A sizeable update to the free, open-source video editor Kdenlive is now available to download.
Kdenlive 24.12 arrives stuffed like a seasonal bird with bug fixes, performance tweaks, and usability enhancements. Additionally, the editor’s developers have removed support for Qt5 so that, as of this release, it is entirely Qt6.
Subtitling gets a big boost with the arrival of Advanced SubStation Alpha (ASS) subtitle support. The key benefit of these subtitles (I’ll swerve calling them ASS) is greater customisation, including things like text strokes, drop shadows, margins, and even effects like masking.
A new Subtitle Manager makes editing, ordering, and managing subtitles easier, with sections for Files, Layers and Content, Style, and Info; and a the new Subtitle Style Editor lets users create unique onscreen font styles with live WYSIWYG previews.
But the subtitle fun doesn’t stop there because the (kick-)ASS subtitle format also supports animation – just 3 effects included: sideways scrolling banner; traditional vertical scroll; and karaoke.
Quite an update on the subtitle front.
Elsewhere, Kdenlive 24.12 offers improved native Speech to Text features, completes the designed of its effects interface, and added effect parameters to the effects panel for a handful of built-in effects (Transform and Flip for video, Volume for audio).
A pair of new colour corrections effects make their debut in this update: HSL Primaries and HSL Range.
HSL Primaries is used to adjust hue, saturation, and luminance of specific colours (like reds, greens, or blues) in a video to make targeted changes for colour balancing, grading, or artistic effect. HSL Ranges allows entire colour ranges to be adjusted.
While Kdenlive’s new GPS Effects enable video makers to add on-screen visualisations for things like distance, altitude, and speed, useful if cutting together content where there’s GPS data to convey stats is helpful – ideal for sports clips.
It’s also now possible to resize multiple clips on the timeline in one go. Users must select all the items to resize (shift + click), then double-click on one of them. In the dialog that appears, set a new duration, check ‘Apply duration to all items’, and hit OK.
Other notable changes in Kdenlive 24.12:
- New shift + del shortcut to extract clip from timeline
- Actions to quickly add Marker/Guides in a specific category
- Titler now supports tabulations
Plus more than 220 bug fixes – the Kdenlive 24.12 changelog offers a blow-by-blow on those.
Get Kdenlive 24.12
Kdenlive is free, open-source software for Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Linux builds can be downloaded from the KDE website as a distro agnostic AppImage (which won’t run out of the box in Ubuntu, so be sure to install libfuse2 first). An official Kdenlive Snap is also available, and the video editor is on Flathub.