From 6th to 10th of September 2024, part of the Kdenlive Team was in Germany to attend the annual KDE convention Akademy and used that opportunity of being together at the same location to have a sprint. It was good to meet face to face and to sit down and tackle some issues together. One of the topic discussed was improving our communication towards users, so here is a much needed update on the status of our fundraiser! This post should have been published a few months earlier but there were so much things happening around Kdenlive that it was hard to follow, so sorry for the delay!

It’s been a bit more than 2 years since we launched our very successful fundraiser. This allowed us to fund some much wanted features, and as a side goal, allowed me to spend more time on Kdenlive. Thanks to your donations, I will be able to dedicate two days per week to Kdenlive instead of one. Note that this only sponsors part of my work as I spend much more time to Kdenlive, but hopefully this will relieve some stress and I will have a healthier weekly rhythm.

During this time, there were around 1,900 commits to the Kdenlive repository, meaning about 3.8 commits per day! We didn’t take that much vacation, did we? Also worth noting is that we handled the port to Qt6 during that time, which was a big task and took a lot of effort.

So now for the status of the fundraiser, here is what has been done so far and what is left. All major things were implemented in the 24.12 release so that we can move on to our next goals soon.

Timeline Nesting

merged in 23.04

This was by far the biggest update since 2019, and can now be enjoyed by all (we recommend using the upcoming 24.12.2 version for the best experience). What remains for this task is to do some code cleanup that will be done in the 24.12 cycle. On a side note, the feature was merged too early and caused some annoying instabilities that are now solved. And I promise we are working to improve our development processes.

Improving the effects workflow

Several changes were made to improve the user experience and make our effects more powerful.

Group effects

merged in 24.05

Ability to control the parameters affecting all effects within the group.

Built-in effects

merged in 24.12

The effects panel gives direct access to effect parameters, allowing to quickly and easily adjust them.

More Easing Modes

merged in 24.02

In addition to the existing easing modes (linear, smooth, and constant), we’ve added several new options like: Cubic In/Out, Exponential In/Out, Circular In/Out, Elastic In/Out, and Bounce In/Out for transitions and effects.

Transform effect improvements

The Transform effect now has a monitor grid to easily align clips – merged in 24.12

Added ability to directly select clips from the monitor overlay – merged in 24.08

Redesigned effects interface

merged in 24.12

The Effect Stack redesign enhances usability with clearer organization of keyframeable and non-keyframeable parameters, improved layout consistency, more compact and clean.

Help button

merged in 24.12

Added a contextual help button in the effect / transition stack which redirects to the effect’s documentation on our fantastic documentation website.

Performance boost

Performance improvements is an always running task, but among some of the recent changes you will find:

• Spacer tool boost – merged in 24.05, the Spacer tool that was previously very laggy when moving more than 10 clips was optimized to allow almost instant move
• Improve speed for audio or video only rendering – merged in 24.08, a small improvement in the way the rendering is passed to MLT means slightly faster render times for the timeline preview
• Improve support for hardware encoders – cleanup and improve the detection of the GPU used for timeline preview and proxy clips – merged in 23.08
• Optimize parts of the timeline qml code – merged in 24.05, we now better handle out of view items

But wait, there’s more!

Thanks to your support we managed to achieve more than planned. We worked in improving our automated testing as well as hired third party developers for extra features.

Regression Testing

One thing we wanted for a long time was a way to automatically check for rendering regressions. We are now entering the final phase of this automated tests and it will soon be run automatically. Hopefully this will make future releases more stable and avoid some of the issues we had in the last years!

Audio Waveform Upgrade

merged for 25.04

The next major release of Kdenlive brings a 300% performance boost for generating audio thumbnails, along with higher-resolution waveforms for greater precision and a refactored sampling method that accurately renders the audio signal. This work was done by Étienne Paul André, check out the in depth details about thew work done here.

OpenTimelineIO Integration

expected in 25.08

Darby Jonhston is working on implementing a native C++ OpenTimelineIO integration to allow importing and exporting project files to/from other applications implementing this open standard. This has many advantages over the currently existing but very broken Python adapter based OTIO integration.

Export features:

• Export a timeline with multiple tracks and clips. (working)
• Support for markers and guides. (working)
• Support for transitions. (not started)

Import features:

• Import a timeline with multiple tracks and clips. (working)
• Support for markers and guides. (working)
• Support for transitions. (not started)

What’s next

During our sprint in Germany, we also updated our roadmap so that it better reflects the current status of our development and goals. We have something big planned for this year so stay tuned.

On behalf of the team, we would like to thank you all for your support that helps make Kdenlive better every day!