Project and Asset Management

Kdenlive works with projects. A project contains all the assets (sources), the timeline with your clips in different tracks, the cuts and trims, compositions and transitions, annotations, markers, timeline marker - in short, everything you and Kdenlive need to produce a video file as the result of your work.

Hint When creating a project, select a project profile with the final video in mind. The project settings determine the resolution (e.g. 1920x1080), the frame rate (e.g. 25 fps), other metadata, and how to deal with the project’s assets.

Note You can change the project profile later but it is not recommended as it may lead to undesirable results, in particular when you use keyframes.

The Project Bin holds all your assets. You can load (or import) video and audio files, single images or entire image sequences, create color and title clips, animations, and download assets from various online sources directly into your project.

While the project bin is for a specific project, you can use the library feature to store assets for use in other projects. That is also the only way to share or copy assets between projects.

Kdenlive offers limited video and audio capturing functionality, for example to create voice overs, or use screenshots.

You can take notes for your project that capture timestamps for easy reference during the editing process. This is very useful for big and complex projects or productions.

Kdenlive has an auto-save feature, creates backups in the background, and allows to archive a project with all the assets included. *[RGB]: Red, Green, Blue *[VFX]: Visual Effects *[feathering]: Smoothing or blurring the edges of a feature *[LFO]: Low-Frequency Oscillation *[dB]: decibel *[LUFS]: Loudness Units Full Scale *[AI]: Artificial Intelligence *[LLM]: Large Language Model *[HSV]: Hue, Saturation, Value *[SOP/Sat]: S(lope), O(ffset), P(ower) / SATuration *[CDL]: Color Decision List *[HSL]: Hue, Saturation, Lightness - Using HSL color space is useful for subtle color changes *[px]: pixel *[hh:mm:ss:ff]: hours:minutes:seconds:frames *[Hz]: Hertz *[CIE]: Commission internationale de l'éclairage, French for International Commission on Illumination *[DCI]: Digital Cinema Initiative *[nadir]: direction pointing directly below a particular location *[OS]: Operating System *[decibel]: Unit of measurement (dB) for sound levels *[clipping]: A form of distortion that limits a signal once it exceeds a threshold *[Spectrogram]: Visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of a signal as it varies with time *[prevent clipping]: Dynamic range compression (DRC)is an audio signal processing operation that reduces the volume of loud sounds or amplifies quiet sounds, thus reducing or compressing an audio signal's dynamic range. *[SNR]: Signal-to-Noise Ratio *[dbFS]: Decibels relative to full scale *[QHD]: Quad-HD *[UHD]: Ultra High Definition