Blogs

I’ve slightly improved the Light Graffiti effect, especially for different colours painted over each other. Enjoy :)

Light Painting 2 from Simon Eugster on Vimeo.

You may probably have noticed that some additional widgets have been added to kdenlive recently. And you probably do not want your kdenlive to look like that:

(Notice that this is on a 1680×1050 screen. You absolutely don't want kdenlive to look like that on an even smaller screen.)

It wont … »

So … this all started when a friend, Melanie, was working on her final paper about Light Graffiti and showed me the video below around mid-September.

Light Painting, also known as Light Graffiti or (partially) Lumasol, is so easy with a photo camera. You take a dark room, use a low shutter speed (several seconds), and paint in the air.

But what about video? You cannot decrease the shutter speed to one frame per minute. Therefore it is not possible.

Really?

This really made me think a lot. Actually for several weeks.

After a few minutes of research, I found that the effect used to create the video seems to be kept secret. (At least I couldn’t find any technical information about it.) After some additional research, I read that they actually did this effect in hardware (i.e. programming some camera chip) — but this was after I’d already written this blog post. (Actually, I’m not sure whether it is truely in hardware; some effects suggest that it was done in post as well, like in the part where you only see the light but not the painter.)

Nevertheless, the idea was fascinating, so I decided to start writing an effect frei0r filter that would do the same. It couldn’t be that hard.

That is what I thought at the beginning.

read more »

In the next version of kdenlive you will again find new scopes. This time not for video but for audio! I will also give some tips about audio in general (recording, perception, etc.), not only about kdenlive’s scopes.

read more »

Merry Xmas! from Simon Eugster on Vimeo.

In the next kdenlive version (or in the current SVN version, if you dare compile it yourself :)) you will find a new option for the vectorscope: To draw I/Q lines. What are they good for?
Read more … »

This article is going to give some tips regarding shooting Video with your DSLR and editing it in kdenlive afterwards.

Camera hardware

Lens

Generally Primes are preferred over zooms in video. (Some people, like me, prefer it over zooms as well for photography — but this is a matter of taste and of how you work.) Why that? A psychological reason is that eyes (at least mine) cannot zoom either, so zooming is hardly ever used in video. The technical reason is that Primes are cheaper to build whilst offering better quality: Better sharpness, bigger aperture (for limiting the Depth of Field). Opening the aperture gives you a very nice look. (Please also read ArtInvent’s comment on this.)

Examples for very popular primes are the Nikon 50mm f/1.8D and the Canon 50mm f/1.8 II.

If you own such a lens, just don’t forget that you should not always shoot at f/1.8. ;)

The last scope (after the Histogram and the Waveform and RGB Parade) that is new to kdenlive 0.7.8 is the Vectorscope. This is actually the most interesting scope because it is quite different from the other ones and, secondly, is really useful for Color Grading.

More in the full article »

Just wanted to post a screenshot of Kdenlive's current development version that includes a great new feature: a Stop motion utility.
The only drawback is that this feature currently depends on a specific hardware to capture from HDMI. So how does it work?

It's very easy: just plug your camcorder or digital camera into the HDMI port of a Linux compatible capture card, and you get a live preview of the camcorder.
Click on the capture button to grab an image, you can also transparently overlay the last captured frame on the monitor to easily see the difference with current live feed.

So capture your frames, preview them with the built in preview feature and then click on the "Add sequence" button to add your animated stopmotion sequence to your project.
Read more in the full article …

We are proud to announce the release of Kdenlive 0.7.8. This new version brings many new features, including improved tools for color correction, improved UI for effects (you can now adjust some transitions and effects directly on the monitor), track effects, improved slideshows and a lot more.

The development team is also slowly growing, and Kdenlive benefits from the recent improvements in the MLT framework(version 0.5.10 is required) and Frei0r effects(version 1.2.0 is recommended) projects.

You can find a detailed list of changes on the Kdenlive 0.7.8 information page.

Source code can be downloaded from our sourceforge page, and packages will be announced on our download page when available.

Support can be found in our forums and issues reported on our bugtracker.

We hope you will enjoy this release!

For the Kdenlive team:
Jean-Baptiste Mardelle