 Since starting my YouTube channel, I've made nearly 800 videos, and I have edited almost all of those videos using a piece of free and open source software called Kaden Live. Kaden Live is free as in freedom, it is also free as in free of charge. It's completely free. There are proprietary alternatives available to me on Linux that may be better video editors, things like DaVinci Resolve are available on Linux now. Lightworks is available on Linux, but those particular projects, they may be excellent software, but just based on ideology, based on the principle of the matter, I try to run only free and open source software where possible. And Kaden Live is a perfectly suitable alternative to the proprietary garbage that is DaVinci Resolve and Lightworks. Now I have experimented with some of the other free and open source alternatives to Kaden Live. I've actually have edited a few videos using things like PTV, Shotcut, OpenShot, and all of those editors are way behind Kaden Live in terms of features. They are not as nearly mature as Kaden Live is. Kaden Live really is the gold standard when it comes to open source video editors. Being free and open source software, you should be able to find Kaden Live available in every Linux distros repositories. So you should have no problem getting Kaden Live directly from your distros native repositories. It's also available as a snap pack, a flat pack, and an app image. So you have multiple formats to go and grab Kaden Live. And that's good. It's really good because Kaden Live is under heavy development. They are pushing out new releases all the time. New releases with new features being added constantly and it's great that it's seeing such heavy development because it's becoming better and better with each release. Because it's under such heavy development, it does seem like every other release of Kaden Live is a complete crash fist, right? Every other release of Kaden Live, it's completely crash-tastic. So sometimes you get that update and your only options are, well, let me go back to the older version because this version seems to be buggy. Or what you might do is go grab one of the other formats. If you had the snap installed, try the app image or try the native package from your Linux distributions repository. Sometimes that fixes the problem. In this video, I want to show you guys a little bit of how I use Kaden Live, some of the things I often do in my videos. I'm not a professional videographer and I'm not trying to make Hollywood quality movies using Kaden Live. I have some pretty basic needs, but I want to show you guys a little bit of what I do with Kaden Live. So let me switch to the desktop here and let me go ahead and launch Kaden Live. When you first launch it, it's pretty bare, right? There's not much going on. You have a project bin and the project bin is where all the videos and images that you have added to be used in your video would be placed. But of course, we haven't added anything. You have a couple of different options of how to add stuff to the project bin. You can click the little movie icon here that says Add Clip or Folder and then you can navigate through a little directory window and add your images and videos or whatever it is you're working with, audio tracks. Or you could just open up any graphical file manager so I could open up Pthunar here and if I navigate to some of the previous videos I have recorded on the channel, what I'm going to do. I'm just going to import some clips that I have used in the past. So I'm going to import these various MP4s, they're video clips. I'm going to import this ping. I could also import this audio track here. I think that was a wave file and then I'm going to close my file manager there and it's loading all of this stuff in the project bin. Now let me scroll over here. Now you will notice that all of my clips in the project bin have a little yellow box in the left hand corner and you see the P that is for proxy. So these proxy clips, they really help speed things up. They help speed up the editing process and previewing the video, especially your preview monitor over here when you're scrubbing through the video. So you really want to use these proxy clips. I don't think they're turned on by default, but it's really easy to turn them on. Go to your settings menu and go to configure Kaden live. And you probably want to do this the very first time you open Kaden live. If you've never run through it because typically what you want to do is go to project defaults and set the kind of video that you typically make because typically you're working within the same format all the time. For example, my default settings are I always want to do HD 1080p 60 frames per second video. That's the only resolution I record in. That's the only videos I want to make. So I've got that set. Then you have a proxy clips setting here. Make sure that is clicked on and you see the enable proxy clips. Make sure you have that checked. So I can't stress enough how important it is to turn on the proxy clips because it will drastically speed things up as far as the previewing and everything is probably just not even going to be possible to preview the video on most hardware. And unless it's like outstanding hardware, unless you enable the proxy clips. The only other thing I want to point out is the environment variables here. There's one for processing threads. I have a 12 core 24 