Complete Beginner's Guide to Editing Videos with Kdenlive

In this video, I'll be showing you how to edit videos inside of Kdenlive. Now, it's important to

understand that the project does not start inside of the editing program. Instead, it starts with

something more conceptual, like an idea. Once you have the idea, you might move on to maybe

having a storyboard or a script, and then you'd gather the assets needed for the project. It

doesn't have to be in that order, but typically it will start with an idea. Now, I won't

be touching all the tools, but we'll be going over most things that you need to know to do a

good edit. With that said, if you'd like to follow along with what I'm doing in this video,

you can download the assets that I'll be using using the link in the description. Next thing, we

have the version of Kdenlive. I'll be using the latest version of Kdenlive. Download the one

that's compatible with your system, either installable or portable. You can try both, see

which one works best for you. I myself use Flatpak. We'll talk more about workspaces later on.

Just note that if your workspace is different and you have the same workspace, go in the upper

right corner and choose Editing. Each one of these options is a different workspace. We'll get

into that a little later. Once you have Kdenlive installed, we can launch it and familiarize

ourselves a little bit with the user interface. Now, I won't be going too deep for now, but

understand that you have different panels, different sections here, which you can

resize simply by left-clicking, holding, and dragging. You have different tabs, and each tab is

a different panel or window, giving you access to different features and different options.

You can toggle these on and off by going to the menu bar inside of View, and then check or

uncheck any of these checkboxes. I would recommend going inside of Settings and taking a look.

You don't really have to click on anything besides maybe the Run Config Wizard and maybe

eventually Configure Kdenlive. If you're having issues with icons or text, you can try going

to the application style, pushing it to Breeze, and then for Color Scheme, choosing

Breeze Dark. Well, whichever version of Breeze you want, but choosing Breeze basically. So

the next thing to do would be to set the parameters for our project. And by this, I mean do

we want it to be 720p? Is it going to be 4k, 1080p, 30 frames, 24 frames, so on and so

forth? What's the aspect ratio? What are you trying to output at the end of this? You can always

do different versions of it, but you still need to choose where you want to start. So to do

that, we go inside of the menu bar inside of Project and down to Project Settings. Inside of

this window here, we can choose the profile along with a couple other parameters. So I'll go

inside of 4 HD 1080 and I'll choose HD 1080p, 30 frames per second. You also have the option

to create custom profiles. I have a tutorial on that. You can always check the other tutorials

on my channel for some more advanced editing tricks. Alright, so once we have our

profile selected, press OK. There are other settings in there you can always explore

them. Now we have our project set to the profile that we want. We can start importing our

assets. There are several ways to import your assets, but I'll start with the drag and drop. So

if you've downloaded the files that I provided, you can simply extract the ZIP, select

everything in drag and drop it inside of the Project bin. If you don't have the Project bin

open, go inside of the menu bar, inside of view and make sure to check on Project bin. Now as

soon as Kate and live identifies a piece of media, it's going to offer the option to change the

profile of that media. I'm simply going to hit cancel because we already chose the

profile that we'd like to work with. Now if we click on these arrows here, we can see our

assets and so let's start editing. I'll click on this first video over here in inside

of the clip monitor if you are inside of the editing workspace. So inside of the clip monitor,

we're going to get a preview of this selected clip inside of the Project bin. At the bottom here,

you can left click hold and drag. to scrub through the footage.

This one is going to have a slightly slower playback for me since it's 4k. If you want to

see more information about your clips you can double click on them. It's going to open the

clip properties tab and in here you can see the specifications of your media, whatever is

selected inside the project bin. Note that you can move these tabs around. You can also detach

them and place them somewhere else. For now, I'll leave it there. Now to start adding our

clips to the timeline. The timeline or these tracked down here. This is basically where

you're going to do your edit. We're going to assemble what you would like to export in the end.

