Video Editing with Kdenlive

Hello and welcome. Today we're going to be looking at Caden Live, a free and open- source video editor that is available for well, let's go uh to their homepage here. Uh it's available on Linux, Windows, Mac OS, and BSD. If we go to downloads here, you can see those options except for BSD. I don't know what those people do. Uh but your install options are here. Also on most Linux distributions, it's in your repositories already, but if you want to make sure you got the the newest version, you can go here and they have an app image or flat pack. Very easy to use. Uh let's go ahead and jump right in. When you start it up, you'll get a window like this and you can either open an existing project that you've been working on or you can choose a new project. They have a whole bunch of presets here. I'm just going to choose this one right here. Allowed it to load up. And I'm using version 26.04.3 just so you know. Uh this is what the default interface looks like. Let's go ahead and bring over some video clips. So, I'm just going to select some video clips here. These are just when I was on vacation a few months ago. Now, I've been using Caden Live for about 15 years now. I guess it's first version came out in 2002. I just looked that up. Uh, but I've been using it for it since about 2010, 2011. And I tell you what, it used to crash all the time. It almost never crashes on me. There's one thing that it will sometimes crash on when I drag in videos like that. Uh, you'll see it was real quick. These are short clips, but it processes them real quick to get icons and, uh, probably get the waveforms for when you drag it in. If while it's doing that, I tried to do something with those videos and drag it down. Sometimes it crashes. So, when you drag in your videos, just give it a few seconds until it's done processing and uh you shouldn't have any issues because other than that, I can't think of last time Caden live has crashed on me. But you have your project spin here with your videos and audio files. You can import MP3s and wave files and also still images as well. Let's go ahead and drag a video down here. So, I just drag a video clip and you can see uh by default you'll have two um tracks. You'll have your video one, video two, and your audio one, and audio two. I set it up so I have three because I usually like a third track for uh music alone. Uh but we'll talk about adding and subtracting tracks later on. Um so we're going to drop in the video here. And as you can see, if you move it, the audio goes to the corresponding track. Uh and uh yeah, so that's there. Now, you can also grab multiple videos. So I can select a few and drag them down here. There we go. Now, let's say I want just the audio from one of these. Well, when you hover over it, you can see an audio speaker here, and you can also see a film strip. If I grab that audio clip now, it's just going to drag the audio. Now, realize you got to be on an audio track for that. If I pull it up here, I can't put it here because these are video tracks. And again, you can indicate that over here to the left, you can see A1, A2, A3, indicating audio, V1, V2, V3 for video. So, if you want just the audio, you can do that. If I want just the video, I can drag just the video down by grabbing that film clip. Most of the time, you'll probably grab both. Lots of times though, you you may just want uh the the video and you're going to overlay some music or something like that. Uh speaking of which, so I have these video clips here. I can hit control and scroll to zoom in and out. Uh if I don't hit control, it scrolls left and right. Um let's say I want to separate this audio from this video file. Well, right now they're grouped. I can rightclick this and say ungroup. Or I can hit control shiftG. But now they're separate files and I can delete the audio if I don't want it or move it somewhere else. Uh, and I can do that. I can select a whole bunch. If I hit shift and select them, I can say ungroup. And now, oh, did I click the wrong thing? Ungroup. Now, the audio and video files are all separate. I'll hit control-z a couple times to undo all that. Now, you can group stuff together, too. So, if I, let's say I set this all up how I want it, and I want to save this group right here to make sure it doesn't get changed, I can shift select them all, and I can group them. And now, anytime I select anything in that group, they'll be selected. Of course, if you want to edit one of them individually, you're going to rightclick and say ungroup. Uh, so that's grouping, ungrouping. So, we're going basic stuff here so far. Let's scroll in. So, I'm going to hit control and scroll in to zoom in. And you can grab by default just the edge of any of these clips and shrink it down. Now, you have three basic tools. Well, there's more, but I mainly use these three tools here. So, we have our selection tool, our razor tool, or our cut tool, and we have a spacer tool. And when you hover over them, you can see that this one says S, X, and M. Those are the shortcut keys. And that will help you a lot if you remember