Ubuntu – Muting certain audio part in movie clip using Kdenlive

1. How to quickly mark a segment to delete:

1. Make sure the video track is selected.
2. Press X to switch to the Cut (Razor) Tool
3. Click once in the timeline at the start point
4. Click once at the end point

5. Press S again to switch back to selection mode

   

2. Use xdotool to automate delete/remove space with a single keyboard shortcut

1. xdotool allows automation of keyboard and mouse clicks/movements; install it with sudo apt-get install xdotool

2. Copy and paste the below to an sh file, say kdenlive_cut.sh in your home directory:

   #!/bin/bash
   
   DELAY=0.5  # delay in seconds between each action
   xdotool search --limit 1 -name Kdenlive > nul  # activate only if kdenlive running
   if [ $? -eq 0 ]
   then xdotool click 1 && sleep $DELAY \       # left-click
      && xdotool key Delete && sleep $DELAY \  # DEL
      && xdotool click 3 && sleep $DELAY \     # right-click
      && xdotool key r;                        # 'R' to remove space
   fi
   

   Make it executable with chmod +x ~/kdenlive_cut.sh

3. Open Settings...Keyboard, and go to the Shortcuts tab. Create a custom shortcut, naming it whatever you want, and setting the "Command" path to /home/username/kdenlive_cut.sh. Click Apply. The right-column will say "Disable", click on it and you'll see "New Accelerator": press your shortcut key combo. I chose Ctrl+Del since it doesn't conflict with the existing shortcuts in Kdenlive.

   

4. Now go to Kdenlive, and mark a segment you want to cut (as explained in Section 1). Click on that segment to outline it in red, and without moving the cursor, press Ctrl+Del; you will see the segment deleted, an empty space appear, the right-click menu show and the space removed -- all in the space of about 2 seconds.

   • Sometimes the shortcut fails the very first time it's invoked, giving you the longer right-click menu or the "Insert Space" option. Just cancel, and try it again...it works.

   • Here's a Youtube Demo of the shortcut in action.

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)