Kdenlive 0.9.2: Some Idle Thoughts

I'm putting together a video that is intended to be an assembly of short clips pasted one after the other. Basically, this is going to be an exercise in categorization and re-ordering. As a result of the work I've done so far, I have some comments.

My raw footage is taken with a stationary camera pointed at a scene where events happen (I'm being intentionally vague here because I'm still not sure if it's going to be worth uploading to the net or not). I want to reorder those events according to their type so that events of a similar type are edited together.

My work flow so far has been as follows: I add the raw video as a clip to the project tree. I play the video and watch it. As events happen, I press the '*' (asterisk) key to drop a Quick Marker on the clip monitor. Once the entire video has played out, I go back to the beginning and, using ALT-Left-arrow and ALT-Right-arrow, seek to each marker, decide what type of event just happened, then give the marker a proper name that describes the type of event ("Collision", "Explosion", "Oh The Humanity", etc.). Once all the markers are categorized, I'll sort them by type and then append them to the timeline to create the final video.

And it's here that I've got some comments.

First of all, when I press the '*' to drop a Quick Marker, the marker is actually dropped at a point about 1.5 seconds in the future, rather than at the frame appearing at that moment. You can even see the little red marker appear ahead of the seek arrow as the clip is playing. I've been working around this, but it's rather annoying (although it does lead one to want a feature of the form, "Drop Quick Marker at Current Position +- Some Time Constant." (My raw footage is 720p MP4/H.264 files from a consumer-grade Samsung camera.)

The other, rather larger annoyance is that I can't search on marker text. In fact, I can't quite work out what the search feature (keystroke '/') actually does at all. I'm planning on working around this by opening the .kdenlive file in an editor and doing the search in there (yuck!). In an ideal universe, I would be able to search markers for particular text, have all the matching results show up in a pane or window, and be able to click on the matching entries which will take me to that position in the corresponding clip. Once there, I could set In and Out points to create a Zone, and append that Zone to the timeline.

Finally, the program seems to leak memory. My machine has "only" 2 GiB of RAM, and as I use the program, I see gkrellm's memory meter creeping up and up until the program starts getting a little flaky. Most of my activity so far has been seeking around inside the clip preview window, skipping forward and backward a lot, and creating and deleting markers.

This will be the second time I've used Kdenlive for a non-trivial project. It comported itself relatively well the last time (far better than Cinelerra), so I'm interested in seeing it continue to improve.