Yesterday I worked on combining several sets of mp4 "Shorts" into single videos, something I've done before. One thing in my favor this time; these vids are all the exact same dimensions, audio stream, etc. so this sort of thing is usually fairly easy. In the past I've had to change the resolution and make other adaptations just to get them lined up for melding.
I spent at least an hour trying to trim the first set of 15 - Trimming a few seconds from the start and end of each of them. Then attempted to use fffmpeg to concat them. However a few of them had some encoding error the ffmpeg did not like. Even re-encoding them with Handbreak didn't resolve it and the web revealed nada re. this particular error. My beloved console tools were failing me.
I've tried Openshot and a couple others in the recent past and found them to be way too complex for this mundane level of a task. It takes longer to learn how to use them then the job does. I hadn't used KdenLive in years because it's always bee so buggy, but I installed it and gave it a try onve again.
What a joy! I dragged the 15 short vids into the "clip" box and within just a couple minutes had figured out how to trim the ends. It uses very simple and logical shortcuts: ( and ) .All I had to do was get the time mark near the 3-4 second mark of each end, use the left and right arrows to step through frames until I found my mark, then just "bracket" the video. Easy as cake.
With that done - and very quickly compared to console tools - I decided to get bold and add titles at the beginning of each short - something I wouldn't have been able to do from the command line. I took me less than 5 minutes to figure out how to make a title frame, give it the "typewriter" effect, and overlay it onto the combined video stream. I made all 15 and then decided to space the shorts a few seconds apart so the title begins to appear before the short starts and fades as the action begins. Finally, I quickly reviewed each of my transitions to verify it looked good and then rendered the final product. All of this took way less than an hour - less time than I had spent searching how to fix the ffmpeg error in a couple of the shorts.
KdenLive did close unexpectedly once as I was beginning, but I didn't loose any work and it never happened again. All-in-all I'm extremely pleased with how far KdenLive has come.
I spent at least an hour trying to trim the first set of 15 - Trimming a few seconds from the start and end of each of them. Then attempted to use fffmpeg to concat them. However a few of them had some encoding error the ffmpeg did not like. Even re-encoding them with Handbreak didn't resolve it and the web revealed nada re. this particular error. My beloved console tools were failing me.
I've tried Openshot and a couple others in the recent past and found them to be way too complex for this mundane level of a task. It takes longer to learn how to use them then the job does. I hadn't used KdenLive in years because it's always bee so buggy, but I installed it and gave it a try onve again.
What a joy! I dragged the 15 short vids into the "clip" box and within just a couple minutes had figured out how to trim the ends. It uses very simple and logical shortcuts: ( and ) .All I had to do was get the time mark near the 3-4 second mark of each end, use the left and right arrows to step through frames until I found my mark, then just "bracket" the video. Easy as cake.
With that done - and very quickly compared to console tools - I decided to get bold and add titles at the beginning of each short - something I wouldn't have been able to do from the command line. I took me less than 5 minutes to figure out how to make a title frame, give it the "typewriter" effect, and overlay it onto the combined video stream. I made all 15 and then decided to space the shorts a few seconds apart so the title begins to appear before the short starts and fades as the action begins. Finally, I quickly reviewed each of my transitions to verify it looked good and then rendered the final product. All of this took way less than an hour - less time than I had spent searching how to fix the ffmpeg error in a couple of the shorts.
KdenLive did close unexpectedly once as I was beginning, but I didn't loose any work and it never happened again. All-in-all I'm extremely pleased with how far KdenLive has come.
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