Parametrized Keyframes - Status Report, February 2026
In the last month, I have mostly been working on refactoring the Kdenlive keyframes system to make it more powerful. This is part of a NGI Zero Commons grant via NLnet.
Improving existing parameters handling
A first step in preparation for this work was to improve the usability of some effects. In Kdenlive, we support several effect libraries, like MLT, Frei0r and FFmpeg's avfilters. Not all effects expose their parameters in the same way. For example in MLT, we have a rectangle parameter allowing to define a zone in a video frame. Other effects expose several independent parameters for a rectangle, namely x, y, width and height.
Currently, these effects are displayed with a list of sliders for each value:
With my latest changes, these will be handled like a rectangle, which means it can directly be manipulated in the monitor overlay.
Another improvement is the addition of Point parameters which will allow selecting a point in the monitor.
These changes are planned to be in the 26.04 release.
Boosting keyframes
The next improvement being worked on is support of keyframes per parameter. Currently, once you add a keyframe to an effect, it is applied to all parameters, which is sometimes not wanted. This will also allow animating only one parameter while leaving the others parameters fixed. Below is a screenshot of a basic UI created to test the feature.
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