Kdenlive is the acronym for KDE Non-Linear Video Editor. It works on Linux, Windows, macOS, and BSD.

What video formats does Kdenlive support?

Kdenlive supports a wide range of video, audio, and image formats thanks to FFmpeg, including MP4, MOV, AVI, MKV, WebM, and many more.

Is Kdenlive good for beginners?

Yes, It has a clean interface, helpful documentation, and lots of community tutorials. While it has advanced features, beginners can start with simple cuts, transitions, and titles right away.

Does Kdenlive support 4K video editing?

Yes, Kdenlive supports 4K and even higher resolutions, although performance may depend on your computer's hardware. You can enable proxy clips to edit more smoothly on lower-end systems.

Can I do green screen (chroma key) effects in Kdenlive?

Yes, Kdenlive includes chroma keying tools to remove green or blue backgrounds and replace them with other footage or images.

Can I use Kdenlive for professional work?

Yes, Many YouTubers, educators, and even indie filmmakers use Kdenlive for serious projects. While it may lack some Hollywood-level features, it's powerful enough for most video editing needs.

Features

Multi-track video editing

Unlimited number of video and audio tracks that can be hidden and muted individually, adjusted in their height, collapsed individually or across the board. You can assign names to easily distinguish them in your complex projects.

Use any audio and video format

Being based on the powerful FFmpeg libraries, Kdenlive can use almost any audio and video formats directly without the need to convert or re-encode your clips. If ffmpeg can handle it, so can Kdenlive.

3-point editing

Kdenlive supports the industry-standard editing technique "3-Point Editing". Play a clip in the clip monitor, define in and out points for the clip and the in point in the designated track. Your editing mode setting determines whether to insert or overwrite what is already in the timeline.

Customizable interface

You can select the widgets to be displayed, their size, position, and grouping to cater to your individual editing workflow. Kdenlive allows to save different layouts to allow for optimal use of screen real estate depending for the phases of editing. It comes with defaults for logging, editing, color grading, and audio editing. The keyboard can be mapped to your individual preferences and to allow for easy transition from other video editing software. Limited themeing as also available.

Title Editor

Kdenlive has a built-in 2D Title Editor to create any type of text from simple callouts to scrolling credits. It uses all fonts and type faces installed on your operating system, allows for line and character spacing, and comes with standard features for text formatting, coloring, and spatial distribution and alignment. It has limited animation functionality for scrolling in any direction and has a typewriter effect for character-by-character, word-by-word, or line-by-line display of your text.

Integrated third-party vector animation Glaxnimate

Kdenlive integrates with Glaxnimate for vector graphics (SVG) for all sorts of animations, like showing a route on a map, info graphics, or call-outs.

Wide range of effects and filters for video and audio

Dozens of effects are available, ranging from artistic, stylish, to blur and sharpen, to color correction and to audio adjustments, as well as all the standard transformation functions. Effects are supplied by the MLT Framework, avfilter, frei0r, and ladspa.

Multi-cam editing

You can have as many camera angles or other type of footage as you need for your project playing at the same time in the project monitor, and then select which source is added to the timeline. That allows for quick switching of angles or footage greatly speeding up your editing process.

Audio and video scopes

Kdenlive has powerful analysis tools to monitor audio levels and check the color grading to make sure your video impresses your audience.

  • Audio Meter
  • Histogram
  • Waveform
  • Vectorscope
  • RGB Parade

Proxy editing

Kdenlive can automatically create low resolution copies of your source clips for a smooth editing performance even on low-end systems. Final render then uses the full resolution.

Automatic backup

Your project file is automatically backed up every few minutes, and older versions of the project file are also kept in case you need to roll back to a previous version.

Automatic subtitle generation using VOSK and Whisper models

Using LLMs (Large Language Models), you can have Kdenlive generate subtitles directly from your video sources. And with Whisper you can translate it to English or to different languages. Kdenlive currently supports .rst and .ass subtitle file formats.

Online resources

Kdenlive has direct online access to the KDE Store for user-generated content for keyboard layouts, effects, title templates, and projects. It also allows to search for and download clips from online resource repositories Pexels, Pixabay, and Freesound, as well as the Internet Movie Archive.

Timeline preview render

Sometimes when using hi-res footage or complex effects real-time playback is not possible. Timeline preview render allows you to render parts of your timeline to get perfectly smooth playback.

Keyframeable effects

Most effects can be keyframed allowing you to change parameters over time. There are different keyframe types available (linear, discrete, or smooth curves) to achieve the result you want.

What's New

Kdenlive 25.04.2 is now available, containing several fixes and small workflow improvements. Some highlights include:

  • Remember title editor window width
  • Fix audio thumbnails have an offset in long files
  • Fix OTIO import path on Windows
  • Better feedback when auto mask fails
  • Some last minute fixes were also included in the Windows/Mac/AppImage versions:
  • Fix OTIO export tracks order and ensure .otio file extension is correctly added

See the full changelog below.

Full Changelog

  • Fix moving subtitle with grab. Commit. Fixes bug #474193.
  • Fix empty gradient in config causes crash. Commit. Fixes bug #505014.
  • Snapcraft: Give more permissions for microphone access. Commit. Fixes bug #504192.
  • Backport missing effects xml. Commit.
  • Fix quick markers not taking clip crop into account in timeline. Commit.
  • Fix marker dialog not allowing to add marker if only 1 category exists. Commit. Fixes bug #504993.
  • Fix merge error causing freeze on exit. Commit.
  • Fix crash in HistogramGenerator when running on a white color clip. Commit.
  • Fix Whisper model directory not being created if asked to do so. Commit.
  • Fix canceling quit on rendering leaves kdenlive in unstable state. Commit.
  • Only clear undo stack when we delete a timeline sequence, not a standard bin clip. Commit.
  • Fix misalignment of monitor tools CCBUG: 498337 CCBUG:461219. Commit.
  • Fix OTIO path issue on import, related to #1998. Commit. Fixes bug #504708.
  • Fix bin clip effects disappear after disabling a timeline clip. Commit. Fixes bug #439194.
  • Fix keyframe in monitor not correctly reported on clip selection. Commit.
  • Fix monitor scene not correcty activated on clip selection. Commit.
  • Fix small error causing offset in long audio thumbnails. Commit. See bug #504579.
  • Fix guides list buttons not working on app opening. Commit. Fixes issue #2007.
  • Fix built-in effects disabled state changes on cut. Commit.
  • Fix render widget target file can have no extension or incorrect path. Commit. See bug #503896.
  • SAM2: show message and full log if the python script crashes, try to auto reinstall if the venv python exe is missing. Commit.
  • Save and restore title editor window width. Commit. See bug #502869.