A 24-minute end-to-end walkthrough of the free, open-source editor — from installation and proxy setup through timeline editing and a proper color grading pipeline.
Posted
7 months ago
Duration
Format
Tutorial
educational
Views
145.6K
4.3K likes
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Kdenlive is a production-capable free editor once you learn the three non-obvious systems that separate it from a toy: proxy clips for 4K playback, a LUT-first color pipeline for log footage, and Bezier-curve saturation for filmic color behavior.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You want a capable desktop video editor without a monthly subscription and are willing to learn a new interface.
You shoot 4K and are experiencing choppy playback in free or entry-level NLEs.
You have basic editing concepts but need a guided walkthrough specific to Kdenlive.
You want to understand color grading fundamentals using a free toolset, not just presets.
SKIP IF…
You already work fluently in Premiere, Resolve, or Final Cut — the pacing is genuinely entry-level.
You need mobile editing or cloud-based collaboration features.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Kdenlive is a free, open-source video editor for Windows, Mac, and Linux that handles professional workflows when configured correctly. The tutorial covers three commonly missed setup steps: proxy clips using ProRes intraframe codec for smooth 4K playback, LUT-first color grading (never grade log footage raw), and a Bezier-curve saturation trick that makes colors darken as they intensify, replicating how film responds to color. Beyond setup, the video walks through every timeline tool: ripple, slip, spacer, cut shortcuts, transitions, titles, grouping, audio fades, and batch rendering.
Free for members
Chat with this breakdown — free.
Sign in and you get 23 free chat messages on us — ask for the hook, quote a framework, find the exact transcript moment, generate a markdown action plan. Bring your own key when you want unlimited.
Dissolve from Compositions panel; layered compositing mode
10:20 – 11:45
11 · Text, Titles, and Tracks
Title Clip generator; Insert Track by right-clicking track area
11:45 – 13:50
12 · Grouping, Audio Deletion, and Fades
Ungroup to remove camera audio; corner-circle drag for fades
13:50 – 15:28
13 · Color Grading Introduction and LUTs
Disable proxies; apply LUT to convert log footage to Rec709 first
15:28 – 18:04
14 · Exposure and Contrast
Gamma over Exposure for base brightness; Bezier S-curve for contrast
18:04 – 21:22
15 · White Balance and Filmic Saturation
Two white balance tools; vectorscope for skin tones; Bezier saturation curve
21:22 – 23:56
16 · Copy Effects and Export
Paste Effects to other clips; render to file with job queue
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
ProRes proxies play back smoothly because every frame is encoded individually — no decoder needs to reconstruct frames from a keyframe chain.
Never apply color corrections directly to log footage — the adjustments will be skewed because the gamma curve is wrong for the tool you are using.
A LUT does one job: it converts color space. Apply it first, then grade on top of Rec709.
Gamma is a safer base-exposure tool than Exposure because it rolls off at the top rather than hard-clipping bright areas.
Standard saturation tools make colors brighter as they get more saturated — the opposite of how color behaves in the real world.
A Bezier curve on the saturation channel creates filmic saturation: colors get more colorful AND slightly darker.
The vectorscope shows you where your colors are shifting; skin tones should land along the skin-tone line regardless of complexion.
Kdenlive has two white balance tools: one controls green/magenta shift, the other controls color temperature — use both together.
Proxy clips are transparent at export — Kdenlive automatically relinks the original high-res files when rendering.
The ripple tool trims a clip while pulling every downstream clip to close the gap automatically.
Shift+R cuts a clip; Shift+Delete ripple-deletes it; Ctrl+Shift+R cuts every track under the playhead at once.
You can queue multiple render jobs and keep editing while Kdenlive renders in the background.
Takeaway
Three setup decisions that make Kdenlive usable.
WHAT TO LEARN
Most beginner frustration with Kdenlive traces back to skipping proxy setup, grading log footage raw, or using the wrong saturation tool — fix all three and the editor behaves like a professional NLE.
ProRes proxy clips solve choppy 4K playback because every frame is fully encoded — the editor never has to reconstruct frames from a keyframe chain.
