Video Editing under linux
Hi All,
Just thought I'd open a thread for us to provide suggestions, links and recomendations to open source video editing solutions. I'd prefer to stick to linux as this is the Club Linux website, but I know a few people are interested in making stuff work on their Microsoft machines.
I couldn't remember the name of the gnome video editing project today, so here it is:
Unfortunately it looks pretty dead to me.
Has anyone tried LiVES? I think that is my next try out.
I have used Kino in the past and it is great for basic importing and editing but I found it hard to produce anything I was happy with. - http://www.kinodv.org/
The other video editing prog we mentioned was Cinelerra - http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3
It sounds pretty good on their website, but I found it pretty buggy and frustrating to use.
From my little experience of open source software things change fast. Remarkable improvements happen overnight so don't take my word for it when I moan about stuff. In fact take all reviews with a pinch of salt, just make the time to try new stuff out and form your own opinion. There is lots of great video editing software for linux, I'm still finding it. Let us know what you find.
For those of us who are lumbered with Microsoft Windows and their crippled media editing and playing software. I suggest checking out some alternative software tools (or just dust off your credit card).
http://www.free-codecs.com/ - This site has listings of lots of excellent tools for playing unsupported file formats on Windows.
Sponsored by:
i think i found one!
Kdenlive!
http://kdenlive.org/
Multi-track, realtime preview, capture. Very much like adobe premier.
Available in the ubuntu repository.
Let us know how it goes...
It looks good - I've installed LIVES and will write and let you know how I go...
UPDATE - 20 minute time window, to throw together three clips.
OK, So I have a few vids I have to paste together so I cranked up LIVES for the first time, First impression is that it needs some work. The interface is not intuitive. I tried to import three clips , it seemed to work but there was no obvious way to access them to edit them once the progress bar was done. No time to trawl the web for howto's. So I took Cam's advice and installed KDEnlive ... 10 minutes to go...
10 Minutes with KDEnlive
That's more like it. KDEnlive is on the right track. The interface is clean and obvious, I'm halfway through putting together my cruddy little vid.
It is not up there with iMovie 2006 yet but I'd rather put the effort into learning something that will improve with time and not become crippleware when the market forces decree.
Find it in the repos folks, couldn't be easier.
Ruben
tregeagle.com
Ok, so it took about half an hour....
I stuck my first KDEnlive effort on youtube....
Ruben
tregeagle.com
Scaling videos
Awesome. What a sports hero!
Anybody got an easy way to scale big videos down to a lower resolution? I've got some huge high-def video files thatfor reasons I won't bore you with I want to get to a lower resolution.
I've tried Kdenlive and PiTiVi, but they both choked on the file size.
Re: Scaling videos
Answering my own question, VLC does it. The File->Open dialog allows to you stream a video to an output file. Took me a while to find the right combination of output resolution/container format/video codec/audio codec for my purposes, but it does the trick.
Also uncovered in my research on this is a user-friendly little utility called OggConvert. Handy for, as the name suggests, converting audio and/or video files to freedom-friendly formats.
Keeping the dream alive
Pete Savage from pr0g80X.vid has some production notes from one of his episodes. They are a great example of how to work with video on Linux.
Ruben
tregeagle.com