Kdenlive Workflow

Kdenlive is one of a suite of free and open source tools built with the Qt tool kit, which you can use in your home office based studio. Right now, I’m using Kate to write this story.

Katepart

Katepart is a framework that KDE uses for making applications. It’s like a template that you can start with, to make a new application. You add modules to it, to add capabilities to it. You can reuse old modules or you can make your own.

Kate is the text editor. You can use it for editing code. You can also use it to take notes and write stories.

Dolphin is KDE’s default file browser. Keeping your files well organized is an important dimension of your video editing workflow. Downloads, Pictures and Videos are the three directories where your art will be coming into your files system.

Create a directory for your website. Then, create directories for each of the web pages and blog posts on your website. SimpleScreenRecorder records screen casts of your computer’s monitor and Kdenlive records the renderings of your videos, in your videos directory. Move them into your Website/Webpage directory.

You’ll take thousands of pictures with your smart phone and your other cameras. Store them in your pictures directory. I’ve settled on naming them for the month and year. Then, put those directories in a directory for each year.

You’ll grab pictures for your webpages and blogposts from there. You can also use pictures in Kdenlive.

Kdenlive

Kdenlive is KDE’s video editing application. It is one of the most popular, premium, free and open source applications. One of the first things I do is, navigate to Settings/ Configure Kdenlive/ Project Defaults and set Video and Audio tracks to 3.

You can drag and drop all the components of your video from your Website/Webpages or Website/Blogposts directory into the Kdenlive Project Bin. You’ll probably have to convert the files to the correct format. That’s easy, just click on the popup that alerts you about that and that’s it, you are ready to start editing.

Once you get all your files loaded into your Project Bin, drag the intro of your video onto the time line. Then your main video. Video track 1 will be the main background video. Anything running on top of that will be in video track 2 or 3.

The video and audio tracks are grouped together by default. You can ungroup them by right clicking on the track and ungrouping them. Then, you can delete the audio or video track for that section.

Use the Selection tool and the Razor tool for editing your clips. Right click on a clip and select extract clip to extract a clip without leaving empty space. Deleting a clip leaves a space, extracting the clip does not. When extracting clips, make sure to pay close attention to the alignment of your clips. You usually need to extract sections of all the clips to keep them properly aligned.

Your video will be displayed in the project monitor. You can watch the video and see the effect of your editing process. You can right click on a clip and add an Insert a composition/ Composite and transform. That will make a composite of the video on track 2, with the video on track 1.

There will be a red square on your project monitor and you can adjust that to any place and size you want. Then, the video on track 2 will run inside the red square, in front of the video in track 1. You can also do the same thing on tracks 3 and 2. Track 2 runs on top of track 1, track 3 runs on top of track 1 and 2. If the red square doesn’t show up, click on the Show/Hide Edit button below the project monitor.

You can adjust the audio of each track in the Audio Mixer. You can rearrange the Kdenlive sections any way you want to.

Video Production

Repetition is a good teaching and learning tactic. Make two or three videos every week, and you will soon be a high performance video producer. That is a valuable skill that you can use in your holistic home office or in a job at a small or big business.

Read the manual for Kdenlive. It’s fairly extensive and will teach you a lot about the details of using Kdenlive.

Once you get your video rendered, move it from your Videos directory to your Website/ Webpages directory for that webpage. Navigate to your favorite video hosting service and upload the video. Once you get it uploaded, copy the embed link and embed it into the webpage you are producing.

I am using the Rumble video hosting service and in order to embed the Rumble video player on my website, I had to install the EmbedPress plugin for WordPress. There are two versions. One is some kind of inline embed tool and the main one is a block I use all the time. I have both of them installed, but I have only used the main one.

After you get the video embedded, you can set the width and height of the player in the Block panel of the right column of your WordPress editor.

You can produce two or three videos a week or you can produce one video every week and use the rest of your time to write stories and work on other projects for your website.

Kdenlive is your video production tool. Kate is your writing tool. Scribus is your self publishing tool. Kontact is your communications center. Use Calligra Stage to help you produce really cool presentations for your website. Use Calligra Sheets to creat spreadsheets to account for your income and expenses, assets and liabilities, and cashflow.

And have fun being a high performance artisan, creating valuable content and presenting it to a global audience.