For the last screencasts I had to do, I needed some tool were it’s easy to cut little pieces of various short movie files and that could have let me to assemble them togeher, maybe with some simple not too heavy transition effects.
I have tried some apps that promised that, but in the past i never had much luck. Cinelerra and Blender uis are simply painful, kino is just linear, pitivi doesn’t have any transition effect, lives insists to convert each movie frame in a separate png…
Now Kdenlive… in the past i never had much luck with that either, it was way too crashy to actually be able to get some work done with it… but some days ago I tried to compile Kdenlive from subversion…
And oh boy, everything is sooo right. I could do all the work in really short time, not a single crash, seeking frame by frame is really fast and using it is really easy.
Kdenlive is the exact balance between an easy to use app and one powerful enough (the interface could look a bit busy at a first glance, but is really simple and trivial compared to tools like Premiere, Vegas or Final cut)
I think it’s an application that really shows what the KDE development platform can do, because is something that is really unmatched in the Linux desktop, if you think the current version is still unstable and a bit impractical give a shoot at the next one as soon as will be out, it will shine!
Since it seems nowdays I can’t finish an entry without a screencast, here it is s quick and dirty “making of” of the Plasma multitouch video, well not actually that one, but shows how fast is possible to create a simple montage.