Editing 4K Video with Kdenlive on Linux

Editing 4K Video with Kdenlive on Linux

When asked to compose and edit a video in 4K, my immediate response was fear. Would Kdenlive do it?

Well, the short answer is YES. You need to create a new project profile and that is basically it. A render profile is not really necessary as you can render with H.264, MP4 or WEBM if you intend the video for YouTube.

To create the "new project Profile". Look under Settings and "Manage Project Profiles". Be careful not to overwrite your favorite profile. Use the settings below:

I selected 30 frames per second for mine. Remember you can always alter the project to suit the footage that you are given.

You can also open the 4K footage using a 1080p profile if you intend to scale down the video for the internet. The clarity of the rendered video is still awesome.

Things to note: 

• I use Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr on a Lenovo G560 laptop. It has only 4gb of RAM.
• Simply playing 4K video on my Lenovo is a feat on it's own due to the lack of RAM.
• VLC manages with 4K quite well but playback can 'step' or skip frames at times.
• I have a two monitor setup but the large monitor is only 1920x1080.
• I figure the PC has to rescale the 4K back down to the monitors resolution during playback.

File sizes:

• The rendered 4K video is going to be large.
• 1.5 mins of 4K video will be around 220mb.
• The same video in 1080p is 85mb.
• Rendering 4K also takes longer (duh).

Also I use Kdenlive version 0.9.6, but from what I gather you can use up to version 15 to also do 4K.

Useful links:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/398613/how-to-export-4k-video-with-kdenlive
https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=272&t=119006