Add clips, titles, counters, transcode... Kdenlive tutorials part 2
243In this part, we'll take a look at how to add various type of clips to your Kdenlive project, from video, audio, images, or even counters, titles, or plain color clips. Let's start !
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The clip bin is where all your clips are located. It will display everything, sorted by name by default, mixing all types of clips. If you're working on a complex project, I'd avise creating folders to store video, audio, and image clips in their respective folders.
The clip bin has a few options, to create folders, to delete folders or clips, or to switch the view mode. By default, Kdenlive will use the list view, but you can switch to an icon view if you prefer, as well as adding the date or description for each clip, or adjusting the zoom / size of each element.
The clips
You can add clips simply with drag and drop, or by clicking on the "Add clip" button. Note that you can also drag and drop folder directly to the clip bin, and their structure will be preserved.
Here are your options:
- Add clip: this brings up the file picker, and so has the exact same behavior as clicking the add clip button
- Add color clip: this will ad a plain colored image, fro which you can select the exact color, as well as the duration, which you'll be able to adjust in the timeline later. This can be useful if you want to add transitions, or fades to a specific color.
- Add Title Clip : this will open the title clip creator, a simple interface to create titles, with images and text.
- Add Template Title clip: this allows you to add to your project a title template that you'vre created and saved before.
- Add Online resources: this allows you to add copyright-free audio, image, and video files, from a few different providers.
Slideshow clip
A slideshow clip is basically a series of still images turned into a video clip. When you select this option, you'll be able to choose where the images to use are located, and select them depending on the mimetype (the type of file, for example JPEG or PNG), or a specific naming pattern in the file name.
You can then set the frame duration, which is the time each image will stay displayed before moving on the the next. You can select to use a dissolve, which is a simple fade between each image, or use a wipe, which is a more graphic way of making a transition between two images, such as using a shape. We'll talk about wipes in a later video
Generators
Generators include counters, color bars, and white noise. White noise is mostly there to use as a sort of animation, for example if you want to cut between two different clips with an old TV channel-zapping effect. It also handles the audio part, that you can mute afterwards if you don't want it.
Clip Actions
Right clicking on a clip yields a few actions. Let's see what we can do:
- Extract audio: this allows you to grab the audio track of a video clip, and create a separate audio clip from it.
- Transcode: if, for some reason, a clip has the wrong resolution or framerate, you can transcode it on the fly
- Stabilize allows you to remove the shakiness from a video clip, oom.
- Automatic scene split - this one allows you to detect changes in the various scenes, and automatically split the clip into multiple ones.
- Duplicate clip with speed changes: this one allows you to create a copy of a clip, while changing the clip speed. You can select the speed here, and if you enter a negative value, such as -100%, the clip will play in reverse. Note that you can always apply the speed effect to a clip later, from the timeline.
- Clip in timeline - this will automatically scroll the timeline to bring you to where you added this clip.
- Locate clip - this will open a file manager in the directory where the actual file is located.
- Reload clip - this reloads the desired file in Kdenlive.
- Duplicate clip - creates a duplicate of the clip, with the text "copy" added to its name.
- Clip Properties - this will display the clip properties panel, which allows you to look at a clip's informations, force some of them, add some metadata, add or visualize the markers you added to the clip, or see the motion tracking vectors that you added.
- Edit clip - this allows you to edit a clip, if it's an image, an audio clip, or a title. It will open the app you chose in the Kdenlive's settings, to edit these files. For example, you could choose to use audacity to edit audio clips, and GIMP to edit images. Title clips will be edited in Kdenlive's title editor.