thread CPU threadripper and by default, this is always set to one setting it greater than one. It says here in Kaden live is experimental, but I don't know if how well it works, but I always tell it. Hey, I have 24 threads on my CPU. You're free to use all 24 if you can. One thing to note with video editing is you kind of need good hardware with video editing. You need a halfway decent CPU. If you don't have a good CPU, video editing is going to be a struggle for you. It helps to have a good graphics card as well. It helps to have a pretty good bit of RAM, too. Kaden live can actually use a lot of that RAM. So if you're one of those people debating whether you want to get 16 gigs of RAM or 32 gigs of RAM or whatever it is, trust me, a video editor can actually use all that RAM. So yeah, if you can afford the extra RAM, go get it. So now that we have some stuff in the project bin, let me import something so you can see how it imports a video. By default, it shows you the audio track and the video track as separate tracks. Right. So this MP4, you see the blue at the top. That is the video track. The green at the bottom with the waveform here, the audio waveform. That's the audio track. They are locked together, meaning they move together. You could unlock them and move them separately if you needed to. Sometimes that's necessary. If you get a situation where a video is out of sync with its audio, you know, you can unlock them and move the audio around and try to fix that. If you can, you see V1 and A1 that is video one, audio one. If I added another clip, you know, I could add this clip here and video two and audio two are on the outside of video one and audio one. And by default, you only have the two different tracks available to you. If you wanted to, you could add more. So what you could do is I could go to video two right here and I could right click here and I could insert track and I could tell it. I want to add another video track, another audio track or another audio and video track. And that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to tell it to insert that track above video two. And now I have V3 here for video three and A3 down here for audio three. Now, let me get rid of the second video that I imported because really, I just want to show you guys just dragging this little arrow here. We could actually just grab the arrow and scrub through the video. Now, I hope it doesn't come across too loud here. I probably need to open up PAHVU control post audio volume control and adjust this. But when I scrub through it, of course, you're going to see the image change here in the preview window. But you also get the audio coming through. You get a new audio server. Oh, you know, you can you can play around with that. If you just want to play through the preview, I mean, you can start this play because all of my audio equipment, let me turn the volume down from this. Now, let's talk about moving around on the timeline because that's probably one of the basic things you need to get straight first is how do you move along the timeline? Well, what I would do is I would use the arrow keys left and right to move one frame at a time. So if I just, you know, hit right a million times, I'm just moving along one single frame at a time that is very useful when you really need to zoom in and edit various minute details, especially like on an audio waveform. But most of the time moving one frame at a time is not very useful. Let me import a second track here. So I'm going to actually import that second video. And what you could do is instead of just left and right moving one frame at a time, you could do alt left and right. So if I do alt right, I move ahead to the next clip. If I do alt left, I move back to where I was before. If I had multiple clips here, I would just keep moving further and further along, you know, each time I go to the end there and then I go to the end there. Every time there's something new on the timeline, new image and new audio track, you know, alt left and right gets you to those again. If you want to, you can just drag the arrows here and that also will move you along the timeline. Also in the preview window, I actually grabbed the arrow in the preview window. I can really move around the timeline, which is really a handy feature. Actually, if you're editing a video that's very lengthy, you know, sometimes I record videos an hour or more in length and even doing the alt in the arrow keys, moving along by clips. Sometimes I want to, you know, move way ahead or way back in the timeline and it's easier just to do it here in that preview window here. Now, one interesting feature with the alt plus the arrow keys, you know, moving along one clip at a time is because that feature is really neat. It's a good idea to actually have multiple clips. So sometimes you'll import a clip and it'll be really lengthy. You know, it might be a 10 or 15 minute single video clip. Well, then when you do alt right on the keyboard, you know, you're going to jump ahead 15 minutes because you got that lengthy video clip. So even a single video clip that doesn't even need to be edited. I'm not removing anything. Sometimes I will go in here and just add a cut. Why will I add a cut? Because later when I start to move with alt left and right, you know, I have another spot to get to instead of going all the way to the end of that rather lengthy clip. And let me get rid of this particular track that we imported to delete something from the timeline. You just highlight it, click on it with the mouse or move with the arrow keys. However, you get to that particular clip. Once you're on it, just hit the delete key. