Video Killed The Screwdriver Star
With the inclusion of PiTiVi into the next release of Ubuntu, video editing — the kind of video editing that doesn’t involve repeated software crashes — may finally be making its way to the free desktop. Jono Bacon and Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge look at the state of play in video editors on Linux, and ask the question: have we now reached the stage where you can use your desktop of choice to put your dog on YouTube?
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I’m quite sure that some big movie studios use Cinelerra and that is one of the main reasons why it advanced so quickly in term of features.
Interesting! I’d be fascinated to read more about that, if you’ve got a cite?
I’m sorry, I think I made a mistake. I was talking about CinePaint (Film Gimp, originally). I was convinced that Cinelerra was a fork of CinePaint, but apparently I was wrong.
The one thing that has fustrated me since converting to Linux about 18 months ago, was the lack of a useable video editor. It was even more fustrating that the only reason why I kept a dual-boot boot for so long was because I used Movie Maker so often. Yeah it’s crappy, but it does at least work. I’ve recently found KdenLive which when downloaded from the site (not the Ubuntu repositories) works resonably well, however it is prone to crashing for no obvious reason
I still think taking the gimp out of default ubuntu install is bad. Though i personally think kdenlive has won the video editor race already even though i have no need for a video editor but it looks like the way too go from what the community has to say.
lastly I think the netblock driver is more exciting than video editing
To leave The GIMP out of the Ubuntu default installation is not a bad thing, if you have a simpler alternative. For example, I wouldn’t want to replace GNOME’s Calculator with GNU Octave, although it can do calculations too. On the other hand, Gedit shouldn’t be replaced with Xfce’s Mousepad, because Gedit is simple enough, albeit powerful.
What GNOME needs is a tool to make simple things, like MS Paint does (although not as limited!). People who want to do serious image editing can install The GIMP easily, but there’s no need to scare people away with it. Although I don’t use F-Spot and won’t install it on my personal computer, I think that using it as an editing tool could be very a very good idea, if the promised tool does what it is supposed to do.
Kdenlive needs to become a lot more stable before it has “won” anything. I have tried it with every new release of Ubuntu and it regularly hangs and crashes when processing moderately large video files. The interface isn’t bad, but I would be happen to have two or three projects competing against each other in order to move video editing overall on linux forward.
Interesting nobody mentioned: http://www.openmovieeditor.org/
Whilst I haven’t tried it, the UI doesn’t look exciting – but I have heard good things!
The other one which isn’t for the faint hearted is blender! http://www.blender.org
Wow. I was totally, totally unaware of that. I’ll give it a try!
I had forgotten about OpenShot – never tried it. It looks like it has an interesting feature set, and looks a little more along the lines of Adobe Premiere, which is what I have traditionally used before.
As for Blender, it has a video editing component, but it is by and large a 3D modeller, and I have no idea how useful the editor would be.
The video editor in blender is incredibly powerful. Richard Querin has made a couple of real basic screencasts about it. Worth a look to get an introduction to how powerful it is.
http://blog.rfquerin.org/2009/01/26/how-i-edit-videos-using-blender-maybe-part-one/
http://blog.rfquerin.org/2009/02/14/really-basic-blender-video-editing-part-2/
It is powerful, but almost unusable in hardness. I tried to use it for the mentioned dvd project and gave up.
Yes, while Blender appears daunting at first, to do what it sounds like you guys are looking for (import video, cut it up into pieces, rearrange it, add titles and music) can be done VERY simply in Blender once you’re shown how.
A few of the main advantages to using Blender over anything else on Linux right now for video editing IMO:
I currently have a Kodak Zi6 and edit the HD video from it all the time. I had given up on editing any video on Linux completely until finding out I could do it with Blender.
ps. This does NOT mean I don’t want the OpenShot and Pitivi guys to succeed either. The more the merrier.
Blender seems a bit heavy handed for simple video editing as its core competency is 3D modeling and animations. A bit of a sledgehammer solution, I would say.