that. So, right now, I'm in select, so I can grab clips and move them around. If I hit X, I can now chop these videos up. I can hit S to go back and move them around. X to cut, so I can cut like this. S to grab and move them around. Uh, so that's uh cutting and selecting. What is the spacer tool when I hit M? What does that do? So, let's say I get these all set up how I want and I want to move this whole group over to the left to fill in this empty space. Maybe I deleted something. Well, I could hit shift and select them all and then grab and drag them over. That works. But let's say you have a whole project with multiple uh tracks and it goes way far out and you don't want to miss anything. Well, if you hit M, that's your spacer tool. You can see you've got these little arrows here like this. Now, whenever I select something, everything to the right of it will be selected. So, I can click here and I can drag all this. If I move this out, see, it's grabbing everything to the left. So, it allows you to grab everything and move it again. If you cut a chunk of videos out, it will uh allow you to move everything over without missing anything, which is it's it's not fun when you miss I've had short little clips and then I go to render it and it takes forever and I realize I left a video clip way out here at like an hour or 45 minutes and it rendered a whole bunch of black stuff because it thought that that was uh well, I didn't think I left it there so it was part of the video project. So, again, M will allow you to select something and everything to the right of it will be select. That's the spacer tool. Let's talk about fading. So, let's say we want to fade in and out. I'm going to hit S to make sure I'm in select tool. Now, I can choose this video here. And anytime I hover over a corner of the video or the audio, you get this little dot. Well, I can drag this and I can drag this. And now I have a fade in. So, one of those fades the video, the video track, and the other fades audio. So, you have to make sure you do both if you want both faded. So, right now I'm fading just the video from black. If I want it to fade out, I can go the other way. And now it will fade out to black. Can undo that. But if I want the audio to fade, I have to drag this to where I want it to fade. What if I want to fade from one video to another, one clip to another? Well, I'll put it on the other track here. And all I have to do is click the corner here. So when I get to the corner, it gives us a little wipe. Now I do a nice little transition there. But of course, again, that's not the audio. If I want, I have to go like this and this and adjust the audio how I want. And now the audio and the video will fade from one clip to the other. So that's how you do transitions or basic fade transitions from one to another. Uh let's say you want to do other types of transitions. You you like those those funky little transitions. Well, let's click here to add a wipe. So now we have a wipe. You can see also uh I should mention right here and this is your clip monitor. This is to preview the clip you have selected in the project bin here. Uh but over here is what you're seeing down in your timeline here. So again, we have the wipe tool. So, or the white effect. So, now it's going to just fade. Well, we can change that right here when we have So, we select the white. I'll zoom in here. Zoom in. Select the white. Make sure you're not on the video, but you're on the wipe you want. Over here, it says wipe. Well, you have a lot of other options here on how these two tracks are going to blend, these two clips. Now, you can do effects like burn and screen and hues and lighten and darken. If you're familiar at all with that stuff, you know what I'm talking about. It's useful stuff. But, let's look at transitions. Those are also in here. And you'll have things like wipe down. So now when we play it, you can see it wipes down. I can change that to a wipe up and now it will wipe up. I can change it to uh instead of wipe there's a slide. So slide down. Now it will slide the video down. Now you notice there was an issue there when I'm doing this. It goes from this to this and then jumps back to that. That's because the order want when you're doing these slide effects and um and what was the other one called? Slide effects and wipe effects. Uh you have to either adjust your key frames here. We'll talk more about key frames in a minute. Or it's going to go from the top track to the bottom track. So I could move this up here and then bring this effect here. And now it should transition properly. Or if we were to leave it down here, I can change these key frames. I can drag this here and this here. So, these little key frames, we're going to talk more about key frames here in a second, but in reality, I don't use those uh wipe and slide downs too much. Uh the easiest thing to do is put the first track higher. I hope that makes sense. Anyway, so again, click here. We got our wipe effect. Make sure you have it selected. We can also do there's one called barn doors or something like that. We got push down, which is a