How to easily delete snippets using Kdenlive?

Question

I'm using Kdenlive to edit some video I recorded. I have some "uh"s, "um"s, and dead air I want to delete quickly. For every little bit I need to remove, I'm having to:

1. Select track
2. Set end cutting point
3. Cut clip (Shift+R)
4. Set start cutting point
5. Cut clip (shift+R)
6. Select portion to delete
7. Press delete
8. Right-click in empty area
9. Click "remove space"

This is a real pain. :-( I'm used to Cinelerra, where you just click-drag a selection, then press delete. Unfortunately, the codecs in Cinelerra are sorely out of date. How can I speed this process up in Kdenlive?

Solution 1

1. How to quickly mark a segment to delete:

1. Make sure the video track is selected.
2. Press X to switch to the Cut (Razor) Tool
3. Click once in the timeline at the start point
4. Click once at the end point

5. Press S again to switch back to selection mode

   

2. Use xdotool to automate delete/remove space with a single keyboard shortcut

1. xdotool allows automation of keyboard and mouse clicks/movements; install it with sudo apt-get install xdotool

2. Copy and paste the below to an sh file, say kdenlive_cut.sh in your home directory:

   #!/bin/bash
   
   DELAY=0.5  # delay in seconds between each action
   xdotool search --limit 1 -name Kdenlive > nul  # activate only if kdenlive running
   if [ $? -eq 0 ]
   then xdotool click 1 && sleep $DELAY \       # left-click
      && xdotool key Delete && sleep $DELAY \  # DEL
      && xdotool click 3 && sleep $DELAY \     # right-click
      && xdotool key r;                        # 'R' to remove space
   fi
   

   Make it executable with chmod +x ~/kdenlive_cut.sh

3. Open Settings...Keyboard, and go to the Shortcuts tab. Create a custom shortcut, naming it whatever you want, and setting the "Command" path to /home/username/kdenlive_cut.sh. Click Apply. The right-column will say "Disable", click on it and you'll see "New Accelerator": press your shortcut key combo. I chose Ctrl+Del since it doesn't conflict with the existing shortcuts in Kdenlive.

   

4. Now go to Kdenlive, and mark a segment you want to cut (as explained in Section 1). Click on that segment to outline it in red, and without moving the cursor, press Ctrl+Del; you will see the segment deleted, an empty space appear, the right-click menu show and the space removed -- all in the space of about 2 seconds.

   • Sometimes the shortcut fails the very first time it's invoked, giving you the longer right-click menu or the "Insert Space" option. Just cancel, and try it again...it works.

   • Here's a Youtube Demo of the shortcut in action.

Solution 2

In the new Kdenlive you can set a zone region with i and o keys and then press Shift+x to delete the region on all tracks. Unfortunately at the moment Kdenlive Version 18.04.1 you can not exclude tracks from this operation.

Solution 3

Despite requests of many users, there is no such function for just selecting a part and removing it out of the audio/video track.

But I think that you just could look where to cut, then cut two times, click on the middle part and then click Del. And that is everything.

I think that this cutting process shouldn't take too long.

Solution 4

You could use a custom shortcut for "Extract clip" which deletes and removes the gap. If you don't want to use the mouse at all you can use the following shortcuts:

1. SHIFT+C to cut the section you want to delete (I added a custom shortcut "c" for this)
2. ALT+LEFT/RIGHT to go to the beginning of the clip you want to delete
3. Press "+" to select the clip to delete
4. Use a custom shortcut for "Extract clip". I use the custom shortcut CTRL+Del for this. This combines deletion of the clip and removing the space.

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Comments

[Vinicius Dias]

That's exactly what I was looking for. Any way to set a zone region by dragging the mouse instead of pressing i and o?

[Robert Houghton]

I'm struggling to get this to work, I'm also on Ubuntu 18.04 and using Kdenlive 20.08 if that matters? Also, xdotool 3.20160805.1 and I checked that my .sh file was executable with stat -c '%A'