User Interface

This section introduces the Kdenlive user interface (UI), explains the various elements, icons and buttons, the menu options, the default keyboard shortcuts that can speed up your editing work, and how you can customize the layout to fit your specific post-production workflow.

After starting Kdenlive the window should look similar to the image below. Kdenlive’s user interface (UI) is consistent across all platforms, so it doesn’t matter whether your operating system is Linux, Windows or MacOS. Of course, icons and text look different.

The UI is separated into four main parts:

[A] The Workspace with the various widgets that can be arranged to your needs. See the View Menu and Workspace Layouts for more details.

[B] The Menu Bar with the Menu and list of Workspace Layouts.

[C] The Toolbars below the menu bar and above the Timeline.

[D] The Status Bar at the bottom of the screen.

Kdenlive’s default screen layout (example uses the Editing view): Menu Bar (blue), Toolbars (yellow), Workspace (green) and Status Bar (red).

Workspaces

The Workspace model follows the video editing workflow and can be adapted to your individual style and preferences. By default, Kdenlive starts with the Editing workspace model that looks like this:

Kdenlive’s default workspaces (example uses the Editing view)

[1] Project Bin, Library:

This is where you keep your source files (video clips, images and image sequences, title and color clips, animations, audio files). In this screenshot the widgets for Undo History, Compositions, and Effects have been added to this section.

[2] Clip Monitor:

This is where the clip selected in the project bin is displayed. In this screenshot the widget for Library has been added to this section. See the chapter Clip Monitor for more details.

[3] Project Monitor:

This is where the content of the timeline is being displayed with all effects and compositions applied. In this screenshot the widgets for Speech Editor and Project Notes have been added to this section. See the chapter Project Monitor for more details.

[4] Timeline:

Most of the action is taking place in the timeline. Here you put your sources in the order in which they will appear in the final video, make your edits (cuts and trimmings), apply effects, add compositions and transitions, and add audio and sound tracks. See the chapter Timeline for more details.

[5] Timeline Toolbar:

This is where you find all the tools you need to edit your video project. See the chapter Timeline Toolbar for more details.

[6] Audio Mixer:

This section holds the audio mixing panel where you control the volume and pan of the various audio tracks and the master.

[7] Menu Bar, Toolbar:

At the top of the screen you have access to the menu (see Menubar and Menu for more details), the Workspace Layouts and the Main Toolbar. The menu bar can be switched on and off with Ctrl+M.

[8] Status Bar:

Kdenlive displays context-specific information or hints on the left-hand side of the status bar depending on where you hover the mouse pointer. In the middle you see the names of the clips you hover over in the timeline. This is also where error messages come up when working with clips in the timeline. On the right-hand side Kdenlive displays the currently selected timeline edit tool and the icons to toggle various timeline features. See the sections about status bar icons and the status bar for more details. *[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 *[SD]: Secure Digital - a proprietary, non-volatile, flash memory card format developed by the SD Association *[SFX]: Special Effects *[VBR]: Variable Bit Rate *[HD]: High Definition *[GUI]: Graphical User Interface