Log footage must be converted to Rec709 with a LUT before you apply any color corrections; grading on raw log produces shifts the footage was never designed to handle.
Gamma is a safer base-exposure tool than Exposure because it rolls off highlights gradually instead of hard-clipping them.
The S-curve in Bezier Curves controls contrast with precision: pull the low end down to deepen shadows, lift the high end to open up highlights without blowing them out.
Standard saturation tools make colors brighter as they saturate, which looks digital. A Bezier curve on the saturation channel makes colors darker as they saturate, which is how film and real light behave.
The vectorscope shows you the direction of your color cast as a physical vector — skin tones should land along the skin-tone line regardless of the subject's complexion.
Two separate white balance tools serve different purposes: the basic one controls the green-to-magenta axis; the LMS version controls warm-to-cool color temperature.
Ripple trim is the fastest way to close editing gaps — it moves every downstream clip automatically rather than requiring a separate spacer step.
You can copy a full color grading effect stack from one clip and paste it to multiple others at once; per-clip tweaks on top are still independent.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Proxy clip
A lower-resolution, easy-to-decode copy of your footage used during editing for smooth playback. Kdenlive swaps back to the original at export automatically.
ProRes
An intraframe codec where every frame is fully encoded independently. Playback is smooth because no frame depends on reconstructing data from previous frames.
Log footage
Video shot in a flat, low-contrast color profile that preserves dynamic range. Looks washed out on a normal monitor and requires a LUT before color grading.
LUT (Look-Up Table)
A file that mathematically transforms one color space to another. A technical LUT converts log footage to Rec709 so grading tools behave predictably.
Rec709
The standard color space for HD/4K monitors. Most color grading tools are calibrated to operate on Rec709 signals.
Vectorscope
A circular waveform monitor showing color saturation and hue direction. Used to identify color casts and verify skin tone accuracy.
Bezier curve (in color)
A curve with adjustable control points that lets you reshape tonal or saturation response non-linearly. S-curves add contrast; saturation-channel curves control filmic saturation behavior.
Ripple tool
A trim mode where removing or shortening a clip automatically pulls all downstream clips forward to close the gap.
Slip tool
A tool that lets you reframe which part of a clip is used in the timeline without changing the clip's position or duration.
Intraframe codec
A video compression format where every frame is independently encoded, making random-access playback and scrubbing fast and smooth.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
17px
00:00Kdenlive is an incredibly powerful free open source editing software. And today, we're going to learn the basics of editing and color grading to get you making amazing videos and making them fast. Let's dive in.
00:11To download Kdenlive, we can go to kdenlive.org or follow the link in the description.
00:16We'll select download, then choose the installer for your system. And once that finishes, you can run through the installation like normal and open the software from there.
00:25Now when you first open Kdenlive, you may get a notification about hardware optimization. You can always reach that menu from the settings, run config wizard, and basically, all this is is just to make sure that your GPU drivers or everything and codecs are updated and working properly. So we'll go ahead and hit okay.
00:41And we'll start with the project bin because this is where all of your files and folders will be imported and stored inside of your project. And the easiest way to import is just to go into your file explorer or finder and click and drag the folder into the project bin. And what's nice about clicking and dragging this folder is that if you have a dedicated folder structure and you have subsequent folders inside, Kdenlive will automatically import those folders if it detects media inside of those folders, which is really nice to have.
01:09For now, we're just going to use some basic folders, so I'll go ahead and delete those for now. And I'm just gonna go ahead and import music and some b roll into here. Now, if we wanted to create additional folders inside our project bin, we can always right click, select create folder.
01:25I'm just gonna make one called titles for now. Now, if you import your media and you get a notification asking if you wanna change your profile settings, usually that's a good idea to do if your project settings doesn't match your footage that you're importing. So you can do that, and it'll update this project setting automatically, or you can go to your project, project settings, and then change your project profile from here manually.
01:49Now, my files are four k UHD and 23.98 frames per second, so I'm just gonna switch that manually and we'll be good to go. And we got the notification saying that it changed and we have our project settings matching our footage.