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you guys how to zoom in and out because this is very important at the bottom here. You have a little slider. Let me move my head out of the way here. There's this little slider and by default, it's set on setting 13. The zoom level is 13 of 21 possible levels. You can zoom in way in and now it's very slow. You know, that the waveform is really long. And if you zoomed back out, you know, 13 was here, but you could zoom way out where I mean the entire clip, I can't I can't even see that clip. And that is a one minute and 11 second clip. So that is, I guess, useful if you're dealing with something very lengthy. But typically 13, the default setting is what I use to preview the timeline. And when I need to make really detailed cuts, especially in the audio, what I do is I zoom way in and I usually don't do the slider here at the bottom. And what I do is the keyboard. If you do control and then the mouse wheel and I can zoom way in here and I can find the piece of audio that I wanted to cut. Maybe, you know, there was some junk in here and I wanted to cut from there to there. And how I cut, by the way, is there's a little scissors icon here. It's actually called the razor tool. I don't know why it doesn't have a picture of a razor. It has a picture of scissors. Maybe they should rename it the scissors tool. It would make more sense, but I do a cut there, a cut there. And now I can move, remove that with the delete key. And if I wanted to, I could right click here in the empty space. I could do remove space and it puts those tracks together. Now I could do the control and the mouse wheel again to zoom back out to a more respectable level. And now, you know, I can this is the area I did the cut. But again, at this level, you know, I did such a minor cut there. I mean, it's such a small cut. You can't really make those adjustments being zoomed out. You got to zoom way in sometimes when you're trying to maybe cut one single frame of audio now that we've talked about the razor tool, which is the scissors actually by default, you're typically in what is the normal mode you have the selection tool on is typically in this really. I mean, this doesn't cut or anything. You just pick a spot on the timeline and you're there. This is typically what you want to use is the selection tool, the normal mode. If you will, I've got the Vim mentality. Just think of selection tool as normal mode. Why is it normal? It's because it's typically what you want to be in the razor tool. You really don't need to use the razor tool, even though you can. I can click on the razor tool and make a cut with the mouse. You can do that with just the selection tool being on being in normal mode. There's key bindings to actually make cuts. Let me show you that. So that cut that I had just made, if I do control Z for undo that cut, I just made goes away. Now, let me go back to that spot. I wanted to make that cut right there. And now if I do shift R on the keyboard, you see, I have that cut there. Now, wherever I want to make the next cut, I go to it. Once again, shift R, I make a cut there. And if I wanted to delete that, you know, I could use the arrow keys or the mouse, either one gets me to that track. Once I get there, the delete key gets rid of it. Then I could right click in the empty space. I can remove space and it just fits everything back together. You can also, there was an option. I don't know if you guys saw that. Let me control Z to undo by right click in the empty space. Again, we have removed space. We also have removed space in all tracks, removed space. Just removed space in this track and removes that empty space and compresses that stuff together, removed space in all tracks, meaning means all the stuff that comes behind it. Maybe I had some images and video and they're placed exactly where they need to be in relation to this track. It moves all of them forward as well. I hope that makes sense. So let me also show you guys the next tool. There's actually three tools, the selection tool, which is the one you're typically going to use, the razor tool, which you could use if you wanted to, but really there's no reason to. And the spacer tool is another one you can use. If I highlighted the spacer tool here and I grabbed this right here and I just started moving. I'm taking everything with me. You notice the clips behind me are also coming with me. Everything behind the clip I just selected is moving. If I had other stuff, let me import another video. Maybe I want that video imported and maybe I want this image also to appear in the video. Now when I grabbed the selection here, you notice they all move with me when I have the spacer tool on. If I had the selection tool on, I can just move that by itself. For me personally, I don't use the spacer tool because sometimes if you start using the spacer tool, so you're changing a lot from the selection tool to the razor tool to the spacer tool, sometimes you'll have that spacer tool selected by accident and you're making major adjustments because remember it changes the clip you're on and it changes every clip past the one you're on. So