Kdenlive UI: Title Editor -- Odds and Ends

Recently, some nice upgrades to Kdenlive's title editor (so-called titler) have landed in the soon-to-be released stable 16.04 version. So what are we to expect from the titler editor feature improvements...?

The Improved Titler

Kdenlive's improved titler.

Kdenlive's title editor has been enhanced on these aspects:

• character spacing of text -- albeit still only for a text element in total, but not for individual character kerning.
• line spacing of multi-line text -- again, only at the level of the complete multi-line text element.
• text shadows for better contrast with the underlying video, etc. -- here, color, transparency, blur radius, and offset can all now be controlled.
• color gradients both for text fill as well as for rectangle shapes -- both start and end color and transparency can be controlled, together with the relative start and end points, and finally the gradient's angle.

These improvements work out quite nicely, so I already used some of these features in a subtle way in a new project I just started work on. Personally, I especially like the text shadows: when used very cautiously (such as without offsets), they improve title clip quality considerably. All texts in the screenshot above were done inside Kdenlive using only the upgraded title editor. Well, some tricks here require some slightly tedious work, but the titler allows for some nice titling.

On a side note, I apologize to the unknown illuminator who created his amazingly beautiful work of art (fortuna fol.) ... that I heavily remixed for my two new screencasting projects.

Where to Get?

In order to enjoy the new titler and upgraded features you do not only need either a recent Kdenlive nightly build or the upcoming 16.04 release, but also a very recent MLT. In case you use Kdenlive on *ubuntu, you may want to try either ppa:kdenlive/kdenlive-master or ppa:kdenlive/kdenlive-testing.

With Kdenlive 16.04 already nearing its official release in a few days we can expect it to show up within few weeks in the usual distributions. Hopefully, packagers of all distributions this time do a better job than with the previous Kdenlive releases...