Kdenlive’s Titler Tool rewrite began with GSoC 2019 and now I am happy to announce that we have an MLT producer which can play .qml files with animations! The producer is being now integrated in Kdenlive.
These are the QML Animation types that are supported and tested so far:
- PropertyAnimation
- NumberAnimation
- ColorAnimation
- RotationAnimation
- PathAnimation
- PauseAnimation
Along with grouping (ParallelAnimation and SequentialAnimation)
Meaning theoretically you can now create animated qml clips that can be added to your video!
Running some examples using the producer
(All examples are run at 25 fps, so you may see a slight jerkiness in some animations)
- RotationAnimation with easing curves
- PropertyAnimation (with easing curves)
- ColorAnimation
- Fading out an SVG image (NumberAnimation on opacity)
- PathInterpolator (source)
Carl Schwan is also helping us make a UI for the titler: https://invent.kde.org/carlschwan/libvectorgraphicsquick – right now, this allows some basic editing capabilities for a .qml file. 🙂
Status
We are now neck-deep into testing and integrating the producer with Kdenlive. The animations seem to be playing fine in the Clip Monitor, but work still remains with adding it to the Timeline and rendering it. Also, there are some known issues when playing certain animations, for instance, the last frame of the PathAnimation isn’t rendered.
If you want to test out the QML MLT producer, you could do it with melt, MLT’s command-line player. You can find the source code for the qml producer here: https://github.com/akhilam512/mlt/tree/qmlproducer
Note you will need to use CMake to build mlt in order to have the qml producer built. Once that is done, run:
melt /path/to/file.qml
The rendering logic can be found here: https://invent.kde.org/akhilkgangadharan/QmlRenderer/-/tree/multithreaded-mlt
Some major changes were made to the rendering logic. We now use a separate render thread for rendering. This took a bit of time but it is essential as rendering on the main thread was leading to a crash when a qml clip was dragged to the Timeline in Kdenlive due to conflicts between QOpenGlContext makeCurrent() calls of the Timeline and the Renderer. See this commit for details.
This is absolutely a cool new feature! Great work
Can you make an Android app that allows user to only edit a video on their Smartphone and then transfer those edits to the PC version of Kdenlive.
What do you mean by “only edit a video” (what is “only”) and what do you exactly mean by “transfer those edits”? (what are “edits”?)
Can you fix everything else that stoped working after 19. Came out
What are you missing?
Hi, is there a forum or place to note bugs, or check current issues?
For the titler not yet, but for kdenlive you can use the bug tracker to file bugs reports: https://bugs.kde.org/ There is a forum but it isn’t very active. You can also join the telegram/matrix/irc chat.
Good to know. I’be been having big issues with playback, and the timeline indicator doesn’t follow what’s actually being played. And proxied videos turn out white and aren’t converted.
This is absolutely great news friends. You guys are doing real good work!
Just ignore some unwanted criticism. All cheers to your great work! ?
‘unwanted criticism’
Kde is filled with bugs and just adding features ontop of it won’t solve the issue.
what a crappy attitude…
I discovered the problems of fake bugs lies in incomplete packages in the software manager of Linux Mint. It’s not properly installing the Kdenlive pak so you need to get the mirrored version on the Kdenlive website as I did and it will install it directly onto your system and you can just rename the icon after it’s installed. It’s really simple that way.
While i do agree that adding features on top of things without solving previous issues is not a good idea. Maybe a compromise can be made to work on optimization for a few months and then implement key features. My reasoning is that if KDenlive team only focuses on bug fixes and optimizations it may lose out on grabbing attention and some useful programmers down the line to help them. Which is kind of why i mentioned in the last thread or two that it still needs to have simplistic features and an HDR color grading mode to leapfrog the competition or even be able to come close to the rest. There are people like me out there trying to switch from AE, and even Resolve 16 or to at least have an alternative for those of us who cant afford these things. I know they can not implement all the features but they can make a few things simpler that other professional video editors can not do.
For the august release, one the highlights will be a multistream audio support as well as some performance optimizations and, if all goes well, hopefully single track transitions. By the end of the year expect nested timelines. So we are getting to the point of having the basic tools needed for a professional editing workflow. Do join the community on telegram/irc/matrix and share your needs. 😉
(Do note this dates are estimates!)
What is the rationale behind splitting audio from the video track on the timeline. I can appreciate there are certain times when it is useful, but it seems to me that it makes for a difficult to use timeline as the number of tracks increase. I regularly use 10 video / overlay tracks, and it becomes near unworkable for me, to the point that I currently use Shotcut, despite KDEnlive have some superior features for me, particularly the implementation of Keyframes, guides and markers. But, the current forced splitting of audio to a different area of the timeline is a dealbreaker for me. It would even be usable to have adjacent video and audio tracks instead of them getting progressively further apart.
Ditto … I agree with you … and I’m only using 4 video tracks two dedicated to crossfade titles … and two to crossfade main videos after cutting)
Could we perhaps have a single ‘joined together’ AV track, which could have a right click to either edit the video, the audio, or BOTH together?
Perhaps we can automatically fade BOTH the video and it’s audio TOGETHER when crossfading two clips?
I just dicovered Kdenlive and these features are exactly what I’m looking for. I cross my finger for smooth development guys 😉
Why not improve the text editor in the Titler. It is awful. You can’t do basic things like highlight a word and change its point size or color … All the cool features are great, but the purpose of a titler is to make titles … that would certainly include a good text editor.
Hmmm, the purpose of the rewrite of titler is to make a great tool for making titles. Here you can see some of the expected features: https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kdenlive/-/issues/460
Thanks for the input. I added it under “Features ideas”. We have to sort the ideas to be more clear what is text related.
I also think a Titler at the moment is not really useful. Already for a while I am editing my Titles in my Photo editor and not in Titler. The project that you started with a Titler is in my opinion way too big and it will take a long time before it will function as it should and we can use it. I think would be much better to do it in two stages. First stage to create a reliable Titler for basic needs and hopefully also with an option to insert .srt subtitles and second stage with all the animations. I think Titler is something that Kdenlive is really lacking at the moment.
This task will definitely be done in stages and only merged to Kdenlive whenever there is basic stable functionality as well as feature parity with the current titler. Do note there is parallel work done as part of Google Summer of Code to add subtitling support. https://invent.kde.org/multimedia/kdenlive/-/issues/666
This looks awesome! I’m looking forward to trying the next version!
Is it possible to use Bézier curves in keyframe for video clips?
Great news on the simple 2D animation stuff this is good progress and it looks like there might be refinement. I can only hope soon there will be plans in the community for a HDR color grading Open source standard. Also would maybe possibly like to see a feature to import all clips in a straight line together so as not to waste time dragging each clip in my project folder to edit. This is of course whenever you guys can get around to it at all.
Thanks for all you do! This looks great!
I hope you consider adding font spacing animation (kerning or tracking) like one can do in iMovie or DaVinci Resolve!
Thanks again.