VLC-Qt Woes ... SMPlayer to the Rescue

A recent upgrade of my video editing station causes a really annoying regression in VLC+Qt. I'm using Kubuntu (15.10 as of this writing) as it is a well-done KDE-centric distribution that is quickly installed and KDE works right out of the box. Unfortunately, the recent upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.5.3/KDE Frameworks 5.18.0 causes VLC to only show a small portion of any video frame. So I needed some remedy...

Transition Tricks in Kdenlive

Kdenlive is a powerful non-linear video editing beast, not least thanks to its MLT engine. Unfortunately, most newcomers to Kdenlive often miss the more subtle tricks that we old hands use in our projects all the time. So how can an empty video track make matter better...?

200K Views for Underwater Cycling Video

Well, who would have ever thought that one of my videos could get 200K views? This evening, Under Water Cycling passed this mark. Unbelievable.

Kdenlive Lost+Found: Some Split Screen is Muli-Track View Instead

Kdenlive lost+found is about these kind of things you wished someone had told you about Kdenlive years earlier. Those thing, where you should've read the Kdenlive documentation more thoroughly.

Today: Kdenlive uses a very convenient two monitor concept. The clip monitor is, you guessed it, for working with clips. In contrast, the project monitor shows what the final outcome of your clips+transitions chaos in the timeline will be: this is what will be rendered. Now, both monitors come with a «split view». So I would expect this to be the same functionality?

Well, both «split views» are actually completely different things. In the clip monitor, «split mode» splits the clip display into two halfs, one part showing the clip before effects are applied to the clip shown, and the other part shows the final result of applying all effects. In contrast, the project monitor in «split mode» instead shows four quadrants (instead of two halves). Each quadrant then parades one of first four tracks that are currently visible (unhidden).

Thankfully, when made aware of the misnaming, the Kdenlive developers kindly renamed the multi-track split view mode of the project monitor into, well, «multitrack view». In the future, this should hopefully avoid further confusion ... and not only on my side. Small UI changes, yet very important for an overall smooth Kdenlive experience to both newcomers as well as seasoned hands.

Kdenlive Lost+Found: How to Zoom In/Out in Monitors

Kdenlive lost+found is about these kind of things you wished someone had told you about Kdenlive years earlier. Things that you've missed and nobody knew Kdenlive even had them already.

Today: how to zoom in and out in Kdenlive's project and clip monitors. The mouse wheel normally simply seeks back and forward when the mouse is in either the clip or project monitors.

But, when holding both Shift+Ctrl when wheeling in the monitors then zooms into the frame and out again.

Extremely useful when dealing with slightly more involved affine transitions with several key frames and each such frame needs to be precisely placed on screen, for instance, for simple animations.

A Year of Surface Pen-Testing

Working for more than a year with the Surface Pro 3 in screencast production it's time for some real-use review. Not those boring paid quills reviews.

Screencast Recording on Linux

Recently I needed to record some raw footage for my screencasting projects, this time recording from a Linux system. This system happens to be my power-horse video editing station with a 27" screen attached, with 2560×1440 pixels (in 16:9). So the frame size is beyond FullHD, which is 1920×1080: the maximum my HD rocket can record.