Set up FFmpeg
FFmpeg is a free, open source program that reads and writes video. Kitly hands it every video job instead of shipping its own copy, so you install it once on your machine and Kitly finds it from then on.
If you never touch video in Kitly, you can skip this page. Image generation, 3D work, audio, and mocap all run without it.
What stops working without it
- Every tool on the video player's toolbar: trim, re-fps, crop, pad, resize, extract audio, extract frame, image sequence, and re-encode. See Video tools.
- Extract frames in Tracking. That's step one of every session made from a video, so a tracking session can't start without it. See Tracking.
- Render Insert in planar tracking, which encodes your comp to an mp4.
- Reading the resolution, frame rate, and duration of a video when you import it.
Screenshots from the player still work, and so do the crop and pad tools on image assets. Those don't go through FFmpeg.
Why you install it yourself
The FFmpeg builds that include H.264 and H.265, the codecs nearly all footage uses, are licensed under the GPL. Kitly is commercial software and can't redistribute them. Pointing Kitly at your own install means you get every codec rather than a cut-down build.
Installing it
Pick the one for your system and run it in a terminal. Each installs a full build with all the common codecs.
winget install ffmpeg
No winget? Download a build from ffmpeg.org/download.html, unzip it somewhere permanent such as C:\ffmpeg, and either add C:\ffmpeg\bin to your PATH or point Kitly straight at the file (see below).
brew install ffmpeg
This needs Homebrew. Without it, download a build from ffmpeg.org/download.html and point Kitly at the file.
sudo apt install ffmpeg # Debian, Ubuntu, Mint
sudo dnf install ffmpeg # Fedora (needs RPM Fusion enabled)
sudo pacman -S ffmpeg # Arch
Restart Kitly afterwards, or click Re-check in Settings, so it picks up the new install.
Checking that Kitly found it
Open Settings and find the FFmpeg section. Found FFmpeg with a version number means you're done. Underneath it, Kitly names where the install came from, which is handy when you have more than one copy on the machine.
Not found means Kitly looked and came up empty. The status bar along the bottom of the window says FFmpeg not set up as well.
Kitly looks before it asks
You usually don't have to do anything here. Kitly checks your PATH and the usual install folders on its own, so a normal install is picked up without being told. The controls below are for the times that doesn't happen.
If Kitly can't find it
Click Locate FFmpeg... and pick the program file yourself. On Windows that's ffmpeg.exe, usually in the bin folder of wherever you unzipped it. On macOS and Linux it's a file called ffmpeg with no extension.
Once you've set a path by hand, Kitly uses it and stops guessing. If you later want it back on autopilot, click Use auto-detect.
Installed FFmpeg while Kitly was open? Click Re-check instead of restarting.
If a codec is missing
Some FFmpeg builds ship without H.264 or H.265. This is common in minimal Linux packages. Kitly checks which encoders your build has, and works around the gaps where it can: if H.264 is missing but your graphics card can encode it, Kitly uses the card instead and says so in Settings.
When there's no way to encode a codec at all, Kitly tells you which one and stops rather than producing a broken file. The fix is to install a fuller build, listed as "full" on the FFmpeg downloads page.
Next step
You're set up. Head to Sandbox Mode and generate your first asset.