One way to add your clips or assets is simply to left click hold and drag it onto the

timeline and release. Now if you scrub through the timeline you're going to get a preview of

what's on the timeline inside of the project monitor. So the clip monitor shows you what's inside

of your project bin and the project monitor shows you what's on the timeline where you're

editing. So once we have our clip on a timeline we can start editing. So basically you can

trim it which is to left click on one of the edges, hold and drag and this will crop the

beginning or the end. You can do it for both sides and notice when you hover over the

beginning it gets a green highlight and when you hover around the end it gets a red

highlight. That's how you can tell them apart. So these parts that we've cropped are not

deleted. They're still available. You simply have to expand the clip back again and

so let's say that I want this to start around here. So not all the way at the beginning I want

to take a few frames out. I can move the playhead over here just so it snaps. We have these well

I have the snapping enabled down here in the bottom right corner of the status bar. So I can

click on the beginning hold drag and it'll snap to the playhead and now let's say I wanted to

cut it. So let's say around here one option we could also grab the end and drag it in or you

can grab the razor tool and wherever you left click you have to click directly on the clip

otherwise it's not going to cut it. You can see here no clip to cut. You have to click on it and

we can grab the selection tool again. Now we've just separated these two parts. You can simply

delete them. That's one way of importing your clips onto the timeline and now a different way

possibly better way of doing it. Grab your clip and inside of the clip monitor you can scrub

through it, identify where you want it to start and then you can click on this little button

here which says set zoom in or you can use the keyboard shortcut I it's going to crop to

this part right here. It'll make sense in just a moment and now let's identify where we want it

to end. So in my case it'll be right here when he's lifting off the ground. I'll click on this

other icon here set zone out or the keyboard shortcut O and it's going to crop to that point and

now if I were to left click hold and drag this onto the timeline it's going to only import the

segment that we've selected up here but I don't want to import the audio since the audio is not

going to be used here so I'll delete this. So instead up here the clip monitor we have those

two little icons here we have a film strip and a speaker and basically if you left click on

the film strip alone and drag it in it's only going to bring in the video and if you did it with

the audio that your speaker it would only bring in the soundtrack. So how would we

delete the soundtrack for this first clip that we imported well you have several options one of

them is to right click on it and go to ungroup clips you can also use the keyboard shortcut

control plus shift plus g and once they're ungrouped you can grab the audio separately and

delete it otherwise if I undo this they move together another The option to delete just the

soundtrack is to hold down ALT, left click on it, you can see we're getting red outlined and

press delete. So let's go ahead and repeat this step with our other clips. So if I jump to

this clip over here, you can scrub through the timeline to where you did your last cut,

hold down ALT and use the arrow keys to jump between cuts or the selected zone on the timeline.

So this jumps all the way to the end and now I can scrub through this clip and look for where it

matches the most. So let's say over here, I'm going to set zoom in so where it starts, then I'll

scrub and find where I want to cut and it's going to be right around here where it's about to

hit the ground, set zone out and notice here we don't have the two icons for video and audio.

That is because this clip here does not have any audio track. So it's not that the audio is

silent, it just doesn't have it. So if I left click, hold and drag onto the timeline, it's

only going to bring in video. Alright, so I'll hold down ALT, use the arrow key. First I'll

click on the timeline to activate it so that we're at the end of this one. Now I'll do the

same with the next clip. So it's going to be this person here, jumps, does a flip and right

before he hits the ground. So over here I'm going to set zone in. Now I'll scrub to the point

where I want it, where I want to cut it and let's say around here, think, press O on the

keyboard for out. I'll drag just the video onto the timeline and then finally I'll repeat this

with this clip over here. But if I change the zone, it's going to override the previous zone that

we had and if we ever wanted to use that specific zone that we first had, then it would be

gone. To avoid that, you can click on this little icon here which is insert zone and project

bin. Keyboard shortcut, control I, click on it and now over in the project bin notice we have a

little arrow here, click on it and you have zone one. So we've just saved that first zone that

we had selected. So now we're free to scrub through the footage. Let's see if I jump

here. Scrub to the footage, identify where we want to make our endpoint. You can use the

arrow keys to go back and forth as well. So grab all of this and bring it in. I can press

spacebar to playback. And we now have our cut. All right, now you can use a transform to zoom in

so you can match their position better. We'll get into the transform in just a moment.

Before that, I'm going to zoom in onto the timeline and I'm going to do so by clicking on

this little magnifying glass, which is fit zoom to project. This is simply going to fit

everything on the timeline like visibly in front of us. So now we have our first edit. Now I'm

going to add a fade out to this clip so we can fade to black to do so. Simply click on the upper

right corner. You can either left click and then it's going to add a fade out or can left

click hold and drag so you can control the duration. Of course, if you simply left click, you

can always drag it after, but I prefer to left click holding drag it myself. From there, I'm

going to click on fade to black. So instead of fading to transparency, it's going to fade

to a solid black and I'll change the animation to cubic. So instead of having a linear fade

to black, it's going to have a bit more attitude to it. Now we can go inside of graphics, grab

our logo or drag it in here, put it on top here. And now here we understand a bit of how layers

work or how tracks work. The V1. So if we look over here on the left, we have V1 for video one,

