A major new version of the open source video editor Kdenlive is now available to download.

Kdenlive 22.08 comes front-loaded with a variety of interesting new features, UI tweaks, and enhancements to many of its existing capabilities. As a result, Kdenlive 22.08 stands to offer a smoother editing experience than in previous versions.

Let’s take a look at exactly what’s new.

New Features in Kdenlive 22.08

This release includes a bunch of enhancements to Kdenlive’s proxy clip generation system (including working NVENC and VAAPI proxy clip encoding). The latter fix delivers an appreciable boost if you work with high-resolution footage regularly and you’re on compatible hardware.

Experimental parallel processing when rendering is available in this release. This could (read: probably will) result in faster rendering times for most users rendering out a typical project. Rendering always feels like it takes forever in any programme so efforts to speed it up are appreciated!

Kdenlive debuted a built-in subtitle tool a few releases back, and now it gets an upgrade with support for basic styling of subtitles. You can now quickly change font family, font size, outline colour, shadows, background colour, and more. Kdenlive devs say to look for even more styling options in the next release!

Style subtitles in-app

The audio recording experience is greatly improved. Audio monitoring mode can now be activated by clicking the microphone button in the mixer, with the correct track pre-selected for recording. You can hit the space bar to start/pause recording, and hit esc to stop. The recorded clips is then automatically added to your timeline.

Kdenlive 22.08 is able to import AVIF, HEIF, HEIC and JPEG XL images, LOTTIE and RAWR animations, and VTT (Web Video Text Tracks) and SBV (YouTube) subtitle files. Being able to mix a wide variety of media in a composition regardless of what file is what format is a must for a modern video editing experience.

A variety of new effects are included:

  • Shear
  • Scroll
  • Photosensitivity
  • Monochrome
  • Median
  • Kirsch
  • Exposure
  • EPX Scaler
  • Color Temperature
  • Color Overlay
  • Color Correct
  • Color Contrast
  • Chroma Noise Reduction
  • Contrast Adaptive Sharpen

Additionally, there’s an effect to change bilateral and VR360 Equirectangular footage to stereo, and the Luma composition now supports video matte files (unlocking some impressive creative capabilities).

There’s also some really neat looking integration with the Glaxnimate vector graphics animation program, which this clip from the Kdenlive team demoes:

https://kdenlive.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/glax-tut.mp4

Elsewhere, the clip-tagging system has been improved; you can configure the colour of the monitor guides; and use snapping in Ripple edit mode. Another neat touch in Kdenlive 22.08: the ability to export guides/markers applied in the timeline as chapters so you can add them to YouTube descriptions, etc.

In all, a sizeable set of updates to this standout video editing essential.

Download Kdenlive 22.08

Want to download Kdenlive 22.08 for Windows, macOS, and Linux? You can do so from the Kdenlive website. Linux versions are provided as a distro-agnostic AppImage, though you can get Kdenlive on Flathub or via the official Kdenlive PPA if you prefer.