Kdenlive is a great video editing software which I often use for not too complicated film-editing work. You can read my article here. Now the developer are preparing the next release of Kdenlive which brings notable enhancements.

If you are a Kdenlive user you may be aware that the team ran a fund-raising campaign to clean up the Kdenlive code. The fund-raising was successful and the team has cleaned up the code, which means that an average user won't see any new feature on the surface but deep down at the code level a lot of cleaning has been done which will enhance performance and will enabled better development in future. The team has not yet merged the changed in the Kdenlive main tree, they are planning to merge it after this release.

The upcoming release, which should be Kdenlive 0.9.3, brings quite a lot of bug fixing along with several minor UI improvements and new features.

Some of the major features or enhancements include:

DVD Wizard
The DVD Wizard was mostly rewritten, now allowing 16:9 menus. It now also autodetects the format of your videos and proposes a trandcoding if it is necessary. In fact, you can now drop any video in the Wizard and just click transcode to get it in the correct DVD format.

The menus were broken in the previous release which has been fixed. The menus remain basic but there is minor improvements as now you can add shadows which makes menus look better.

Improved clip markers
Clip markers are very important for a film-editor and now Kdenlive has improved it with the ability to add comments to find them in the clip.

Clip Analysis
Another notable new feature is clip analysis which allows user to add some MLT effects that analyzes the clip and store the result for further use. Some of the useful cases as pointed out by the developer  Jean-Baptiste Mardelle are:

Automatic scene detection: Kdenlive can now parse your clips to find the different scenes and add markers or cut the clip accordingly. The process is currently very slow but it's a start.
Improved motion tracking: Kdenlive can also now analyse an object's motion, and the result of this can be used as keyframes for a transition or an effect. For example, you can now have a title clip that follows an object (see small video demo below).

This release will also benefit from the improvements done to FFmpeg, Frei0r and MLT which will make video processing better on Kdenlive. The next version is scheduled to be released on November 19.