I just reached 50 subscribers on my YouTube channel, so I made a shout-out video to thank them:

It was easy to make. I made a document with Open Office and typed the names of all my subscribers. I copied and pasted that into Inkscape. In Inkscape, I set the width of my document to 1280 pixels, which is the same width as a 720p HD video. Then I chose my fonts and I chose a light color because the letters would be scrolling over a black background. After I had all the text the way I wanted it, I chose the “Select and transform objects” tool (the black arrow) and clicked on the text to see how tall it was. It was about 5300 pixels, so I set the document properties to 5400 pixels tall. I got everything centered up and exported the document as a .PNG file. I left the background transparent. Then I found a cool song on incompetech.com. Kevin MacLeod puts tons of royalty-free music on his site, and you can use it under a Creative Commons license.

I downloaded the song, then I got into Kdenlive and imported that and the .PNG file that I made with Inkscape. I right-clicked on the .PNG file in the project tree and clicked on “Clip Properties.” Kdenlive treats the image just like a video clip. I changed the length to 1 minute, 17 seconds, to match the length of the song I downloaded. I also turned on “Transparent background.” This allows the black background (or other video if you have the credits rolling over it) to show through behind the words.

I dragged the clip down into the video track and clicked on the composite box that showed up right below it. Up where the project tree was, it switched over to the transition tab. In the project monitor, I could see that Kdenlive had shrunk the size of the .PNG image so it all fit in the frame. I clicked the little gear button on the transition tab and chose Resize -> Original size. Then I dragged the red box (which represents the .PNG image) down so the top of it was below the black box (which represents what you see on the screen). I clicked the little gear button again and clicked on Align -> Hor. Center.

Right below that composite window is a timeline with a little red triangle and a little black triangle at the left end. The red triangle is a keyframe, which is basically a reference point for you to tell Kdenlive, “I want this video (or image or whatever) to be in this condition at this point in time.” So I wanted the words to be down below the visible area at the beginning. The black triangle shows you what point in the timeline you’re looking at as represented by the black box above. Since the black triangle and the red triangle were lined up, the changes I made in the last paragraph were applied to that keyframe. I moved the black triangle to the far right of the timeline and I clicked on the “Add keyframe” button (a couple of buttons over from the little gear button). Then I moved the red box so the bottom of it was above the top of the black box. I aligned it to the horizontal center again.

So with the keyframes, I told Kdenlive that I wanted the .PNG image to start below the visible area, and have it move to a position above the visible area over the span of the timeline. Kdenlive calculates the difference between the two conditions in the keyframes, and makes a transition between them throughout the timeline. There are other effects you can apply to a video or image and have it change over time using keyframes, so that’s why I was saying, “condition.” In this example, I am only applying motion, but you can experiment with keyframes and see what kinds of cool effects you can achieve. Am I being clear? Am I being verbose?

Finally, I dragged the MP3 file from the project tree into an audio track and rendered. Pow, it was that easy.

Comments are greatly appreciated.

Related posts:

1. Using keyframes in Kdenlive
2. Fun with Kdenlive
3. VirtualBox setup complete
4. Inkscape examples
5. Draw a shamrock with Inkscape