V2 for video two, a one for audio one, a two for audio two. When you place a clip on a track

above another track, it is placed above the track quite literally. So if I had a solid

clip up here, it would block the clip underneath it completely. But in this case, we have an

image with transparency. So it's like you can see through it still. So now I'm going to add a

fade. So this time I'll click on the upper left corner and drag it in. And now the logo is going

to fade in gradually. I'm going to click on the clip, change the animation to cubic in again. So

it has a bit more attitude fading in. And there we have it. Lastly,

the logo is a bit big, so I'm going to shrink it in size. And to shrink it in size, you can

click on the star over here and choose transform. You can either double click on it, or simply

left click, hold and drag it onto the clip that you want to add it. And you'll have the

options to control it inside of the effects and composition. This is basically what we've

been using to tweak the values of the fade-ins that we've added so far. All right, so inside of

the transform, down here in size, we can change the percentage. So let's say I go

for 80%. It is going to shrink the size of the logo over here. All right, you can click on

this, and it arrows to collapse it. So we have our first rough cut, but over here in the

beginning, I want to have a transition between the clouds and the next clip. I also want

this first clip over here to be a little shorter. It lasts a bit long, so I'm going to crop it.

Now, there are different ways of cropping. One option is you can snap the end of it to the

playhead. To do so, you can press close parentheses. To snap the beginning to the playhead,

you can use open parentheses. All right, and now we've left a big gap back here. There are

several ways to close this gap. One of them would be to right click on the track and go with

remove space. Or notice that the top clip didn't move. You can right click, say remove space in

all tracks, and everything moves together. There's another tool that allows you to do this for

other situations where this won't work. We'll see it in just a moment. So I want to add a

transition between the clouds and this second clip over here. One way to do this is select a

cloud clip. Go up here above the timeline. You have mixed clips. You can use the keyboard

shortcut U or double click between the clips. It's going to add this purple thing, which is

a transition. If you click on it, you're going to get a couple options here. So you can control

the softness, the duration, the position. The position is mostly which clip does it affect most.

But if this feels a bit complicated, you can delete that and grab this clip over here,

move it above, and simply drag it on top of this clip. Now notice it's simply going to

cover it completely because again, it's now placed above it. And I want this transition to

last two seconds. So I'm going to hold down Alt and I'll press the right arrow key so I can

jump to this cup over here. So now if I hold down Shift and I press the left arrow key, the

playhead is going to jump exactly one second. So hold down Shift again and I'll press the

arrow key and it jumps another second. And now I have two seconds of transition right

here. So holding down Shift and pressing the arrow keys jumps one second in either direction.

And in this case, one second is 30 frames because we're working at 30 frames per second. Now to

add a transition between this top clip over here and this bottom clip, I can click at the

bottom left corner, this little purple dot here, and it's going to add a composition track over

here, this white composition. Now you can always change what a composition does so we can go

from wipe over here to all of these other options. But instead what I want to do is change the

white method from none to, I'm going to scroll down here, and go to curtain. Now if we move

forward, you can see how it has this curtain transition, but the edges are very rough. So inside

of the effect and composition stack, I'm going to increase the softness significantly. And now

it's going to give a more subtle transition from the clouds to this scene over here. All right.

Now to add our title. I'll jump back in the project bin. I'll click on an empty area. So

there's nothing selected. And then up here, I'm going to click on this folder to create a

folder and I'll call this titles, press enter to confirm. And over here, this little play

button or video button, if you left click on it, it's going to open an explorer window. This is

another way of importing your assets. You can also import image sequences that way. You

have this option down here, import image sequence, but I'm simply going to cancel out of

this. And instead I'm going to click on the little arrow next to it for this dropdown. And in

here, you have other options. You can add a color clip, image sequence as well. And you can

add a title clip. So I'm going to add a title clip, left click. I have a tutorial dedicated to

titles inside of KDN Live. So I'm just going to breeze over this one. I'm going to write the

word flip. Then I'll center it horizontally and vertically. The font that I'm using.

using is Lily tier one. You can download it from Google fonts if you want to. You can change the

color but instead I'm going to use a gradient. I already have a gradient here. You can click on

the pencil so you can customize the gradient. Just cancel out of this. I'm going to add a drop

shadow and crease the blur. Now to see better how this is contrasting with the background,