little different. So, again, this is going to go backwards. So, I'm going to want to actually do it like this. And now it will push both videos down. So, you have all those different effects in there if you're into that sort of thing. Let's talk about effects, though. So, let's go over here to the effects tab. And here we can search through. You have audio effects and video effects. I'm just going to type in gray for grayscale. And I will drag that down to here. And now, this video clip is grayscale. It's the only one that's grayscale because it's the only one I added the effect to. If I want to remove it, all your effects are right here. Let's grab something with more options. I'm going to go film. We have two different film grain. We have film grain and old film simulator. I'll drag this one down here. And now we have our effects, which has options, right? So, we have the brightness up. You know, how much it flickers, that sort of stuff. Well, now the order of your effects does matter. So, I could drag this and put it up before the grayscale or after the grayscale. Depending on the effects, it may make more of a difference or not. But, if I decide, oh, I don't want that anymore, I can just click that garbage can. Click that garbage can. They're removed. That's adding it to one uh piece of uh one clip there. But let's say I want everything on the track. I don't want have to grab the effect and make all my adjustments to every single clip. Well, I can drag it to the track. And now everything on that track will have that effect. So, let's go back because it'll be more visible in this. So, we'll go like this. So, now everything on track one here will be grayscale. This track, this is uh track two. So, it's not grayscale, but that's track two. Uh, so you can see that we have the film effect and the grayscale there. Let's talk a little bit more about the key frames. So again, I can now click on the track over here. You can also name tracks if you want and call this test or whatever I want. If you need to keep track of that, I'm going to go ahead and remove these effects. I'm going to add an effect. How about uh just do a hue uh a hue shift. So I'll grab this. I'll put it there. So let's move it so it's not fading there. So we can see it very clearly here. Nothing didn't seem to do anything else because we haven't adjusted the hue. Well, I can adjust the hue like this, right? I can make my my wife and the dog blue. Well, that will keep it that constant hue shift that entire thing. But we have right here um key frames. So, I can go from the beginning here. We have a key frame which is currently set to. I can go to the end here or anywhere in here and I can click add a key frame and then I can adjust that. So, now they should go from being blue to pink by the end of the clip. So, blue pink. So any uh effect that has key frames, that's how it works. You set it, you add it, you can copy them, stuff like that. Mainly, you're going to just be adding and adjusting the numbers for most things. Uh let's talk about the transform tool. So let me go ahead and remove that. Um so when you go into effects here, there's crop tools and position tools. They're called all different things. And I used to use all these different ones to get different effects. And then I realized there is the transform tool, which does pretty much all of that in one. So you're just going to search for transform. You're going to use this a So, let me go ahead and put that on here. I'm going to move this clip over here. Move this wipe. So, drag it. So, we're looking at that. Now, I can resize this clip. So, I can do like a picturein picture. There's one right there. I can either manually scale it up there, or if I want to be an exact size, I can say like 25%. And then, if I want it to be centered, we have these center tools here. So, these alignment tools, I can center it uh here and here to make sure it's right smack in the center. Again, I can set key frames if I want. I can go to the end here. I can add another key frame. I can make that 100%. And then uh it's already centered, but if it wasn't, I can click center and center. Now, uh it's going to zoom in. So, and you can overlay multiple tracks. So, I can put this up here. I can add the transform tool to that. I can set this to 50%. Let's move uh so we're viewing that. I can move that up here. And now it's going to look kind of weird, but we got one zooming in and the other over to the corner there. So you can put those all over how you like. That's super useful, especially let's say I import this PNG. So you can import images. Let's go over to our project bin here. Um, and this has a transparent layer and Caden Live will recognize that. So now I have this. I can drag this text down here and by default it will be right like that. I can size it up so it fits over this clip just right. But maybe I don't want it full size right there. Well, again, I can go to effects. I can drag the transform tool here. I can set it to 50%. And I can move it down to the bottom here. And to make sure it's centered left and right, I can click on this right there. And