Less than a month following the 23.08.5 release and merely a fortnight after KDE MegaRelease 6, the Kdenlive team announces Kdenlive 24.02, marking a significant milestone in the evolution of the open-source video editing software.
This latest version introduces a substantial upgrade with the adoption of Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6, laying a solid foundation for Kdenlive’s development in the coming decade.
Kdenlive 24.02 Highlights
Kdenlive, short for KDE Non-Linear Video Editor, is designed to cater to the needs of both amateur and professional video editors. It offers a wide array of editing tools and features. The much-anticipated transition to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6 enhances the user experience across various platforms.
Linux users, in particular, will appreciate the improved Wayland support, while those on Windows, MacOS, and Linux will benefit from the native support for DirectX, Metal, and Vulkan. This shift from relying on OpenGL and Angle to these native graphics APIs translates into a significantly boosted performance and a more responsive editing experience.
However, with great upgrades come new challenges, and the Kdenlive team is upfront about the potential rough edges in this transition. Issues like themes and icons not being properly applied on Windows and AppImage, display errors in timeline clip texts when using Wayland, and a crash in the Subtitle Manager under MacOS have been identified.
Additionally, the audio recording feature has been temporarily removed, awaiting its migration to Qt6. The development team encourages user feedback to aid in refining these areas in future updates.
Looking ahead, the Kdenlive roadmap focuses on stabilizing the software following this major upgrade, with subsequent releases (24.05 and 24.08) aimed at addressing remaining issues. Performance optimization is a key priority in this release, including enhanced RAM usage during clip imports and fixes for Nvidia encoding and transcoding with recent FFmpeg versions.
Kdenlive 24.02 also introduces several quality-of-life improvements. In light of this, multiple subtitle support and a subtitle manager dialog have been added for easier import and export of subtitles. The Speech Editor now allows for creating new sequences directly from selected texts.
For effects, the initial implementation of easing interpolation modes for keyframes promises more dynamic and visually appealing results. A new interpolation method for scaling operations has improved rendering.
Additional usability enhancements include the ability to apply effects to groups of clips, move or delete clips within a group more efficiently, and a toggle button for enabling/disabling effects directly on the timeline. Introducing an FFv1 render preset, automatic update checks without an internet connection, and a sound notification for completed renders further contribute to a smoother editing process.
You can refer to the release announcement for detailed information about all changes in Kdenlive 24.02.
For Linux open source video editing, I’ve found KDEnlive to be the most stable and easy to use video editor for general purpose editing. Every year or two I try the alternatives and end up coming back to kdenlive. And I’m not a KDE user. Anyway, I’m a fan. It’s great software. I’d be interested in hearing others’ experiences and preferences, though!
Video editing on Linux has come a long way. I remember probably 12-13 years ago using Cinelerra, and although I got it to work, it would randomly blow up in the middle of editing.