My impression is, that the crf option is actually (and very unfortunately!) not supported by kdenlive yet. Why? Well I used a rendering profile with crf=20 and rendered. Then I changed the profile to crf=18 (leaving everything else unchanged). The filesize of the first rendering should usually be smaller than the rendering of the second file. BUT: It is not! The two files had the exact same filesize! Therefore it seems to me, that kdenlive actually just ignores the crf-option (and at the same time does not put out an error message).
Could perhaps someone confirm this?
It would be also very helpful, if a savvy person could exactly explain, what options are supported and which ones not.
Happy to discuss.

Thank you for your kind and fast feedback. Because for it definitely did not work, I tried to update my system from 11.10 to 12.04 - and this actually did it! Now I can also work with the crf-option!
I am about to generate a H.264 rendering profile which uses the preset slower and the tune option film (next to the crf option). But I did put this in a seperate thread.