02:03So now, let's go ahead and actually look at some of our footage. If I start playing this back, you'll notice that the playback is very very choppy. It's not really playing back smoothly at all.
02:12Lags quite a bit. And the reason for that is because these files are very hard for the software to play back. Now, can fix this in the form of proxies.
02:20Now, there are two different types of proxies, but the type we're focusing on today is the type that makes it really easy to edit. So let's go ahead and go back into your project settings, and then we'll go to this proxy tab.
02:31And the things we wanna make sure we have checked are proxy clips, generate for videos larger than, and then we can just set our size to one pixel so that we can generate proxies for all of our videos inside of our folder.
02:44We can specify the size of the proxy video, and then we set our encoding profile. Now, this is the key part that makes our proxies work well.
02:53In this menu, we have a lot of different options here, but the type that we really wanna use is ProRes. And by default, it uses the proxy version of ProRes, so it's the lowest file size possible for ProRes. But this type of codec will make it very, very easy for your editing software to play back the files because every single frame is encoded individually.
03:13So we'll go ahead and hit okay. And if you wanna make this a standard for all of your projects that you open, you can go to your settings, configure Kdenlive, and then go to proxy clips, and just make sure the options are the same.
03:25And then hit apply, and then select okay. And then to make sure that we actually generate our proxies, we can highlight all of our clips, right click them, and make sure proxy clip is checked.
03:36And that'll generate the proxy files, and you'll see a p show up whenever the proxies are created. So now, if we start playing back this file, it may look slightly worse quality and lower resolution, but it plays back super seamlessly.
03:49And when you go to export, it'll automatically relink the original files, Or if we wanna toggle them off if we're doing any color grading or any sort of effects work, we can always go back and toggle that individual proxy clip off and see our original clip again. So we'll go ahead and toggle that back on for now. So let's go ahead and actually import these files into our timeline here.
04:10So we'll start with this first one, and if I import this, you'll see that we have our play head, which determines what this viewer is looking at. And you'll notice we have two different viewers here.
04:21So we have our project viewer and the clip viewer. The project viewer is showing whatever the timeline sees. The clip monitor is for viewing whatever clips are in your project bin.
04:31So in this clip monitor, you can do things like setting in and out points, so you don't have to import the entire clip into the timeline. We can just find a point where we want to start the clip, press I to set an in point, go to the end of where we want it to, hit o for out point, and then we can just click and drag that into our timeline as well.
04:52And now, it's a shortened version of the clip, so we don't have to chop the ends off in the timeline. You can also hover over this and drag video only into the timeline, or you can drag the audio only into the timeline. And then to highlight clips in the timeline, you can hold shift, click and drag, and then whatever your mouse hovers over will highlight all of your clips that it selects.
05:16And then we can just go ahead and delete these for now by pressing delete. So let's just go ahead and import the last three clips here by clicking on this one and shift clicking the last one to highlight all three of them. And now, I'll just click and drag this into the timeline, and now, all of our clips are in our timeline.
05:31Now, to navigate the timeline, we can scroll out by holding control and scrolling up and down, and that will scroll towards the mouse, wherever the mouse is located. Or you can just scroll up and down to scroll left and right in the timeline.
05:46Or you can middle mouse click and hold and drag and that will fine tune your left and right scroll. Now to do some basic trimming on these clips, if we hover our mouse over the beginning or end of the clip, you'll see that we have the mouse change and highlighted colors to show that we're on the edge of the clip. So if we click and drag this, we can see that we're just trimming the beginning and not moving anything else in the timeline.
06:09If we go over to the end, we can do the same thing with the end of the clip to trim that part as well. There's additional tools like your ripple tool, and the ripple tool allows you to trim the beginning or end of a clip while moving everything ahead of that point on the same track along with it to keep your edits and gaps the same.
06:26And we can see on this next clip, if we start dragging the end of it back, it pulls the rest of the clips back with it. Likewise, if we trim the beginning of the clip, it'll keep the edit point there while pulling the end of the clip and everything else ahead of it back with it. We also have this slip tool where if we wanted to choose a different part of this clip to use without moving anything in the timeline, we can just click and hold on our clip and now we see the full range of the clip that we have.
