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Re: [tlug] Video Editing Soft & Formats



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






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