be careful using the spacer tool. You can really mess up some stuff by sliding around things with that spacer tool. Now this video that I was putting together here is going to suck really bad because these were not clips that I had actually put together for a proper video. I just imported some random stuff but let me start the video playback here. I'm gonna let it play for a second. And here in a second it's coming up on an image that I also imported. The image is on top of the video because it's on top of the video on the timeline. Then now we've got two videos and two audio tracks playing at the same time, which is a bit of a mess. Now I was showing you that to show you guys, sometimes when you start adding a bunch of stuff to the timeline, sometimes the preview is a little choppy. It's actually working pretty good for me today but especially when you add a ton of effects, you got some transitions going on, maybe you got some transition wipes and then you've got various images and various audio tracks all fading in and out. Sometimes the preview isn't great. You know, it's kind of hard to tell what's going on. So a really neat thing you can do in Kaden Live is you can render small sections of your video so that you can check it out without having to render the entire video because say your video is a half hour in length. Well, a half hour video is gonna take me, I don't know, depending on the effects and everything, 15, 20 minutes to render on my machine. I've got a beefy machine. You've got bad hardware. It might take four hours to render a half hour video just so you can check out, you know, maybe a 10-second clip. No, you can actually render whatever selection you want from this video and how you do that. Maybe I wanna see all of this stuff, how these work together. So I pick the timeline where I want to start and I hit I and that is the beginning of this and then the next thing, then maybe the ending points right here. I go there and I hit O and I have a selection. I don't know if you can see. It's a little lighter shade of gray from there to there that is selected. When I go to the top here, go to the render button here and you could choose what format you wanna render your video in. WebM is set by default. You could change it to MP4 or whatever it is you need to change it to. By default, it's gonna render the full project, meaning everything on the timeline, the entire length of the video. But you could go down here and click selected zone. Do that, render to file. It's complaining to me because it's gonna title it untitled.webm and it already exists because I've done this before. By default, it tends to name everything as untitled unless you give it a title. So that's why it's complaining. And there's some other video in that directory called untitled and we're overriding it but that's fine. There, I just rendered that short section of video in 10 seconds or 15 seconds from rendering finished in 15 seconds. So I didn't have to wait hours for a video to render just to preview whatever section I wanted to check out. And if I wanted to, I could open up my file manager here again and go to that directory where it had the untitled webm and there it is. Let me open it and show you guys the preview here. That is the short little video it rendered. So let me show you guys some of the common things that I often do in my videos. So let me start the video preview here. The proportions of this have got a little wonky. Let me start the playback. All right, so the playback here, it went from black to the video here. That was because that's how it was recorded. I recorded this particular clip in OBS. OBS has a fade from black kind of transition but say I actually started the video here. Let me delete that and I'm gonna grab the spacer tool and drag everything forward. And now the actual start of the video, let's imagine it starts like this. It doesn't fade from black. But I want it to fade from black. Well, what I could do is I could grab the top corner of the video track and I just grab it and drag it to wherever it is. I want the fade in effect to stop. So now that I've added that fade in, let me play, you see. A really nice fade from black. Another thing I often do is I add text to the screen. Maybe I say something dumb or I need to clarify a statement or whatever. Maybe I'm just adding text to the screen for effect. Here's how I accomplish that. I go up here to project and I add title clip. And then I type something. Maybe I want to say DT is so cool. Exclamation point, that's the text. And yeah, I could play with the font phase. I could play with the font size, depending on how big I want it. Let's make it a hundred point font. And then here in the preview window, I could drag the font around to exactly where I want it on the screen. I want it, you know, toward the bottom in the center, underneath my head. I'll say now that I've got the text because the text is right here. If I click on that, we could add some more text but I don't want to do more text. I want this button here, background. We can add a rectangular background. I'm just going to draw this sort of transparent black rectangle over my text. Now you're going to say, well, shouldn't the text be on top of the rectangle? Yes, you do have a Z index here in the top right. So just adjust these numbers. So if I set it to Z index negative one for the rectangle, as long as the Z index for the font is zero