06:54And we can look at our project monitor to see what frame we're starting on and what frame we're ending on. So we can just start it right as she starts walking here and end on a good frame at the end.
07:07So then we have this spacer tool. Now, what the spacer tool does is anywhere you click the mouse, it'll highlight everything ahead of it in the timeline, so you can bring this back and close in any gaps. Now, let's go back to the selection tool.
07:21And And let's say we wanna make a cut in our clip. Let's go ahead and go over to this one over here and find a place where we wanna cut, and then press shift r, and that'll make a cut on our clip itself.
07:33So we can just go ahead and delete this one by pressing delete. Or if we wanna automatically close that gap without having to go to the spacer and click and drag, I'll just go ahead and undo that. We can highlight this and then press shift delete, and that'll automatically close the gap when it's cut.
07:50Now, let's just say we had another clip on the top layer here and we wanted to only cut one of them. Whichever one is highlighted, if we do the shift r shortcut, it'll only cut what's highlighted. But let's just say we wanted to cut everything under the playhead, we can press control shift r, and that'll cut everything under the playhead regardless of what's highlighted.
08:11And so I'll go ahead and move this back for now. Now, instead of clicking and dragging edges, we can also use the shift nine and shift zero shortcuts, or basically the parenthesis shortcuts. So we can go to this point in the clip and maybe we wanna end it here.
08:26We can press shift zero, and that will trim the end of the clip to the playhead. Or we can go to the beginning of this and then press shift nine, and that'll trim the beginning of the clip to the playhead.
08:38Now, there's an additional thing that we can do with those shortcuts. If we switch our tool to the ripple tool and do those same shortcuts, so now if we do shift nine, instead of just a trim, it'll ripple trim the clip. And then the same thing goes for at the end.
08:52If we use shift zero, it'll pull everything ahead of it to the playhead. So those are some basic cutting tools.
08:59Now, let's go ahead and add a couple more things just to showcase this a little bit more in detail. I'm gonna go ahead and make another cut right here just for fun. And let's say I wanted to add a transition to these pieces.
09:11Well, we can go to compositions, and I'm just going to add a simple dissolve for now, but we can go ahead and click and drag this and hover over our clip here. And now, if we zoom in, we've added a transition to these clips, and it dissolves from one to the other.
09:28And then we can click on this transition, and then we have our effect composition window over here where we can specify what types of parameters we want this to have, and we can move its position like so. Now, alternatively, instead of using transitions in this way, I'm gonna just go ahead and scroll out a bit.
09:46Let's say we had a clip on top and we wanted to do a transition this way. Well, we can use a different composition mode. So let's go ahead and bring that dissolve back in, and now we see we can actually place this on a track.
10:01And if we go ahead and switch our tool back over to the selection mode, we can go into the dissolve and our adjustments are slightly different here, but essentially, the result is effectively the same where we're getting this dissolved from one to another. But this is a good way to do different types of compositing mappings.
10:19And now, let's go ahead and scroll once again. And let's say we wanted to add some text onto here, but we wanted to add it in a layer above our footage. Well, let's go back to our project bin here, and I'm gonna close this b roll.
10:32And we don't have any titles in here, but we can easily create one in this tab here. And this tab allows us to add additional color clips, folders, different titles, templates, animations, and generators.
10:44A lot of stuff you can do in here, but we're just going to add some basic text for now. So, I'm gonna go ahead into the title clip, and I'm not gonna go into super detail about all of this, but the basic thing we'll do is just click inside of this text box, and we're just going to type in some text. Yay.
11:00And maybe I'll resize it a little bit, maybe make this two fifty, and then I'm going to go ahead and hit these center buttons, and then hit create title, and now we actually have a title. And then I can just click and drag and throw this into the folder to keep it organized.
11:15And now I could just throw it into the timeline like so, but maybe I want it to go above this point and I need some extra space. Well, we can create additional tracks by right clicking in the track area and selecting insert track. And then we can specify how many tracks we wanna add, if we want it to go above or under whatever tracks we're selecting here.
