It's been over 7 years since my last "2-Minute 2-Torial", so it seems only right to bring it back for "Twos Day" -- Tuesday, 22-2-22 (ISO - or 2/22/22 or 22/2/22, if you prefer your dates American or European, respectively).

Transcript: Did you know that you can use a Kdenlive edit as a clip in another Kdenlive edit?

This is very useful in animation workflow, because we often want to use stand-in versions of shots, and then replace them, later.

In this shot, for example, I simply used a drawing and panned across it in Blender to create a quick "storyboard animatic".

I also wasn't sure exactly how long it should be. I can adjust that with the speed setting in Kdenlive.

Later, I went through several versions of the shot, as more and more elements were animated.

These aren't just different shots. In Kdenlive, they are different kinds of shots:

The storyboard animatic may use the "Change Speed" tool to adjust the timing, or the "Transform" effect to pan and zoom the image, working with just a few still images as the source.

The Open GL animatic previews are usually AVI video files, rendered directly from Blender.

And the final renders are usually a series of frames rendered to a lossless format like PNG images, for maximum fidelity. This is called a "PNG stream", and is the usual format for our final animation output.

Each of these is stored differently, and you can't simply reload the clip in the Kdenlive project bin with the new versions!

But you can update them easily in a separate Kdenlive file.

Then you use that Kdenlive file AS the clip in the scene you are editing.

With proxy-workflow (which I'll explain in another video), this is just as fast as rendering the shot and including that, but there will be no loss of quality when the project is rendered.

It also makes it easy to use special effects, like limited framerates, as I used for this "timelapse" shot. Only the shot file needs to know that it was animated "on threes".

The final edit file only sees video, through all of these steps, and it updates automatically from the linked Kdenlive project!