I haven’t run across Open Video Editor before. It looks nice. Does anyone have any direct experience with it?
The main problem with PiTiVi is it’s lack of Transition, and to a less degree Effects, which are standard features in the proprietary counterparts. OpenShot has these.
Also, OpenShot is based on the MLT framework ( http://www.mltframework.org/twiki/bin/view/MLT/ ), the same as Kdenlive, so it’s not just FFMPEG and Mencoder glued together…
Agreed on the lack of transitions. If PiTiVi has transitions, titling, and DVD menu creation, I’d be ecstatically happy with it (as I suspect would most simple create-a-video users, who have a similar use case). (Upload-to-YouTube would be nice, too, I admit, although that sounds like it should be doable from a plugin.)
Agreed, although I’m not sure it would be wise to integrate a full featured DVD menu creator like DVD Styler into a video editor. Then again, it is nice to be able to accomplish all tasks from one program. Kdenlive has a DVD wizard, but last I checked it was a new kind of pain.
Yeah, I’m not totally sure about that either, I admit it. Being able to do simple DVD menus would be great, though; maybe just be able to designate certain “break points” and a “DVD menu theme” and PiTiVi constructs the menu, assuming that the “break points” define the starts of different titles. Not sure how exactly it’d work, but being able to do something simple would be great. If you want to do complex stuff, sure, go and use a proper DVD editor like Styler.
My last shot of editing with Pitivi ran into the same issues. At the time I wondered if Pitivi could help itself in this regard by making a plugin architecture that was compatible with some other video editor’s plugins?
I used kdenlive to produce this. One of the reasons why I’ve not got any of the other videos out yet (aside from having, you know, other things to do) is that it’s so laborious, particularly if you don’t have a massive amount of processing power.
Of course, you can run kdenlive on your laptop, if you don’t mind being sterilised when rendering the finished product.
Once PiTiVi has transitions, effects and titles I’d be more than happy to use it for simple editing. It’s much, much better than kdenlive for someone who knows nothing about video editing (i.e. me).
Oi Oi, Graham.
One of the things that first attracted me to PiTiVi is that I could conceivably hack on it. Have you thought about contributing to it, being the l33t Python hacker that you are?
I haven’t actually… good point.
I think I’ll add it to my to-do list for the new year
.
That would be awesome.
On the Kdenlive front, it seems according to this page http://www.kdenlive.org/user-manual/downloading-and-installing-kdenlive/pre-compiled-packages/ubuntu-packages that the packages in Karmic are out of date; a ppa is provided.
What is with most of the linux non-linear video editors and their custom rolled UI’s?
If they can do a better job than what’s possible with say GTK or QT then by all means, but until they can, they’d do better by sticking with the standard toolkits.
That’s one of the reasons we like PiTiVi
Hmm, I would have thought (not being a video editor myself) that most of the widgets that are provided by the standard toolkits just don’t cater to the sorts of workflows and tasks needed for video editing. Yes, you can use them, but novel/different UI widgets will be more natural instead, so they bit the bullet and made them (once again, not that I’ve used them). Just a conceptual two cents, I guess.
Happy to be corrected, of course.
I would’ve thought so myself, but in practice, for example Kdenlive (using QT) is fairly slick in this regard, but the others I tried with custom UI’s felt quite clunky and looked pretty ugly.
For simple tasks, it is also worth mentioning the cross-platform Avidemux : http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/
I have used it mainly to cut out ads from TV streams and join clips together. What is nice about it is that it tries to preserve the format without re-encoding and so keeping the quality as high as possible.
Ah, is avidemux roughly equivalent to VirtualDub on Windows then? The very limited video editing that I do tends to be just chopping clips and joining them together. I think there’s definitely a place for this kind of editor along side the more complex non-linear editors.
I think that the areas where Linux falls down regarding video editing is with the home user – but there’s several categories of software where this is the case, so it’s an issue that isn’t just restricted to video editing. I haven’t used PiTiVi, but it looks pretty solid and it seems to be the closest to iMovie. iMovie is the benchmark as far as I’m concerned – I used to teach iMovie to early years pupils, pensioners, SEN pupils. It didn’t matter who it was, they could pick it up and use it within half an hour. I think that’s the sign of a good user interface more than a feature-packed piece of software – and yes, some made films of dogs on skateboards.
