Re: [tlug] Video Editing Soft & Formats

[Dave M G <dave@example.com>]

TLUG,

I had to step away from this thread because I was a little disappointed 
that after I had established that I do have experience with graphics and 
video editing, the pendulum swung from assuming I knew too little, to 
assuming I expected too much. It seemed that the goal is to hold Linux 
in constant, and to compensate for my perspective regardless of the 
direction I was coming from. That doesn't strike me as very objective, 
which is where I'd hope for this discussion to go.

Especially because video editing is something I'd like to eventually be 
able to do on Linux. In fact, I'm currently shopping for a video camera, 
one that uses a hard disk for recording, and I'm hoping I can do as much 
as possible on Linux.

I said Linux is about 3 to 5 years away from being on a level of ease of 
use equal to commercial video editing based on two things. One is having 
observed the time it took commercial suites like Discreet and Premiere 
to go from rudimentary systems that had a lot of the problems open 
source video applications are having now, to being something useful. 
What those commercial applications have become is by no means a perfect 
standard by which any up and coming application should emulate. But it's 
a yardstick to start with in order to guesstimate how long it took them 
to meet the needs of users. The other reason I picked that time range is 
optimism. I hope video editing on Linux becomes really good that fast. 
Maybe it will be faster, but I don't want to get my hopes up.

To try and be more helpful, I took a look the list of software and 
articles that Pietro had assembled, and tried to see if I could say 
anything useful about it.

First, in consideration of Mencoder and ffmpeg. I am not an enemy of the 
command line just on principle. I do feel command lines have their 
place. However, I don't think video or graphics is one of them. Graphics 
are, by definition, a visual medium. Using pure text to manipulate 
images is like talking over the phone to tell someone how to paint a 
picture.

This applies even if you're doing something as seemingly simple as 
converting video files from one format to another. Because of aspect 
ratios, frame rates, audio and video codecs, file formats, and other 
issues, the output can be different from what you expected. And 
different video content will compress differently, meaning there is no 
easy way to assume results. Especially if you want to manipulate it in 
the way that Pietro is talking about, where file size and quality is 
going to be adjusted by tweaking the image size and compression settings.

It is pretty standard in a lot of video editors to be able to see 
preview, or better, a side by side comparison, of the input and output 
before you commit the CPU time to actually rendering it. No command line 
tool I know can do that, which means you have to keep rendering tests. 
And that means that no matter how much of a guru at the command line you 
are, you will spend more time than someone who has access to sliders and 
see their results manifest immediately.

Using a command line to accomplish even that kind of simple task eats up 
time with trial and error that no one should need to spend. So there is 
just no way that I could ever agree with anyone that command line 
operations are on an equal level as GUI tools for tasks that are 
definitively about visual content. And that applies to everyone from the 
guy who has never saved a movie file before to a seasoned pro.

For GUI editors available on Linux, I agreed with a lot of the comments 
in the provided Linux.com articles, at least as far as Cinellera and 
LIVES goes. Clunky and unstable.

However, I had not tried Jahshaka yet. So yesterday I downloaded and 
gave it a whirl. It does have a superior interface, though I'm not sure 
if it has video tracks (graphical timelines that show the start and end 
of video clips so that you can place them in relation to each other). It 
seems to use layers instead, which strikes me as unintuitive. But, even 
though video tracks may be in there somewhere, I don't know because I 
could not complete the tutorial on their web site. Every time I would 
move an image into the animation interface, as per instructions, the 
program would die, with the error "Segmentation fault (core dumped)" at 
the command prompt.

Because of this thread, I've given video editing on Linux another look, 
and it is still, in my opinion very early alpha stage. I will continue 
to play with it because I have high hopes for it. But in the meantime, 
for anything I was going to do that I really wanted to get done, and not 
just do for experimentation's sake, I would use commercially available 
applications.

--
Dave M G
Ubuntu Feisty 7.04
Kernel 2.6.20-16-386