Re: [tlug] Video Editing Soft & Formats

["Josh Glover" <jmglov@example.com>]

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