As a professional desktop user, I turned my back on Mac and started using open source software 4 years ago. I’ve found that by using a combination of KDENLive, Blender, Audacity and DVDStyler, I can do all the things I used to do on my Mac (all of this software has come on leaps and bounds over the last few years). I very happily walked away from Final Cut (4.5 and 5 were so crash-prone and buggy that it made the KDENLive of old look stable) and DVD Studio (hardly the pinnacle of Apple’s UI design, and again, pretty buggy), but leaving proprietary behind wasn’t without its problems. It’s taken me years to find adequate replacements for some features I was used to (overlays, filters, compositional tools etc) or for the open source alternatives to catch up, but as far as I’m concerned, I now have the tools in my arsenal to contend with my competitors. I’m still missing Garageband – I’m not a pro musician, but if the film required composition, I could always turn to it – but LMMS is starting to look like a proper option. So, professionally, I really don’t think there’s an awful lot to complain about.
I agree that iMovie is the benchmark. In my mnd the primary use case is someone who wants to put a video of their dog on a skateboard on YouTube, complete with some simple titles and transitions. I don’t think we need something in which you could plug in 100 cameras and film The Matrix.
By the way, as for a GarageBand equivalent, have you tried Jokosher (www.jokosher.org)?
Just visited http://www.jokosher.org – I’ve been getting it’s name confused with Jahshaka for quite a long time, so almost automatically dismissed your suggestion! Jokosher looks pretty good, but true to my previous open source experiences, I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve attempted something ridiculous.
Why not make your target the Warchowski Brothers, so that Mr.Rover-on-Skateboard gets something that meets his needs and exceeds his expectations?
Thinking back to using kdenlive about 18months ago, I cannot think of many things more painful!
I tried it out again a while back, and it did seem to be far more stable!
I did manage to have a go at green screening, which I must say wasn’t as obvious as something like Pinnacle Studio.
Pitivi is an app I looked into while I was looking for non impossible (read cinelerra) to us video editors. At the time it was no way near as feature packed as it is now, and at the time kdenlive won out!
I think we are moving in the right direction now, we have editors that can burn DVDs (so Linux Format tell me can be done with kdenlive now), and can include transitions and effects such as chroma-key or including multiple videos at different points on the screen!
With users reporting bugs, suggesting features, and helping to squash bugs we can get even better!
mattmole
Yeah, a big chunk of how I am personally evaluating the race is how much opportunity lies in the development community to make these apps successful. Part of what excited me about PiTiVi is that (a) it is GStreamer based (b) it uses Python and (c) it has a fully open and extensible community.
Given Tony made a video about you guys (and a few other losers), maybe you should ask him what he used?
(I think he uses kdenlive)
Good idea, pal.
Maybe Tony should offer his input on this thread – I will ping him.
Open source has solutions for what most users need from their computers already. Web browsing, email, office tools, listening to music etc. About the only thing left is the video editing. Everyday people make videos of their vacations or babies first steps and they want to share it, So some sort of video editing is a must for a well rounded desktop.
I haven’t looked recently but the last time I had wanted to make a quick video, nothing quite fit what I wanted to do or wasn’t stable. And what I wanted was pretty simple.
By my judgement there is still no clear leader in this application category, though there are lots of possibilities. Hopefully One will materialise and resources will become less fragmented amongst all the contenders.
I hope PiTiVi works out.
I have been editing home videos on Ubuntu for a couple of years now, and the only editor I’ve had any luck with is Avidemux. I’ve tried Pitivi (including about 6 weeks ago) but I’ve never actually been able to edit video with it. The UI looks nice, but it’s really not obvious to me how to cut clips, stick them together, and output them in the correct format. There is no help in the program, and the manual on the web site has big gaps in it. All that seems to happen is that I get so far and the program stops responding.
