I build my course by creating individual .mlt scenes then combining them into a lecture.
I’ve used both
creating each scene as an .mp4 clip and loading all the scenes for a lecture through open file.
And by leaving the scenes as .mlts and using the open mlt xml as clips.
Both approaches work. Obviously the export for the combined mp4 scenes is faster (not counting the time to create the individual .mp4s of course) , but is there a reason to use the mlt xml as clip approach over the open multiple mp4 files or vice versa?
I too uses mp4 clips rather than Mlt clips for long videos.
It does save more time especially when I need to do reedit every now and then for the
final master mlt that brings in all mp4 (or mlt) together … to save time of having to re-render all
Mlt each time.
Perhaps mp4 quality isn’t as good … otherwise if high quality is not a key requirement, I tend
to stay with this.
You may be interested in this topic if you care why MLT on timeline are twice as slow vs. intermediate renders.
I personally hate intermediate renders. “In my professional life” I render (ask editors to render) scenes as proxy and insist on final product to render from the source material. But that’s just me. There are different ways to go about production and disk space is cheap so looseless intermediate renders are OK.
Shotcut support for multiple timelines (MLT on MLT) is pretty basic.
@MOCKBA , thanks for sharing the reference thread. I’m an old mainframe computer guy, so I didn’t follow the details, but I get the gist.
I’m not sure how to interpret your and others’ replies in terms of best practices regarding mlt clips vis-a-vis .mp4s. I do use filters in my original mlts. But I make no changes on the imported mlt clips and simply add an audio track under the concatenated video track.
I do experience about a 20 percent crash rate as I “add selected to timeline” from the playlist. But I don’t know that it results from loading the mlt’s as a clip as opposed to mp4.