Polish your video footage with Kdenlive

Kdenlive is an open source application that gives you everything you need to edit video K footage into finished compositions. To this end, you can add video files from various sources, alter their length and position, and add effects to give the finished production a professional look.

It’s what is known as a non-destructive editor, which means that you don’t alter any of the underlying files. Instead, data pointers within the program are updated, so you have almost unlimited scope to alter things and make fine adjustments at any stage of the process.

What we’re imagining is the sort of project where you have a video of an event or a trip. You’ll want to combine multiple video files and edit them down while adding some music, voice narration and title cards.

Lights, cameras, edit!

We assume you have the latest version of Kdenlive installed and you have some recorded footage you would like to edit. The first task is to start a new Kdenlive project (File > New), and this launches the project configuration dialogue. Select Custom Project Folder. Although video files are huge, it’s a good idea to place them on your fastest drive, preferably an SSD. You can always move the files to a different drive, such as a network drive, after you have finished the project.

You can mix and match footage types within the project, but aproject can only output a video