My uses have been editing videos that other family members have made on their cameras and burning them to DVDs so people can watch them on their TVs. There are three steps to that – editing, authoring, and burning the DVD. To take those in reverse order, Brasero does the job for burning and DeVeDe does the job for authoring (making the menus and arranging the files in the correct layout for a player).
That leaves editing. For the average person, I think they just want to clip out the bits in the video where they filmed the inside of the camera bag, and do a few simple effects. One of the really critical things you need to be able do though is adjusting the sound track to synchronize it with the video (there are circumstances where it can get out of sync because sound isn’t closely tied to video in the common formats). I don’t see the features in Pitivi to be able to easily support that to millisecond precision (even a fraction of a second is very noticeable). Perhaps it can be done, but if so it isn’t in an obvious way and it isn’t documented anywhere that I can find.
A couple of the straight forward effects you would want to be able to do are to adjust the brightness of the video and to rotate it. These aren’t something you need all the time, but they’re probably more important than transitions because you sometimes need them just to be able to watch the video.
A problem that I see with Pitivi is that it asks you to pick the correct video and audio codecs. It takes a lot of research to find out what format DVD video is and the average person would probably just give up at that point. For all the common cases, I should just be able to say what I want to do with the video without having to pick what encoder to use and how many frames per second. The features should be there, but they shouldn’t be needed for most cases. Avidemux does have an “auto” menu where it tries to pick correct settings for you, but I think it re-encodes the video unnecessarily in some cases (where it could have just copied it).
One big problem for many video programs is NTSC versus PAL. Normally the author is from somewhere that uses one or the other, so support for the video format from the “other” area gets short shrift and may not be tested properly. This is something that needs testing and feedback from people in different parts of the world.
Stuart mentioned DeVeDe. I have been using this (and I used to use KMediaFactory), and it definitely does the job for authoring DVDs (making the menus and putting the files in the correct layout for a DVD player), I think the UI could be simplified a bit, but it is definitely ready for mainstream use. You also need to use a photo editor to create a DVD menu background image (usually I pick a relevant screen shot from the video). The photo editor needs to be able to resize the photo to correct exact pixel size and convert it to PNG. I use GIMP for that.
If you really want to experience the state of Linux video editing, you really need to use a video camera and try making some DVDs to watch on your TV. You don’t get a true idea of what things are like if you watch video on your computer because the computer media players will accept just about anything for input. Video players for TVs are a lot fussier about their input and they won’t recognise anything except the exact format they expect. If you can get it to play on your TV (via a cheap DVD player), then you can probably do just about anything.
@mg “I’ve tried Pitivi (including about 6 weeks ago) but I’ve never actually been able to edit video with it. The UI looks nice, but it’s really not obvious to me how to cut clips, stick them together, and output them in the correct format. There is no help in the program, and the manual on the web site has big gaps in it.”
I hope it was pitivi 0.13.3 or newer (if it’s the 0.11 series or older, forget about it).
Normally, the 0.13 series are designed in an intuitive-enough way and are stable enough that you shouldn’t experience such problems. About the manual: you mean, the PDF manual (not the crappy old one on the wiki that I recently deleted)? If not, take a look at the new user manual. If you see anything unclear or missing in there, please email me so I can improve it.
Yes, I was referring to v0.11.3 which was in Ubuntu 9.04. As for the PDF manual I was refering to the PDF file on the web site for 0.13.3, (2 months old) which is still there now.
If you want a good example of what isn’t clear in the menu, have a look at the “Render” section. Basically it just says:
1) From the Project menu, use Render.
2) Adjust the various encoding settings, if needed, to use settings different from the project settings.
3) Click the Render button.
That sounds nice, but the average person just knows what they want to do with the output. They don’t know whether they need an FFMPEG RoQ Muxer with a pre-load of 0 (and I don’t know that either). Those settings need to be there somewhere, but there should be an easy way to say that I want a file with video and sound that I can make into an NTSC compatible DVD without having to worry about whether I’m supposed to be adjusting the audio bit rate.
