[nzlug] The state of linux video editing WAS Re: Where to start... where to start...

[Nick Rout]

kino is very good BUT suffers from the fact that it is designed to work
with material from DV movie cameras (ie the specific standard definition
digital video that you get from mini-DV digital tape cameras via the
firewire connection). This is great for people who want to work from that
format to edit their home movies.

Nowadays kino will also import other codec movies (eg xvid in avi etc) and
uses ffmpeg to do so meaning that almost anything supported by ffmpeg will
import. HOWEVER the imported movie is converted to DV codec so that it can
use kino's DV oriented code to do the editing. The problem is that the
converted file is very large (which is the nature of the DV codec) and the
conversion is very time/cpu consuming. Whats more there isn't much visual
cue as to whats going on during import unless you start kino from an xterm
and look at the output in the xterm.

The effects (transitions etc) are there, but more limited than something
like sony vegas etc.

So kino won't do everything in the same way that one might expect but it
will do it. It will also render the edited movie to a large number of
codecs and formats, including back to DV for archival purposes, DVD
compliant mpeg 2, and various mpeg4 (xvid etc) codecs.

Perhaps the easiest out of the box video editor for linux is main actor,
but it is a commercial program with a $US200 price tag, although that is
light compared to the cost of some of the windows offerings. It is a dual
platform (win/nix) editor and looks and feels like something people used
to a windows editor would expect. It has a good range of effects and a
good range of rendering options. Although people are unused to expending
money for linux programs, this one is worth it if you want it. The
downloadable version is fully usable but renders a watermark, so you can
try before you buy.

Hmmm after typing that it appears that main concept may have dropped main
actor to concentrate on their codec development. bugger.

Cinelerra has a steep learning curve but the documentation has improved
over the last few years. It takes a bit of getting used to and I confess
to not having mastered it. It has some compositing features that aren't
present in kino (eg the ability to do green screening etc). There are some
video based tutorials from the Source vidcast
(http://www.thesourceshow.org ). The show is produced using cinelerra. The
shows are in an odd order, they go episode 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3 (guess what
scifi movie series those guys like!). The ponters to the tutorials are on
the cinelerra-cv docs page here:

http://cvs.cinelerra.org/docs.php

kdenlive apparently shows promise, but is still pretty beta-ish last time
I tried it. I have seen very positive reviews at the 0.4 stage, and I see
that 0.5 has been released and is in gutsy, so I'll try it tonight.


On Wed, February 13, 2008 8:38 am, Centurion Computer Technology (2005)
Ltd wrote:
> Steve,
>
> I use a combination of Kino four your basic movie slicer and dicer and
> qdvdauthor for mastering to dvd's.  This combination works well under
> debian (mostly testing with some unstable packages)., and I have played
> with cinelerra as well, but find it over the top for basic home movie
> editing.
>
>


-- 
Nick Rout