Having recently bought a brand new Sony Action Cam HDR-AS200v I wanted to do some video editing. I’ve used Blender before but at some point of time it was to over-bloated and to complicated for some video editing tasks. So I’ve had a look at kdenlive.

Due to the nature of the action cam I had recordings in

• standard MP4 (28 Mb/s)
• XAVC S Codec (50 Mb/s)

I’ve first set the right profile in kdenlive (1080p, 30fps) and imported the recordings. Afterwards you can render your mixture losslessly by using the MPEG4 profile which is basically:

• video: mpeg4
• audio: pcm_s16le

Since the rendered movie is going to be very large, you can render and compress it to sth like h264. This is also the codec recommended by YouTube for the uploads. So I’ve used ffmpeg to encode my lossless movie to h264:

ffmpeg -threads 0 \
       -i <loessless movie> \
       -crf 18 \
       -bf 2 \ 
       -flags +cgop \
       -pix_fmt yuv420p \
       -acodec aac  -strict -2 \
       -vcodec h264 \
       -preset slow \
       -b:v 500k 
       movie_h264.avi

To play the movie I recommend mplayer or mpv:

mplayer -cache-min 70 -lavdopts threads=0 -framedrop <file.avi>

or

mpv --autosync=30  --vd-lavc-threads=0 <file.avi>