11:37So we can go ahead and hit okay, And now we have two additional tracks, and we can easily put our text above everything else to keep it organized. Now, the last thing I wanna show in the timeline is about grouping. Now, all of these clips have some camera audio that is completely useless to us.
11:54Now, there's a couple ways we can deal with this. Right now, all of our clips have this blue outline on them showing that they are grouped, and you'll notice that whenever you click one, it highlights both the audio and video. You can also just press and hold alt and select one or the other, and that way you can individually select them and move them around.
12:14But another way we can do it is by selecting them, right clicking, and going to ungroup clips. And now you'll see that there's a black outline on them because now they're individual clips and not bound together. But you can always regroup them by shift clicking them or shift dragging and highlighting them, and then right clicking and selecting group clips, and now they're bound together again.
12:38So because we don't need any of this audio, I can just highlight all of my clips right here, right clicking and selecting ungroup, and now I can just shift drag and select all of my audio, and then go ahead and delete them.
12:51And because I don't have any more audio in here, I can go ahead and add some music in here, and let's just find some music. I'm just going to drag this one in here, and I'm just going to align it with the beginning of this clip, and I'm going to scroll ahead and maybe have some fade off over here. And so maybe I want this one to fade out at the end, and maybe we have some text at the end to fade us out.
13:14So we can go ahead and just make a cut here by pressing shift r. We'll just go ahead and delete the rest of this. And then we have this little circle on this top right corner.
13:24If we click and drag this, it'll automatically fade this music out. So now if we play this back, the music automatically fades out for us, which is really nice.
13:37And then in order to make sure the text doesn't just pop off the screen like that, we can also do the same thing with the text and have a video fade on it as well. So now the text fades out smoothly and the music fades out smoothly. So by now, I'm sure you've noticed that our clips look a little bit flat.
13:54And that's because they're completely ungraded and they were also shot in log, which our monitors can't even show properly. So we're not gonna go too deep into the log specifics today, but we are going to go into some color to see how we can improve the look of these clips and some techniques that we can use. Now, before we go into the color tab, we wanna make sure that we turn off our proxies so that we're working with full resolution footage when we actually go to color.
14:19So let's go ahead and just highlight all of our clips and turn off proxy clip for each of them. And now, let's go ahead and go over to our color page. And now we're working with full resolution footage, and we're on the color page.
14:31And to find all of the effects that we can use for color, we'll go to the effects tab and make sure we pull down color and image correction. And this is where all of your color grading and color correction tools will live. Now because this is log footage, we don't want to make adjustments directly to this log state because it'll actually provide incorrect adjustments and skew the footage in ways it wasn't meant to be handled.
14:55So we can solve this really quickly by using the apply LUT option. Depending on what camera you have, you might have different options for LUTs, but for this, we're just going to use a simple technical LUT to transform from its log state to Rec seven zero nine, And the LUT file we're going to apply is probably gonna look different for you, but mine's a f log clip from Fujifilm, so I'm just going to apply that.
15:16And you can see, all we're really doing is taking it from the color space it was shot in to rec seven zero nine, which is the color space that most monitors use. And we're keeping the flat log look too, but now with correct colors. So now, let's actually look at our tools that we can use.
15:28So we'll start with the exposure. I'm gonna go ahead and just click and drag this on here. And sure enough, when we increase and decrease our exposure, you'll see that it is in fact moving our overall brightness up and down.
15:40And our radius, if we increase it, will decrease the black level, and decreasing radius will bring our black level up. So that's just nice to have. But the thing you have to be careful of with the exposure is that it's really easy to push it too high to the point where it starts clipping your color channels really hard.
15:58You can see it flat lines up here and we get all these white spots and it's just really messy. So, in general, you'd want to be very soft with this exposure and use it only for extreme circumstances where you wanna maintain contrast.
16:11But I'm just gonna go ahead and remove the exposure for now and I'm gonna look at the other one that I use, which is the gamma. So, gonna go ahead and apply this here. And by default, it's going to maximize it, which is not what we want.