now my uh logo or my website is down at the bottom of the page there. And we can see how that looks. So, that's use super useful. What have we not gone over yet? Let's talk about uh time shifting. So, let's go ahead here. Let's remove any effects from this video. Don't care about the audio right now. So, I know I'm not recording any audio in this video, but right now we're going to rightclick this and I'm going to go change speed. And now I can make it 50% speed. And so, it's going to play in slow motion. I can rightclick it, change speed, and now I can say 200 or even more. And now it's going to play super fast. Now, when you're doing that, the audio is going to get higher pitched or lower pitch accordingly. If you don't want it to, you can do pin uh pitch compensation here, so it won't change the pitch when you speed up and slow down the video. Um, I'm going to set this back to 100, although it doesn't have to be for this. Oops. I'm going to rightclick that again, go change speed, and then you can do reverse. So, I picked this clip because now it'll look like the boat's going the other way. So, you can reverse clips there as well. So, that's right clicking and choosing change speed. Now, let's talk about the interface a little bit. We have all these different tabs and windows. One great thing about Caden Live, especially for me, since I have multiple monitors, is I may want to have some of these windows on a different monitor. Now, by default, in this this video clip here, if I uh double click this, it becomes full screen. You don't see it cuz it went off to my right monitor here. Let me go ahead and bring it over here. There we go. Um, we're not playing anything right now. Let's go back to here. Let's move this here. And let's M tool to drag all these over here. And drag everything here. Now, if I bring that video clip over here again, there it is playing uh full screen. And that's super useful again if you have more than one monitor, which when you're video editing, having at least two monitors is nice because you can have the video full screen like this on a second screen while you're doing your editing. If I want to go back into the project, I can just double click it. But not only that, any of these tabs can be pulled out. Uh so you can write project notes. That's nice. Uh you can put copyright information there or just notes that you have for the project. But let's say I want to pull that out. I can pull that out and I can drag and drop it into any of these sections. Boom. I can drop it right there. Well, didn't really drop right there. Um, anyway, once you pull it out, you can click this button, puts it back. If I pull it out and there, now it's dropped there. I had to pull it toward more towards the middle. So, now it's here by the clip monitor. I can pull it out again. Now, if I click this, it's going to go back there. Or I can grab it and I can put it right there. Um, but let's say you pull it out. I've done this before. You pull it out and you close it. And now you want it back. Where is it? Uh, it's going to be under view. Yes, view. So, you have all these tabs here. You can see the ones that are unchecked. We just closed the uh notes, right? So, project notes. Boom. It's back and click this button and it goes back there. So, if you ever pull out a a tab uh and it goes somewhere and you can't find it. That's how you get back. All of them should be listed under view here. You just kind of have to remember what it's called. Look at some of these tabs down here. You do have an audio mixer, which is nice. You can adjust the audio for each track individually here. Um, the effects stack. We already looked at uh time mapping. I I haven't played with that. Subtitles. I have played with before. You can import subtitle files. Let's say you have movie import subtitle file and it'll actually uh put them as a track. So you can edit the subtitles right in here. Uh which is super nice. I've had to do that before where I was wanted to play a video on a TV screen that didn't read subtitle files. So I just baked them into the video. It's kind of a crude way of doing it, but you can do that right here. and you can set up the fonts and all that, but just importing the the uh subtitle files and Caden Live takes care of the rest. Uh I don't know what the speech editor is. It looks like it might uh create subtitles based on speech recognition. I haven't messed with that. Let's talk about rendering. Uh so you have your big render button here. You click this, it drops Oh, you can. Okay. Uh so you can see right there it says control enter, which is actually what I normally do. Control enter brings up your rendering window. Uh or you can click this button. Now, it has a bunch of presets for you. By default, it's going to look like this, right? You're going to select your preset. Uh, I like having more options. I can adjust things over here. One thing you may want to look into turning on is parallel processing. It can use multiple threads if you have multiple uh cores on your processor, which you probably do, but it warns you that there could be rendering artifacts. So, if