New Zealand (South Island)
Seth Kenlon is a UNIX geek, free culture advocate, independent multimedia artist, and D&D nerd. He has worked in the film and computing industry, often at the same time. He is one of the maintainers of the Slackware-based multimedia production project Slackermedia.
Authored Comments
I've been a Kdenlive user since 2008, and I've not had the experience you're describing. I run it on Slackware, with most components of my multimedia workflow compiled from source code. I'm not sure how much of a difference that makes, but it's a data point.
I also manage my media carefully, and transcode to "sensible" formats for editing. Editors on other platforms do this for the user, and usually more or less in the background; that's why, when you import video into your $proprietary_editor, there's often a stage where it "processes" or "optimizes" the video. On Linux, I do effectively the same thing and, especially on big projects, I edit in formats that I feel are mature and well-supported. Linux editors tend to allow you to *try* to edit pretty much anything you throw at them, but in my opinion, it's not always smart to do that. A good way to troubleshoot your workflow is to settle on one format for video (like ffmpeg's mp4, Xvid, mov, or even huffyuv if you have the space) and one format for audio (wav or flac), and see if that helps eliminate crashing.
I run Kdenlive on Slackware. Here is a tutorial site on how to set up a system that mirrors mine:
http://slackermedia.info