16:22But the key thing I want you to notice with the image and the waveforms is that while I move this, you'll notice that it doesn't clip our colors whenever we increase it. It gives a nice roll off. So this is actually a good tool to use as your base essentially for where you want your base exposure to be applied.
16:39Now, are a lot of other tools that you can use for exposure, but this is the primary one that gives me the most optimal result without destroying the image too much. So now, we're going to look at our white balance here. We can go down to the bottom where we have our two different white balance adjustments.
16:55So I'll just go ahead and add them both, and we're actually not going to adjust this quite yet because we want to define our contrast first. So if we go up, you'll see that we do have a contrast adjustment, but I'm actually going to use the bezier curves for this.
17:12So let's go ahead and drag bezier curves on it. And what this will allow us to do is define our contrast from a curve. And so we have our black end here and our white end up here.
17:22And so we can just click and drag this low end down to bring the shadows down lower, and then we can flatten out this black point here. And then with our high end, we can straighten out this area and just bring this up and bring a nice round curve, or we can just add another point and really define that s curve.
17:43So with this s curve, we have a really big body of contrast. You can see that's already doing a ton to our image. So if we turn this on and off, you can see that that really fills in everything quite nicely.
17:54And we can do a little bit more with this if we wanted to raise our black end but still have a nice defined look. We can easily do that here, which is nice.
18:06Now, with the white balance, let's go ahead and close this up to give us more room. With our white balance adjustments, let's go ahead and enable both of those. The regular white balance is more actually for your green magenta shift, so you can click and drag this back and let's say we wanna get rid of some of that green cast so we can bring it down to shift it more towards magenta.
18:27And then maybe it's a little bit too warm in the overall image, so we can go to the white balance l m s and then bring our color temperature up to kind of neutralize those skin tones and give a more natural looking image.
18:42Now, when you're adjusting white balance, most of the time, not all the time, but most of the time, it's best to prioritize your skin tones. And the best way to do that is actually by using the vectorscope.
18:53Now, if you've never used a vectorscope before, this is basically just showing how saturated your colors are at any given color vector. So you have your red, your yellow, your green, cyan, blue, and magenta.
19:05And these waves and data points down here are just showing where all of your colors are shifting towards. And, obviously, in this image, there's a lot of yellow and green, so we're seeing a lot of those yellow and green shifts. If I cranked this color temperature all the way up, you can see how it starts moving down towards cyan, or if I cranked it all the way down, you'd see, oh, we got a lot of red in our image for some reason.
19:28We don't want that. But we're just going to go ahead and stick with this area for now. And you can see with those two white balance adjustments, we've already gotten rid of a lot of that green cast, and the image looks a lot more natural.
19:41And now, the last thing I wanna talk about is in terms of saturation. Now, saturation isn't necessarily one of the three cores, but something relatively problematic about how saturation is usually used, whether it's the normal saturation effect or something like hue saturation intensity. When you increase saturation using these tools, they make your colors brighter, which can make your clip feel very digital or video y.
20:03Now, it isn't inherently wrong, but it's the opposite of how colors behave in real life. For example, when something gets more colorful, naturally, it will become darker. Now, fortunately, we do have a way to accomplish this here.
20:15We can actually use another bezier curves adjustment, surprisingly enough. So let's go ahead and add a new bezier curve to our flow here. And we're just going to change this channel to saturation.
20:28So if we grab our upper handle here and start dragging it to the left to increase our curve, you'll see that not only is our image getting more saturated, but all of our waves and our color channels are all going down, meaning our colors are actually getting darker. So, this is actually a more filmic type of saturation and you can have a lot of fun with this because you can really shape your saturation in a way where if you have colors that are just way too blown out, but you wanna maintain a lot of the colors in the more subdued areas, we can actually bring this high end down and decrease the max saturations, but also increase the lower saturations.
21:07So we can bring a lot more body into some of the skin tone areas and take away some of the green in a lot of this forest area. So if we look at this before and after, we're bringing a lot more color and life into the skin while keeping the background subdued.
