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Re: [tlug] Video Editing Soft & Formats



On 09/07/07, Dave Gutteridge <ebisudave@example.com> wrote:

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.

I don't know better than this, but given what you are about to say, I suggest that people take your opinion with a *large* grain of salt.

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.

Wait for it...

Sadly, just about every option I found was command line.

Oh my. My friend, if you hate the command line, Linux may not be the best option for *anything* highly technical.

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.

The documentation most certainly is not weak, as you would know had you either a) run "man mencoder"[1], or b) Googled for mencoder, in which case you would have stumbled across some of the following:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Mencoder_Introduction_Guide
http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_MEncoder_Tips_and_Tricks
http://howto-pages.org/ffmpeg/

As for the settings of myriad parameters, there are these magical
things called shell scripts, wherein you can dump the messy
command-line and just call the script with a filename or two.

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.

Sounds to me like your decision makes sense for *you*, but I doubt that Pietro will be deterred by a lack of GUI-ness.

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.

Please keep FUD to a minimum in the future, Dave.

Your post was really not bad, but this last paragraph should have been
omitted, as *your* needs are not the same as some TLUGgers like Pietro
who have been using Unix since before there was a GUI.

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.

I shall take up the gauntlet you have thrown down, because a) I need to buy a video camera soon, b) I have a Mac so I can compare the iMovie stuff to the Linux tools, and c) I want to figure all this stuff out using Open Source software.

With that out of the way, can anyone recommend a good DV camera? I am
looking for something under 100,000 yen with both Firewire and USB
2.0, and a power supply that can deal with European current. I assume
that like laptops, cameras have an external AC->DC converter brick
that can accept 100-220 volts, but I want to verify this assumption.

I am not a pro, so I don't need bells and whistles; I am just looking
for an entry-level point-and-shoot model that can spew video in a
format that V4L2 groks.

Cheers,
Josh

[1] http://tivo-mplayer.sourceforge.net/docs/mplayer-man.html


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