Capturing Video

Kdenlive provides functionality for capturing video using Blackmagic’s Decklink, and via ScreenGrab.

For other devices, mostly connected via Firewire (also known as IEEE 1394 High Speed Serial Bus) card and cable, use dvgrab directly in a terminal.

You configure video capturing from Menu ‣ Settings ‣ Configure Kdenlive ‣ Capture.

You define the destination location for your captures by using Menu ‣ Settings ‣ Configure Kdenlive ‣ Environment ‣ Default Folders.

Screen Grab

This captures video off the PC screen. Enable the Screen Grab widget via Menu ‣ View ‣ Screen Grab.

Hint Any issues or errors with the screen grab are displayed in the Clip Monitor widget. It is recommended to move the Screen Grab widget to a position where the clip monitor is easily visible. For example, the Screen Grab widget can be added to the dock where the Project Bin or the Library is. Docking it to the Clip Monitor widget prevents a message from being visible.

Monitor 0/1:

Select the monitor to record from

media-recordScreen Grab:

Start/Stop recording

configureConfigure Recording:

Opens the Kdenlive Menu ‣ Settings ‣ Capture ‣ Screen Grab window

The recorded clip will be added to the project bin.

Possible issues

Screen grab uses ffmpeg for recording and encoding. Most issues have to do with the version of ffmpeg installed or how ffmpeg was compiled.

If you are capturing the screen and using the x246 with audio setting, the recording may crash. In this case create an Encoding Profile for Screen Capture where -acodec pcm_s16le is replaced by -acodec libvorbis -b 320k.

Blackmagic

This is for capturing from Blackmagic’s Decklink video capture cards.

Note There has been no major development or testing with this part of Kdenlive. It may work, it may have issues. No bug reports have been created, but there is not knowing how many users actually perform video capturing with this hardware.

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There are now two branches of ffmpeg : a Libav branch and an ffmpeg.org branch. The ffmpeg version from the latter branch reports the configuration when you run with ffmpeg -version. The Libav version does not. So this method to check for the --enable-x11grab does not work if you have the Libav version of ffmpeg. *[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