you're in a hurry, check that. It could greatly speed up your rendering time. But if you don't care about the rendering time, don't check it. All up to you. There's other things that it does after or while it's rendering that you can adjust over here. Uh, now you have this full project or selected zone. Let's go ahead and hit close. Uh, you have this little blue line at the top of your editor here. I can drag this. Oops. I can drag this out. I can move it around like this. So now, control enter to bring up my render window. If I hit selected zone, it's only going to render things under that. So if you just want to render part of your clip, part of your project, you can that way. So, let's go ahead. I'm going to choose this. I'm going to just put this in my temp folder. I'm going to click render. We start rendering projects. I'm going to come back over here, say selection only. I'm going to call this untitled two. I'm going to click render. We come here. And you can see one project's going. The other one's waiting. If your computer's fast enough, I can start this next project. If you decide you don't want one of them, you can click it and choose abort. Uh, rendering a video is usually pretty quick. The more effects and layers you have, the slower it's going to go, obviously. Now, one nice thing Kane Live does offer as well is scripts. So, you can actually, I'm not going to get into this. I've talked about this in the past. Most people use this, but you can generate scripts and what it will do is create a shell script for you that when you run will render out this video. That could be really nice for automating tasks, automating a bunch of renders. Anyway, uh, so that finished. What else could I touch on? Here's something I wasn't prepared for because I would have had to make a an example video. But lots of times I'll be recording a video and then I will also be recording either from a separate camera, a second camera or just from a microphone. Uh let's say these two clips uh are recordings with from different cameras. Well, I can I used to manually line them up. I would clap at the beginning of video and line up the clap. It's not that hard to do. But what you could do is you could rightclick this and you can say align reference video. I can set this as the reference video. Then I can choose this one, right click it, and say align. And I can say align audio to reference. It's not going to work with this because they're not audio, but if the audio, if there's similar audio in both of them, it will line them up for you. That's super nice. Again, if you do multiple camera stuff, of course, you can save your projects. Uh, come back later to work on them. Actually, I do want to do something here. Let's go ahead and I'm going to drag this over. Drag this over. Drag this over [clears throat] and I am going to save this. Save. I'm just going to call it temp test. Now I'm going to start a new project. I've only done this a few times, so it's super useful. Let's say you edit a whole scene, but then you want to put it into a bigger project. I am pretty sure here's that project I just saved. I can drag that whole project in here. And now it's like one file. So it didn't render out the video. They're still all separate clips, but all those settings are in there. So, you can have multiple scenes. And then, oh, it crashed. Again, this is not something I normally do. And uh yeah, so Kaden Live did crash on me. All videoers do it occasionally. Let's try it again. Drag that in here. Drag it down here. Click in here. Okay, we seem to be good now. Um, yeah. So, if you you want you're making a bigger movie, you can edit each scene individually and then put them together. The benefit of that is if you're rendering out, especially if you're rendering something lossless, you don't want to render it more than once. This will allow you prevent you from doing that. Again, it's not something I do too much, but if you're really making like a movie, that is a super useful thing to do. Uh, did I talk about title clips? I don't think I did. Let's go ahead and create a new project. I'm going to go back and drag in all my video clips here. Again, when I drag it in here, you'll see it processes them all. Only took a few seconds. I obviously, if they were longer clips, it would take a little bit longer. Most of the time, the only time Ken Live normally crashes on me is if I try to do something while it's still processing those videos. And even then, it doesn't always do it. Uh, but let's go ahead. I'll grab video of this dog. Let me just make it longer by setting the time to 50%. Now, let's say we want a title clip. So, we talked about bringing in PGs. What I can do is up here in my uh projects bin, right click, and I can go uh create a title clip. So, there we go. I can come up here. I can type in hello. Now, I already have set an outline here. So, by default, there's not going to be an outline. You can see how hard that is to read. Now, you can change the color. I can change that to a red. And now, you got red text. But if you have white text, it's usually a good idea to add an outline