipulation of audio signals. Audio signals are electronic representations of sound waves— longitudinal waves which travel through air, consist ...

capabilities include normalization, phase and pitch shifting, limiting, volume adjustment, reverb and equalization filters as well as others.

Visual effects Visual effects (sometimes abbreviated VFX) is the process by which imagery is created or manipulated outside the context of a live-action shot in filmmaking and video production. The integration of live-action footage and other live-action foota ...

include options for masking, blue-screen, distortions, rotations, colour tools, blurring, obscuring and others. * Configurable

keyboard shortcut computing, a keyboard shortcut also known as hotkey is a series of one or several keys to quickly invoke a software program or perform a preprogrammed action. This action may be part of the standard functionality of the operating system or ...

s and interface layouts. * Rendering is done using a separate non-blocking process so it can be stopped, paused and restarted. * Kdenlive also provides a script called the Kdenlive Builder Wizard (KBW) that compiles the latest developer version of the software and its main dependencies from source, to allow users to try to test new features and report problems on the bug tracker. * Project files are stored in

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

format. * An archiving feature allows

exporting International trade is the exchange of capital, goods, and services across international borders or territories because there is a need or want of goods or services. (see: World economy) In most countries, such trade represents a significan ...

a project among all assets into a single folder or compressed archive. *Built-in audio mixer

References

External links

* {{Video editors Free and open-source video-editing software KDE Applications Software that uses FFmpeg Video editing software Video software that uses Qt Video editing software for Linux Video editing software for Windows

History

Features

See also

References

External links