Preparing for the new Kdenlive release

We are finally preparing the new Kdenlive release that should be out in 10 days (on the 19th of November). Many people are wondering what happened with our successful fundraising, so here is a first update: as it was clearly stated, the fundraising's goal was to clean up Kdenlive's base code. This will not produce immediate benefit for the user, but rather help us for future developments. The result of this refactoring has not yet been merged in Kdenlive's main tree, work will start after this release.

The last months were spent fixing important bugs that were discovered in Kdenlive 0.9.2 and also new issues that happened due to recent fixes in the video framework (MLT) that we use. Several small UI improvements and new features were also introduced as you will discover below. Users that want to help us can try the current development version (see our instructions for testing current development version) to give us feedback before the 19th of November release.

Here are some of the enhancements that will be available in next release:

Rewritten DVD Wizard

The DVD Wizard was mostly rewritten, now allowing 16:9 menus. It now also autodetects the format of your videos and proposes a trandcoding if it is necessary. In fact, you can now drop any video in the Wizard and just click transcode to get it in the correct DVD format.

DVD menus were also broken in the past versions, this should be fixed. While the menu creation remains very basic, you can now add a shadow to the menu's texts to make them look nicer.

Improved clip markers

The clip markers (comments that can be added and used for seeking in the clip) have been improved. You can now have several categories that show up in different colors. Markers can also now be imported and exported, and are compatible with Audacity's format.

Clip analysis feature

An exciting new feature is also introduced in this version: clip analysis. In short, we can have some MLT effects that analyse the clip and store the result for further use. The first usable cases are:
automatic scene detection: Kdenlive can now parse your clips to find the different scenes and add markers or cut the clip accordingly. The process is currently very slow but it's a start.
Improved motion tracking: Kdenlive can also now analyse an object's motion, and the result of this can be used as keyframes for a transition or an effect. For example, you can now have a title clip that follows an object (see small video demo below).
  
Of course, we also benefit from the fantastic work of developers working on FFmpeg, Frei0r and MLT (among others) that make all the video processing behind Kdenlive possible.

Don't hesitate to post feedback in our forums / bugtracker in the next 10 days so that we can make this release even better.
For the Kdenlive team, Jean-Baptiste Mardelle