Kdenlive/Development/Ideas

This page contains ideas for future development which still need refinement.

What should be discussed about ideas?

• Bigger picture: Is the idea related to another topic and should be tackled from a more general perspective (e.g. change the timeline behaviour altogether and redesign the clip monitor for trimming, instead of adjusting here and there)
• What is the benefit of the idea? Does it target a reasonably large user group to justify the development effort?
• What is the estimated effort? If it is hard to estimate, what details or what knowledge is missing?

What are possible goals?

• Provide a workflow that is efficient enough to work on long projects
• Provide core functionality that is expected from a professional video editor
• Attract more developers to speed up development

What are possible benefits?

• ❤️ – Community will love this feature
• 🎥 – Professionals need this feature
• 🤓 – Makes work with Kdenlive more efficient/pleasurable

GitLab issues are considered until 2020-03-28.

Web Site

Topic	Benefit	Description
Improved download experience	❤️ – new users have no troubles downloading Kdenlive	Always link to the newest Kdenlive.AppImage in the download section

UI and UX

• How can we improve user guidance? Use modern methods to help the user find features and understand what they do.
• Is the workflow intuitive or can it be improved (e.g. less clicks, more clarity in navigation or switching widgets)?

Topic	Benefit	Description
Improved keyframe editing		For example, edit all keyframes together: #259, add more easing modes #572 (note: CSS animations also contain easing modes)
Project Bin improvements	🤓	Improve visual clarity and UX for project bin. For example, add a bit of spacing between clip entries, fix #283. See also #287, #291. Show start frame of zones and not just duration. Open and collapse folders with arrow keys ←→ instead of forwarding the clip in the clip monitor. Make tags more visible and allow to filter by tag. Add “Move to folder” to context menu to speed up clip sorting (rather than dragging the clip in a long list to the top and waiting for the content to scroll).
Improve effect experience	🤓 – Applying effects is faster	Improve visual clarity of the effects list (coloured number boxes do not help too much e.g.), keep looping a zone while modifying effects (see #293), check if interactions work (e.g. scrolling has a double assignment: It scrolls the effect properties page, but also the keyframe item). See also #350. Add comments to effects, see #582. Remove all effects on a clip, as in T9797. Check if resetting with RMB is the standard way of if double-click is better (see T10295). Check for consistency in the effect widgets in general and check that numeric input is possible (also for Lift/Gamma/Gain value bar).
Workspaces for specialised workflows	🤓 – Faster editing in an editing stage	Change what widgets are shown and how Kdenlive behaves depending on the current editing stage (audio, effects, color correction, …); see #407. Reset layouts (#249) and include them in the project file #417
Window management		Make a widget cover the whole window for better focus, see #519. Auto-adjust the clip monitor width to the video aspect ratio to give other widgets more space.
Shortcuts	🎥	Give shortcuts another visit and make sure they are consistent (see e.g. #550, #563) and also get inputs from other editing tools. Create a shortcut guideline document where shortcuts are listed including the reasoning behind (e.g. in and out points with i and o because of the words and because the keys are next to each other). Add shortcuts for different playback speeds as in #406.
General usability improvements	🎥 – Kdenlive provides a consistent and practical UX	Redesign clip popups (e.g. other location) to avoid that they overlap controls (#592), make it easier to resize the timeline (#593), use timeline scrubbing/zooming for faster navigation in the timeline, see T10897
Icons		Add more custom icons. For example, “Insert zone in project bin” is the clip icon – make it look related to set in and out points. Consistent icon language for Select/Razor/Spacer tools. Also have an “Enable Effect” icon.

Performance

Topic	Benefit	Description
Rendered preview	🎥	Pre-render the selected zone while editing when normal playback stutters. (implemented)
GPU support	🎥 – Everybody loves x-fold speed-up	Make use of GPUs to render videos and scopes. Use ArrayFire e.g. to stay hardware independent. Ask Nicolas for his research.

Editing Workflow

Topic	Benefit	Description
Advanced editing in timeline	🎥 – Users of other professional video editing applications are familiar with the editing workflow from other programs.	Editing includes both trimming and 3-point editing. Improve trimming of clips directly in the timeline whereby adjacent clips are trimmed as well, and inserting/(re-)moving clips on the timeline. See also #225
Editoral Collaboration		T10260

Colour Correction

Topic	Benefit	Description
Scope improvements	Simon wants it	Add logarithmic scale to histogram. Check what the %% mean in the Vectorscope. Show better colour levels in the vector scope when everything gathers on one point.
Secondary Colour Correction	🎥	Colour Correction for parts of the image. This first requires a solid general colour correction workflow.

Timeline

Topic	Benefit	Description
Track types		#421 – also support video-only tracks
Various timeline enhancements		Use user-defined categories (name and colour) for guidelines, see #547. Merge clips again after they have been split, see T10846. Upgrade the timeline ruler and e.g. highlight seconds and not just every 25th pixel.
Nested timelines	🎥 - Larger projects are easier to structure and to edit in post	Edit some clips on a timeline and add the result on the main timeline, see #226, or combine clips as blender does it, see #422

Effects

Topic	Benefit	Description
Speed Change	❤️	Reverse parts of videos easily (#555, #224). Advanced speed editing including slow-motion can be accomplished e.g. with slowmoVideo, but including slowmoVideo requires building a slow-motion library which can be used by MLT e.g.
Effect groups		#4

Audio

Topic	Benefit	Description
Professional Audio Support	🎥	Improve working with audio. Cross-fade audio on a single track. Support more than 2 audio channels as #382. Add a master mixer for audio, as in #357. Support audio busses where audio output can be sent to, edited with an effect, and then mixed together in master.
Enhanced Audio Recording Workflow	YouTubers, Users which record audio directly within Kdenlive	Make it easier for users to record audio, e.g. as #594. Also, see #105.
Auto-cut silence	❤️ – YouTubers	When recording voice, mute when the person is not talking. This could be an audio effect (threshold) which works in post, or directly included in the recorder (would not work for existing audio). See #247

Video

Topic	Benefit	Description
Video orientation handling	❤️ – everybody taking pictures with a Smartphone, Action Cam, …	Change orientation of videos before they are used (e.g. a video that would mistakenly be inserted in portrait mode)

Titler

Topic	Benefit	Description
Improved titler handling	🤓	If the name of a duplicated title is auto-generated, use text content of the title as title, see #320

Projects

Topic	Benefit	Description
Archiving support	Users which work a lot with Kdenlive and have many projects will like improvements here	Only include clips in the archive when they are actually used in the timeline, see #561

Stability and Testing

Topic	Benefit	Description
Project Recovery after Crash	🤓 – Users are less likely to lose work.	Enhance project recovery. Check if the backup time interval is suitable. If a project crashes on load, catch the crash and offer to load an older version. See also #309, #418.
Stability improvements	🤓 – Users get less random crashes	Do not crash because MLT throws an exception (e.g. in const uchar *imagedata = frame->get_image(format, ow, oh); in kthumb.cpp), see here.