or higher then the font of course is going to be sitting on top of the rectangle. I'm going to click okay. And now I have DT is so cool in this particular text, this title clip over in the project bin. Now I could drag it to the timeline and I could put it wherever it is. I want it on the timeline. And now let's play. And now you see the text pops up. Now when the text popped up and then when the text went away, that was not very smooth transition, right? It's kind of jarring. Text automatically just flashes on the screen. Wouldn't it be great if the text faded in? Well, you could do that. I could do a fade in. I could also do a fade out by grabbing the top corner at the back of the title clip. So let me start the playback again. And that was a very nice fade in for the text. And let's see the fade out. Yeah, much better. I like that already. If for some reason you didn't like what was going on in the title clip because sometimes you add it and then you realize that's not quite in the position you want. You can always go back in the project bin and just right click on it and choose edit clip and just go in and edit what you need to do. Move it or change the colors or whatever. Maybe you want to change the font color or if you can highlight the background you can go change the background color. By default I was doing black with a little transparency but you can choose whatever colors you would like. Some other modifications that I sometimes often have to do is sometimes I do have to adjust volume levels maybe for whatever reason I had to step a little further away from the microphone for something, especially you guys if you're not actually sitting at a desk or something maybe you're doing something out and about. Microphones get further away from you sometimes. If you're moving around a lot maybe doing stuff outdoors and there's a section of audio maybe that's a little low. Well what you can do is you can use the selection tool and shift R to do some cuts or you can use the razor tool to do some cuts. Maybe this short section here there were a couple of words you said that were very soft. And once you've made that selection right click on the audio track and do volume key frameable and you can adjust up the gain. 18 decibels that would have to be a really quiet clip to need that much gain added to it or maybe you want to completely mute something. I mean you can drop the gain minus 100 decibels that effectively mutes it but if you wanted to just completely mute the audio you could again right click on the audio track and for me I have mute in insert effect. I should actually talk about these effects these effects are your favorites. So these insert effects for the video I have lift gamma gain and transform as my favorites audio I have mute and volume key frameable as favorites but depending on the effects you use all the time you may have different stuff as your favorites you can very easily remove your favorites from the list and add new favorites from the list just go up to the effects here and if you wanted to add something I don't know maybe the vignette effect right click on it, click add to favorites and now that would be listed in your favorites I don't know what the vignette effect is so I'm not gonna add it I doubt I would ever use it. Another thing I often do in my videos is you guys have seen me add inline images often and sometimes I even do inline videos and what you do with that well anytime you drag another a second video clip to the timeline on top of the one you're already on you know both are running at the same time for example these two videos here so this video here is playing and then when it gets here you know the next video, the one on top is actually gonna be the one shown on screen because it's covering up this video both audio tracks will be playing together though it's just gonna be a jumbled mess as far as the audio but if you wanted to do a screen in screen kind of thing what you could do is transform the second video let me move ahead in the timeline here so you guys can see this what I would do is I would right click on that insert effect and do transform and then the transform effect you have a lot of options as far as where this video is gonna appear on the screen you have options as far as left, center, right, top, middle, bottom, what size by default of course it's 1920 by 1080 it's just you know something I shot with my camera but I could move it around on the screen I could play with these maybe I want it a slightly offset from the edge of the screen from the left maybe I also want it slightly offset from the center minus 100 and maybe for the width instead of 1920 let's make it much smaller how about 800 and now you will see I will have the second video much smaller and it's video in video all right, the audio is still a mess what I could do is actually mute the bottom audio track I could go to insert effect, mute and now I would have the video in video but I wouldn't have two different audio tracks going on so that's how you would do video in video an image appearing would be very similar so I have this image here this is just a ping, same thing I would just right click on it and I would go to transform again I would choose exactly the offsets from left or right or top and bottom and then select a size and I guess I could do that so let me pick something at random so I'm just offsetting 50 from the left edge of the