Manage Cached Data
Kdenlive 16.04.1 rather quietly introduced a useful new feature to be found in the timeline toolbar: Manage Cached Data. It allows you to see how much disk space your projects each eat up. You can then also selectively clean up project-cached data when you do not need it anymore after finishing a project. See also the archiving feature.
You reach this new dialog via the timeline toolbar Preview Render preview-render-on button, then Manage Cached Data.
This opens a dialog window with two tabs: Cached data for the Current Project, and an overall view on All Projects.
Current Project Tab
The Current Project tab gives a detail view on your currently loaded project with a nice pie chart. It shows you at a glance how much space individual elements of your project need for caching, such as the timeline preview rendering cache, proxy clips, or audio and video thumbnails.
Here, you can selectively delete cached data by simply clicking on the corresponding Delete edit-delete buttons.
To remove all cache data for the currently loaded project, clip on the bottom Delete edit-delete icon.
Finally, when you click on the link at the bottom the folder containing the project cache will open in your file manager.
All Projects Tab
The All Project tab gives a view on the space used for all your projects, backups and proxy clip data. This helps identifying the “space hoggers” in your file system.
Select a project in the file manager-like window. The pie chart will show its part of the total data cache. Click on the Delete Selected Cache edit-delete button to clean the cache for the selected project. The edit-clear-history button cleans up unused cache.
The Backup data section shows how much space is used by your backups and a link to the backup folder. Clicking the link opens the folder in your default file manager. Clicking on edit-clear-history deletes old backups (defined by the time setting below), clicking on edit-delete deletes all backups.
The Proxy clip data section shows how much space is used by proxy clips and a link to the proxy clip folder. Clicking the link opens the folder in your default file manager. Clicking on edit-clear-history deletes old proxy files (defined by the time setting below), clicking on edit-delete deletes all proxy files.
You can specify the number of months you want Kdenlive to retain when executing any of the edit-clear-history actions with the Cleanup will delete data older than parameter.
Notes
Sources
The original text was submitted by user TheDiveO to the now defunct kdenlive.org blog. For this documentation it has been lifted from kdenlive.org, updated and adapted to match the overall style. *[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 *[XML]: Extensible Markup Language *[fps]: frames per second *[NTSC]: National Television Standard Committee - defined the TV system used in the United States, Japan and many other countries *[PAL]: Phase Alternating Line - a colour encoding system for analogue television *[LFE]: Low Frequency Effects *[RAW]: The RAW file format is digital photography's equivalent of a negative in film photography: it contains untouched, raw pixel information straight from the digital camera's sensor *[DSLR]: Digital Single Lens Reflex *[DOF]: Depth of Field *[NDF]: Neutral Density Filter *[AVI]: Audio Video Interleave *[BT.601]: A standard from 1982 defining how RGB color primaries get turned into the YCbCr channels used by modern codecs *[BT.709]: A standard from 1990 which does the same at BT.601 but the transfer coefficients are slightly different *[grep]: A Unix command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines that match a regular expression *[MLT]: Media Lovin' Toolkit - An open source software multimedia framework designed and developed for tv broadcasting