The only way I've found to fix this is to save my project, close KDEnlive, then relaunch and open the project. KDEnlive will pop up a box with all the missing clips and give you the option to search recursively to find them.
Once it finds each clips' new folder, click "OK".
Be sure to save your project again after KDEnlive has made the changes.
(aside: would be nice if KDEnlive had an option to perform this recursive search when right-clicking a clip that has gone "missing"... maybe someday)
well if you never specify anything it never alters anything. This applies to any video editing software.
Wrong approach to making a video editing project start to finish :
- go to "file" -> "new project" specifing color, resolution and so on...
- we can stop here step one was already wrong (IMO)....
Correct approach (IMO) :
- (record the source material in the format you want, codec can be anything .mkv, .flv, .mp4 (preferably not .avi))
- Open the editing software and close the "new project" window that opens, if any.
- drag and drop video file in the editing app's project's "media library" section (not the timeline).
- then drag and drop video from the media file project library to the timeline. (the timeline de-facto inherit's that file's properties and won't be altered by further file drops to it even if the format is different, the first drop defines the project).
- edit
- on render don't add any resolution options, simply choose container (again .mkv and .flv is fine but prefer .mp4), encoding (here the choice is simple : hardware or software h264 but feel free to choose another encoding if you really want to.), the quality level and the filename).
(if you don't have a recording of your desired resolution to start with you can grab a sample off of youtube with a youtube downloader website and use that as a "timeline initilizer", once the timeline is set to that resolution and you've added one of your own files, you can remove it from the timeline).
this works for me in Kdenlive, Davinci Resolve and Premiere (on windows)
in editing I find the K.I.S.S. principles make you win out in time and results. And this approach is really as simple as it gets.
It's also fine to scale down, ...say you have some 2K/4K footage to mix with 1080p, then just add the 1080 bit to the timeline first (even if you're going to edit it last).
From there on the whole project is 1080p, then when you drag your 2k/4k footage to the timeline you'll find it overflows outside of the zone, you'll have to scale (and maybe crop) it and then the rest of the steps remain the same, at render you won't have to specify a resolution and the file you'll get will be a 1080p.
(also always select a small bit to render and render that first to test it before wasting several hours of rendering the whole project for something that isn't outputting the resolution/quality/sound/ect.. you want)
as for if you need to go through the hassle of rendering just for a small fade to black I think the answer is yes, until youtube finishes their new beta online editor and adds this sort of functionality. at that point you can offload menial render tasks to youtube.
Best Answer
To stabilize a specific video file I import the file into kdenlive, right-click on it, select "clip jobs" and then "stabilize".
This will start a "job" which produces a file with .mpi appended to the end of the original video file name.
Then remove the original video from the project file list, add the .mpi video file, put that in the timeline and render it.
The problem is that this .mpi file will only work in the project environment in which it was created. It also takes a lot more time than the length of the original video because the processing is single-threaded. Then there are possible memory issues with large files. So creating a large video and then stabilizing it is a very time and memory-intensive process, requiring at least as much memory and swap-space and multiples of the time required to create that large video in kdenlive without stabilizing it. It's a good argument for an IS video camera or at least breaking the unstabilized final product into chunks and stabilizing the chunks in groups which will not require use of the swap file, then combining all the stabilized chunks into one final project and rendering it.
Then there is the effectiveness of the stabilization pass...kdenlive gives you a lot of options to play with, all affect speed, memory requirements, IQ and stabilization. Or you can try using the ffmpeg tools directly which requires a new level of understanding and effort...but at least it's possible.
Deshaking videos using script
in any case it will help immensely to do this at low-res and figure it all out before trying to do it on unstabilized files straight from the camera shot at high resolutions especially at high frame-rates. My 4Gig laptop just spent 5 days stabilizing a 30min 5GB 4k-30fps h265 mp4 video. Now I'm trying to figure out how best to render the .mpi file. I'm considering just rendering the final product at 720p or at least at 1080p. It took 8 hrs or so to render the original unstabilized 5GB 4k product at moderate IQ and encoding settings that was a mixture of 12MP stills and 1080p video...and that was for 30 minutes of 4k video. My fear is that trying to render a final product at 4k is going to ask too much of the 4GB ram + 1GB swap that I have currently and it simply has to be done at 1080p to match the original video components. So I'll try that first and update this later.