I'll check on show background. Tweak the shadow a little bit. Once I'm done, press create

title. Now we have our title clip, but I want to place it above all of our tracks. So I'm

going to right click on this top track, insert track. We can add video, audio, audio, video. You

can choose above or below, choose how many tracks, etc. Simply going to create a new

track called titles, click OK, and then I'll drag in the title. Now I want the title to appear

at least one second after this starts. So I'm going to go to the beginning, hold down shift,

press the arrow key and snap it to this playhead. Now I'm going to drag it all the way, snap it

to the end of this transition down here. Let's add a bit of animation to our title clip. I'm

going to go inside of the star, choose transform, drag it on to it. And now inside of transform,

we can also create animations. To do this, I'll jump to the beginning using this stopwatch

with the arrow. We already have a keyframe. I'll jump to the end over here and I'll add a

keyframe. Jumping back to the beginning, I can change the y value so I can move it up and

down. So I'm simply left clicking, hold and dragging. So I'll move this over here, for

example, and then jump to the end. And I'll move this ever so slightly higher. Now you're

going to see red outlines with the show height edit mode. You can also click and move your

text on the screen in resize, etc. If you move to the right corner, you have these options

here to zoom in and out of the canvas. You can add a grid. You can add some guides over here.

You have a few options over here on the right side. Alright, we have our animation. Now I want

to change the interpolation. I'm not going to get too much into this. I'm just briefly going to

show you if I click here, go to y position. This is the animation. It's a straight line.

And I want it to have a bit more attitude. So being on the first keyframe, I'm going to click on

the slope and I'll go to smooth. And now we get a little bit more of sassiness inside of our

animation. Alright, if I play this back, we're going to get this gradual up motion of the

word flip. Now to add a transition, I'm going to click on the bottom left corner. It's

going to add the composition track. But if I play back, there's no transition happening.

So to fix this inside of the effects and composition stack, we're going to go from

composition track, switch it from automatic to v1 so that it knows that it's transitioning

with v1. Now if you play back, it's going to simply fade in. Alright, now I'm going to switch

the white method from none to curtain again, so curtain. And now it goes from under to above,

I want it to do the invert. So I'm going to invert it. And now it's going to go from the top to

the bottom. And I'll add a bit of softness to it. With that done, I'm now going to make it

fade out or disappear. And to do so, I'll click on this bottom right corner, add another wipe.

I'll change the method to dissolve our mean to curtain. And then I'm going to change the

composition track from automatic to v1. So it's switching with v1 again, and I'll click on invert.

So it goes upwards, increase the softness quite a bit. And now when I play back, it's going to

fade away. So now we have this big gap here with everything in the back. And if I were to right

click, and I go to remove space, in all tracks. Notice how it doesn't stop at the end of this

track, which is basically where we'd want everything to snap to. So instead, I'll control Z out

of this, we can use the spacer tool, keep our shortcut and what the spacer tool does, it grabs

everything that is after the cursor. So if I left click here, you can see everything gets

selected and we can move it all together and snap it to the end. If ever you want to move

everything that's just on one track, hold down control, click on that track and it'll grab

everything on just that track. We've now finished the rough cut, we can add our music by

going to the music folder, drag it in, but if I fit to timeline, you can see how this track is

too long. So I'll control Z out of this, zoom in again, I'll click by the end over here, set

zoom in, drag and drop it, and now I can match it to the end over here and drag it in. Now

when it comes to the soundtrack, I want the first cut here to happen on the beat. So this part

right here, drag it back, you can zoom in as much as you want. Now your waveform is not going

to look like mine, you can simply right click on the track here in separate channels,

otherwise it's going to look like this. Separate channels. Alright, now I'll make sure that

this starts at the beginning. I don't want the track to start playing as loud as it does from

the beginning, instead I want it to fade in. To do so, I can click in the upper left corner

here, click hold and drag and it's going to add a fade in so it's not going to start full

volume. But still I find that the volume of the audio is a bit too loud

and I would like to bring it down. So I'll click on the star, go to volume, key frameable, add

it to the soundtrack and now I can lower the volume here so I could say for example negative