color like so. That way, if there's any white background, you can still read it. Now, of course, I can select all this. I can change the size of the uh text. I can change the font. Uh all the things you would normally do. Now, if I was to come in here, I can say, "Hello, this is a test. Hey, there. Now, let's say I want to align that at the center of the screen." I have my align tools here. Align. Align. That aligned that group of text, but the text inside is not aligned. That's what this is here. You can also adjust letter spacing, line spacing, all basic stuff. There's also a typewriter effect. If you want it to look like it's typing like a typewriter, you can check that and set your options there. Um, I'm going to uncheck that for now. Uh, if you like to have your text zooming in, uh, a good option is animation here. And here, by default, it's 5 seconds. You're going to want to adjust it how long you want. But what I can do now is basically this is like the camera view, right? We got the start and end. I'm going to, if I want to zoom in, I'm going to take the end. I'm going to zoom in, make it small as I want, and then align that centered. So now, if I create this title clip, I can drag it down here. And now over that 5-second period, you can see right here, it's zooming in. Now, if you want to make sure that the background was black and not transparent, we can double click this. And I can uncheck this uh background. So now, if I Oh, I hit I don't know if I saved that. Let's go ahead uncheck that. update title now. Oh, right. One more thing. Uncheck the background. Go to background and give it a color and turn this up. There we go. So, now if you want to make sure you have a black background, then of course I can have it fade to the video. Uh so that's that's the title clip uh editor. A quick overview. You can have more than one title clip uh text box in a title. You can add shapes. Um, most part basic text is what I use it for, but it does have a lot of options. Let's talk about something else. So, we talked about fading to and from black, right? What if I want to fade to a different color for some reason, maybe white, right? I used to do wedding videos and sometimes fading to white is nicer than fading to black. How would you go about doing that? Well, the way I would go about doing it is up in my project pin, I would rightclick this and I would choose add color clip. And then I would choose a color, whatever color you want. You can do white, you can do gray. Let's go ahead and just do a pink color. Okay, so now we have this clip we can pull down. By default, it's 5 seconds, but you can make it however long you want. And then all I have to do is fade. Click like that just like we did anything else. And now we're fading to pink or whatever color. I can always double click that. Uh, can I change the color? Clip effect. Now I guess if I want to change the color. Ah, I can double click on it there and I can select a color with the dropper there or pick whatever I want. Okay, now it's blue and now I can fade to blue. So, that's fading to another color. I'm trying to think of other basic things people might do in a video editor here. Let me bring in a few other clips down into the track here. So, let's say I have this going on. I click here, of course, you're going to see the top track. Uh, something else that might come in handy, if I right click here and go to multitrack, which I guess is F12 as well, it will show you all the clips in that area. So, if you're unclear on where the clips are, I never really use that, but I could see that being useful if you have a lot of tracks and you want to see all the different video clips in there. And then, let's see. F12 brings it back to F12. F12, or just right click here and go uh multi-track. Uh, extracting a frame, you can save it to a file. If I extract a project now, I it's going to save it to a file, but then add it to the project here. Now I can drag this image in here and do different things with it, but it's a still image. That's super useful sometimes, especially if let's say I just want to like freeze frame. Well, there's a freeze frame option uh actually in under effects, but you could also just take the last shot and hold it there. Different ways of doing different things, doing the same thing. Uh I think that's it. I'm just trying to think if there's anything else uh that is a normal editing thing. I thank you for watching. I hope you give Kaden Live a try. There are other open source options out there. OpenShot, I haven't tried it in years. Back in the day, there was Cinderella. That thing was not super fun to work with. Uh Blender has a built-in thing, but it's it's not as fullfeatured. It's not the main focus of Blender. Uh yeah, OpenShot this as far I know there's probably a few others. I've been using Caden live forever and I think it it works great. So go ahead, give it a try. Uh, no harm, no value. You don't have to pay for it because it's free. It's open source and it's been around for over 20 years. Uh, and it's crossplatform. I thank you for watching, and I hope that you have a great day.