We're working to provide you with a stable, slick, powerful video creation suite for a couple of main reasons. First, we all want to have the best possible system for realizing our own creative ideas and projects. That's pretty obvious itch scratching. Secondly, and more seriously, we all know that free and open source software can do amazing things. We would love for everyone to be able to share the best of that with the outside world. In this day and age, that means sharing video - all kinds of video – from screencasts and films to tutorials and video blogs. We wanted it to be easy. We wanted it to be powerful. And we wanted people to be able to say that they created it free and open source.
There's many great features already from beginning to end. You can record from FireWire cameras, webcams and even your screen directly and when you're done editing, you can save your video using multi-threaded rendering that keeps going in the background as you edit, even if the application crashes. But there's still a lot that we want to improve. Being essentially a "dot zero" release though, just like with KDE 4.0 release, there's still plenty of fixes and features to be made, and stability to be enhanced. We still look into every crash report and do our best to figure out how to improve it. Having said that i've been using it on our own projects and have been very happy with the huge progress made since the the previous releases over a year ago.
That improvement all starts with creating the videos you want and joining the community of enthusiastic users and new contributors. People who make videos and file any bug reports they can along the way. People to add the features they want and people to package the releases (if you know how, we'd love to talk!). We're very lucky that a project like this has all the glamour of a creative, userland application, as well as many technically interesting areas such as improving effects and their keyframing, JACK pro-audio integration, low level multimedia framework interaction and the newest features of the KDE 4 framework. Of course anyone able to help with the fundamentals like documentation, testing, and of course using Kdenlive is always extremely welcome! It doesn't matter if you don't know how to code. Neither do I. We work as a team, and we're fortunate enough to be able to use the skills we have supporting the talented people who can.
Now, with the KDE 4 version of Kdenlive out the door, we all have the opportunity to focus on a variety of potential improvements from the roadmap. Increasing control and flexibility of audio and video effects, the array of timeline editing tools, speed and of course stability are all on the roadmap for potential inclusion on the next release. There's still work to do, but the future of popular video editing on Linux and BSD is looking brighter than ever right now. We look forward to sharing it with you at kdenlive.org.
Packages, repositories or builds are already available for Debian-based systems such as Kubuntu/Ubuntu (at debian-multimedia.org), Madriva and Gentoo at the time of writing.
Note: There is also a slightly out-of-date Kdenlive screencast at http://vimeo.com/2234149