Re: [tlug] Video Editing Soft & Formats

["Dave Gutteridge" <ebisudave@example.com>]

Pietro,

Video editing on Linux is something I would eventually like to be able to do. But, after having experimented with it for a while, I gave up because for now the video editing software out there is still very much in the early stages.

Basically, what I've found is that most of them want Quicktime format movies. This is most likely because Mac has a high presence in the video editing industry, so Quicktime would get the most compatibility with other video editors and take advantage of people's existing repositories of footage.

Some of the editors also support MPEG and AVI formats, but seem to be very picky about video and audio codecs. I personally could only reliably get Quicktime to work.

Which brings us to your issue, which is the issue where I got frustrated and stopped. How to convert from one video format to another on Linux.

Sadly, just about every option I found was command line. It's not just that I hate command line operations, it's that for video formatting, the commands had literally a dozen different parameters to be set in order to make a successful conversion, and the documentation was weak.

I decided that video editing on Linux just wasn't there yet, and decided to wait until either Linux video editors accepted more formats more reliably, or there were decent GUI conversion utilities.

Sorry that isn't much help. I did want you to be aware, though, that video editing on Linux is an area that you should keep your expectations to be very low. If I really needed to do video editing, I would buy a Mac.

If you do learn a process of getting from video camera to editing software, please do post it here. I would love to follow in your footsteps.

-- 
Dave M G