RENDERING THE FINAL OUTPUT
Kdenlive offers many final output option presets, but a lot of these are for niche situations. In most cases, the preset Generic > MP4H264/AAC is the right one. It’s worth checking the More Options box to tweak things further, though. In here, don’t be afraid to check Custom Quality and move the quality to 100%. This uses extra disk space, but it’s better to overdo it with the quality settings, because if you intend to upload the video for online streaming on sites such as YouTube, there will be some quality loss as it is re-encoded.
Because video encoding takes a long time, make sure that the threads box has a number that is the same as the total number of cores on your CPU. Video encoding is a process that scales very well when split between CPU cores. That said, you may want to dial this back if you need to keep your computer responsive for other tasks while the encoding is taking place.
As is the case with the Title Editor, the toolbar has a link to a preset store browser. If nothing else, you can download these to examine when you’re stuck for the right settings. that has to be done at this point as Kdenlive builds up a map of the peaks and troughs of the audio.
Once the processing is complete, it’s possible to align the video footage with the audio clip as long as the audio is similar. In our example, click on the audio clip that is connected to the video clip, right-click and select Align Audio To Reference. The clip should shunt forward or back so that it’s exactly aligned.
You can also use this to synchronise multiple video sources by using their audio tracks as the sync source. Imagine a situation where a musician is recording a tutorial video. They might have a close-up camera showing what their hands are doing, a zoomed-out camera showing their face and body, and an audio recording of their voice and their instrument. This gives them three source files to deal with. They can align all three perfectly by setting the audio clip as the reference track and using Align Audio To Reference to shift the two video files from the two cameras into alignment with each other and the audio track.
Kdenlive has all the basic features to make goodlooking videos, along with a few options to add pizzazz to the finished product. Happy videography!