Sometime ago, around release 15.08 or so, Kdenlive debuted its often-requested transparent tracks. In the same way as Kdenlive offers audio mixing across all timeline tracks, transparent tracks offer automatic layer-like «over» compositing. This helps especially newcomers to Kdenlive, as they immediately feel at home now that they can compose video clips on different tracks in almost the same fashion as they do in image applications, such as GIMP.

Unfortunately, you can easily achieve rather unexpected and unintuitive results when you mistakenly switch on or off only some of your video tracks. So while transparent tracks were a big step forward in terms of functionality, the user interface wasn’t perfect yet.