Somewhere along the way the render quality of Kdenlive has become very poor. I googled and saw some people with the same complaint and but didn’t really see a good solution. However I did see the screen below in a general options description but it wasn’t specifically talking about my problem. It shows more options (as seen on the right) when you click More options as seen below. Duh! However as you can see the Custom Quality was a very low 3%. Bumped up to 100% and once again render quality looked great, however the render size was much larger than the original. The render quality also looked great if I just unchecked Custom Quality, I assume that also means %100. The lowest quality I tried was 70% and I thought the quality still looked pretty good and the output size was slightly smaller than the original. I didn’t see a way to save these options. Every time I tried to render a new video it defaulted to a quality of 3%. This isn’t something I usually changed before.