screen and 50 from the center of the screen and we will make this 500 pixels and there is the image all right and that's kind of neat but a lot of times again with the image in the video or a video inside a video you do want some kind of transition so I might do a fade in and a fade out on the image fade in on this video now let's see those so there was the fade in there was the fade out and here comes the fade in or the inline video that's playing yeah very nice one effect people often want to do is they want to speed up or slow down a video especially for like this inline video that I added I took away the audio track from it it's no audio going on so wouldn't it be cool if whatever I was doing in this video I sped it up like a by a thousand percent or something how you do that in Caden live is go to the end of the track so if I go alt and then right let's move along and get to the end of that track and what you do you can do a control and grab the end of the track and when you do that you can adjust the length you will see the percent sign on the track let me move ahead in the move ahead in the timeline a little bit control, grab the edge, drag it and you guys see on the far left the percent sign it says a hundred and eighteen hundred and twenty hundred and twenty five hundred and thirty that's how much we have sped up the track now if you don't do control and you just grab the edge of the screen all you're doing is basically cutting a video so like this audio track down here if I just without control grab it with the mouse and just drag all I've done really is just cut cut that's basically the same thing is doing a cut and deleting that but control and then adjusting the width of a track actually speeds it up or slows it down so I'm just going to keep dragging that I'm going to zoom out because I'm going to adjust a lot here I'm going to do a control grab the edge of the screen and we're going to speed that video up about eight hundred and nine hundred percent and now that I've done that let's see how that transition looks in the preview window there's the image here comes the inline video and it's going to be sped up by a million percent see how fast I'm talking in the inline video things are just flying by yeah pretty neat effect and really that is most of what I do with my video editing I mean I've shown you pretty much all the tricks that I do as far as adding title clips adding inline images inline video speeding up tracks adjusting volume by the way on the audio there's also effects for normalization if you need to clean up your audio edit your audio a little bit in CadenLive you can do that I don't often play with that stuff as typically if I need to edit audio I'll actually take that audio track and put it in something like Audacity and clean it up there which you certainly can clean up your audio a little bit inside CadenLive some other final thoughts on this short CadenLive tutorial you know CadenLive does have a steep learning curve like everything I showed you in this short video took me a long time to learn and there's so much more about CadenLive I don't know again I have some very basic needs I've only learned the stuff that I've needed to learn I don't do a lot of crazy stuff with my videos so I've only just barely scratched the surface with some of what is possible with CadenLive the other thing you should consider also is render times render times do vary if I go back to the timeline here if I only had a single video and audio track here and then clicked render the render time is gonna be super fast but now that I've added some fade-ins and fade-outs and the transform effect and the inline images and the inline videos even though I haven't done a ton of stuff I can get a lot fancier than some of the effects I've done here the more effects the more layers of stuff you start adding the longer the render times take so that is something to consider in closing I do want to tell you guys this CadenLive it's free as in cost but let's not take advantage of the developers of this fantastic piece of free and open source software think about the money you save by using CadenLive you didn't have to spend hundreds or in some cases thousands of dollars in licensing fees on proprietary alternatives like DaVinci and Lightworks and things like that so think about that think about all that money you save can you guys please go to the CadenLive website it's very easy to donate to the project give those guys a few bucks give them 50 bucks, 100 bucks, whatever it is again think about the hundreds and some cases thousands of dollars you saved by using this fantastic piece of software please donate I'll try to link to the donation page from the CadenLive website now before I go I need to think a few special people I need to think Michael Gay, Pablo Nacorpini and Mitchell Entropy UK Sean, Arch5530, Chris Chuck, DJ Donnie, Dillon, George Lewis I'm Ray Paul, Robert Sean, Tobias and Willie they are the producers of the show they're my highest tier patrons over on Patreon I also need to thank each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well this very lengthy list of names which is way too long for me to try to read out but sincerely each and every one of you thanks for your help supporting me over on Patreon because this channel is sponsored by you guys the community you'd like to support my work you'll find DT over on Patreon all right guys peace