21:23And those are just some quick color correction and color grading tips. Hopefully, were helpful. If you wanna copy those effects and place them on other clips, we can just right click, hit copy on this clip, and then highlight our other clips, and then right click, and then select paste effects.
21:39And now, all of our clips have those same adjustments. Now, those adjustments might not play the same for every clip because every clip is a slightly different scenario. But the good news is is because we have our layers built out like so, we can go into each one of them because we know what they are.
21:53And let's just say this one obviously needs some exposure, so we just want to increase this gamma. And that gets us to a much closer spot very quickly.
22:02And then we can do other things like building our contrast curve differently or moving our white balance differently, giving this more of a magenta shift, like so. And there's more that we can do with this, but let's just go ahead and see how we can actually export our video and get it out. So let's go ahead and just go back to editing.
22:20Let's say this video is in a done spot. Well, we can go to the beginning of this clip over here. We'll press I for in, and that sets our in zone.
22:30And then we can just click and drag, and we can make sure this snaps to where the ending of this music is right here, and that'll snap to the edge. And we'll just make sure that this is actually snapped on to the beginning here.
22:42And then this is our zone that we're going to send to render. And the easy way to render is just by going up to project, render, and then we can specify what type of exporting we want.
22:52I'm just gonna go ahead and stick with this m p 4H265. If you wanna see more on different rendering types or different tips and tricks for this, let me know. But we're going to go ahead and just specify where we want this to go.
23:05I'm just gonna go ahead and put it in its correct folder. We'll give it a name, and then we'll hit save. And then we select render to file, and that'll put it in the job queue.
23:14Now, the great thing about this is we can go ahead and continue doing other work or working in different sequences. And if we wanted to send other things into the job we can do that while it's rendering. So if I set another file to render, let's just say this is forest v two, we can hit render to file and now it'll also render that clip when it's done rendering the first one.
23:36And that's how you edit a video in Kdenlive. What's a tool you would like to master next? Audio, effects, subtitles or graphics?
23:44Or is there something in this tutorial that you would like to dive into deeper? Let us know any of these things and if this tutorial was helpful for you in the comments below. Okay then.
Kdenlive has always been free. What most beginners miss is that it is also genuinely capable — provided you configure three things correctly from the start. This tutorial covers all three, then walks every tool from the project bin to the render queue.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
14:43list
The 5-Effect Color Grading Chain
Apply LUT (log to Rec709)
Gamma (base exposure)
Bezier Curves luma (contrast S-curve)
White Balance + White Balance LMS
Bezier Curves saturation (filmic saturation)
A specific ordered stack of effects that produces correct, filmic color from log footage in Kdenlive.
Steal forAny NLE that supports LUTs and curve-based effects
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
23:36next-video
“What's a tool you would like to master next? Audio, effects, subtitles or graphics?”
Asks viewers to comment with their next tutorial request — low-friction engagement driver that also functions as content research.
An 84-minute start-to-finish walkthrough of DaVinci Resolve 21, using a Star Wars fan-film project to cover editing, color grading, Fusion VFX, Fairlight audio, and delivery.
A 22-minute crash course that covers everything from editing vocabulary and panel layout to custom Fusion transitions and the psychology of viewer retention.
00:05
00:13
00:18
00:22
00:33
00:38
01:04
01:19
01:32
01:56
02:22
03:44
04:07
04:11
04:15
04:41
04:57
05:09
05:17
05:25
05:33
05:41
05:55
06:03
06:10
06:18
06:27
06:45
06:54
07:02
07:09
07:13
07:17
07:28
07:46
08:04
08:20
08:35
08:50
09:05
09:33
09:46
10:00
10:13
10:29
11:08
11:22
11:31
11:40
12:32
13:03
13:24
13:34
13:44
14:16
14:34
14:50
15:05
15:20
16:14
16:44
17:10
17:32
17:53
18:10
18:34
18:50
19:10
19:29
19:56
21:04
21:30
21:47
22:22
22:42
23:20
23:34
1:24:15
1:12:14
21:51
07:11
18:29
22:50