12, which is lowering it quite a bit, or simply negative 6. Now last but not least, you can

do a bit of color grading or adjusting the values. I have tutorials dedicated to just

that. You can click on the star and add a lift gain gamma to some of your tracks and modify

their values over here. Alright, now if this workspace is not comfortable working with these,

you can always switch to the color workspace or the effects workspace for a smoother

workflow, if I jump to the color workspace here, we now have some more information as to what

we're working with but we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves here. I'll jump back to editing

and we can do simple tweaks. We're going to make these slightly redder. Now when it

comes to the effects, by the way, if you go inside of the effects tab, you're going to

have all of the effects available and to make them go inside of the star here, you

simply have to right click on them and add to favorite. Check the rest of my channel, you'll

find plenty of tutorials dedicated to teaching you more advanced things with getting

live. Alright, so last but not least, what we're going to do is place everything inside of a

sequence. So I can control a to grab everything, right click and go to create sequence from

selection. Now of course, you want to make sure you save all of this first probably. So go to

file and save, but I'll call this comp one. So okay. And now we've created a sequence, the

comp one over here, which has all of our cuts. And then it's inside of sequence as a single

strip. If you go inside of sequences up here, this is what the sequences are.

We have the sequence one, which is the main timeline that we've been working with, and then we

have now comp one. And this is good for things like if I go inside of images and I grab this

computer screen here, it's an image, I'll place it above this, I'll stretch it out. And it

doesn't fit the size. So I have to add a transform to it. And inside of the transform, we can

click over here, I think it's this one, fit to width, and it's simply going to fit the width.

You can also finish aligning it. So that's a vertically such and to remove the green screen or go

inside of effects or look for key. I have a tutorial dedicated to learning how to remove green

screen, make our selection such we can zoom in to see if there are any errors. Seems to have

done a pretty good job. I'll zoom back out. And now with this sequence over here, we'll add a

transform and we can scale it down, can use the controls here, click on the control or hold

down, I think it's shift or control, shift, hold down shift, and then I can place it behind

the screen here. There we have it. You can also zoom in on the screen, the

display, if you don't want to be as small. And we've just placed this inside of the screen here.

All right, now one more thing, this clip over here, I find it to be a bit slow and I'd like it

to move a bit faster. So to do so, I can right click on it and go to change speed and the

higher percentage, the faster it moves, the lower the percentage, the slower it moves. So right

150, press enter, you can see it's shorter now because it's faster. And if I play back, it

still feels a little bit slow. And if we don't want to do the whole clicking, right clicking

and going to change speed, you can zoom in here, hold down control. Before we do so, notice

how we have a percentage up here, 150. So if I hold down control, left click, hold and

drag, you can see the percentage goes up. So we're not trimming it, we're changing the speed of

it. So I'll put it up here, play back. I like the speed. So now I can move everything or grab the

spacer tool. But if I left click and try to move, it doesn't move and that is because the

soundtrack is being pulled as well and it's already reaching the wall. So I can't pull

everything back. I could hold down control, but it's only going to move this track over

here. So how do we get past this? Well, you could grab the selection tool and hold down

chip, grab everything or simply lock the soundtrack, grab the spacer tool. And now when you

left click and drag, everything will move except the soundtrack. Now we can unlock it. Right. And

there we have it. Now you can see that it's a little shorter. Let's just drag this in. And

we're done. Once you're fully done to export this, you can export either this sequence or

this sequence. You can simply hold down control, press enter or go inside of the menu board

inside of project down to render. Now to have the extra options that I had over here,

simply click on more options. And that's how you get these extra options. So choose the

profile, the codec that you'd like to export as. So in this case, I'll go with generic HD

for web and before H264 AAC. You can choose whatever works for your project or whatever you're

trying to export. You can even export just audio if you want to. You can tweak the settings

however you like. You have the parallel processing for faster rendering, but you can see it

may cause artifacts. I rarely ever get artifacts and by rarely, I mean I could probably

count it on one hand. You can add metadata, choose the location where you want to save

it, give it a name. So flip video and then hit render to file. And then getting live is

going to do the render. Interesting thing is you can continue editing from this point

on and it's not going to affect the render. I can keep editing and it won't affect the render

and I can start another render after this render. So I could say, now I want to render this

sequence over here with the table. And so I go inside of here and it's like, okay, I'm

going to render it with the same settings. Render to file. Oh, I have to change the name. That's

the only thing. To render to file. And once the first render finishes, the

second one is going to start automatically and it's going to be the sequence. So to learn

more about Kine Live, you can click on display this over here. It's a bunch of more advanced

features. I also have two Kine Live classes available both on Skillshare and Udemy. The links

are down in the description.