I think I will like Pitivi after it has developed a bit more. I’m not sure it’s quite ready for the average person though.
I have another suggestion about the manual though. Don’t put notes about “TBD” or bug reference numbers in the user manual. They’re not relevant to someone using the program and they make it look like a working draft rather than something ready for use.
@mg: try 0.13.3 in Karmic. Do not under any circumstances use 0.11.x. It’s a year old, it was before the big refactoring, and it is completely unsupported. The difference between that and 0.13.3 is night and day. The manual is written for 0.13.3, and I can understand that it makes no sense for earlier versions.
About the rendering section: I agree, but I don’t see any way you can document what codecs and settings to use for all possible use cases. No user manual does that (check out the professional/proprietary apps’ user manuals: they do not do this. At least not iMovie nor Vegas). It is planned to make it easier to use, though, namely with a refactoring of the user interface and the availability of presets. See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=432723 and http://pitivi.org/wiki/Rendering_Profiles
“I think I will like Pitivi after it has developed a bit more. I’m not sure it’s quite ready for the average person though.”
It is not ready for your average person you meet on the street indeed. Currently, it is for technology enthusiasts and early adopters (or those with very basic needs). It will get better over time. They just have a mantra of making everything rock solid before adding features on top.
“I have another suggestion about the manual though. Don’t put notes about “TBD” or bug reference numbers in the user manual.”
I disagree in the sense that I’m not putting all the bugs/RFEs in there (only a handful), and I think excluding them would somehow leave gaps in the greater design vision of the manual.
The “rendering profiles” idea is what I think you need. I suspect that you could probably cover most use cases with a dozen profiles. The user could then still make (and save) their own custom profile for anything that doesn’t cover those situations, but the average person wouldn’t have to worry about that. If I had to pick one thing that needs to be done more than anything that I saw in Pitivi so far, I would say that would be it.
As for the “greater design vision of the manual”, most people won’t care about that. They just want to get their videos to work with the version they have now. I have a free software project of my own that is directed at very technical users, and I have at least 80,000 words of documentation.
And as for “it is not ready for your average person you meet on the street indeed”, well I don’t think that’s what Jono Bacon was hoping to hear. I think he wants something he can ship with 10.04 that will be ready for the average person on the street. If it’s not ready for the average person, then it shouldn’t be part of the default install.
Just last year, I tried doing a slide show dvd with linux and finally had to give up. I ended up doing the dvd in Windows and the audio track with linux and then combining the two. Will defiantly have to check out the above programs.
For simple video editing on Linux, Kino (http://www.kinodv.org/) does a decent job. One of the best features of Kino is the ability to import Raw DV from a DV camera.
Having a video editor with a nice UI is not going to be much use if one can’t import DV.
I just had a look at the web site for the local camera store. They don’t even list a DV tape video camera anymore. They’ve got a few DVD and hard disk cameras, but everything new seems to be going flash. DV is legacy support, especially as most people don’t have the hardware interface for it and never will. At one time all the video cameras were DV tape, but even few years ago it was pretty obvious the writing was on the wall for them.
There are probably enough people with older DV cameras to make it worthwhile having a stand alone DV import and conversion program. There’s no reason to make that part of the video editor though. Just save the file to disk, convert it to MPEG, and then edit it like any other video file.
I guess what is obvious from the comments above is that there is a vast range in desired functionality and effort/interest in being skilled enough to access that functionality. And it’s tough to cater for the video/film maker expert down to my Dad.
As I’m building a mythbox I’m hoping there’ll be something that I can make a DVD out of several recordings, a bit like what Aq was doing but with tv shows (I’m thinking miniseries or short doco series).
I couldn’t give a toss about uploading short videos of my dog, partially because I don’t have a dog, and secondly because I suck up lots of other people’s time drivelling on FB and twitter. ;o) Seriously, I’m just not a YouTube junkie and privacy of my family is more of a concern to make it worth it – mind you, I’m happy for everyone else to do it and do genuinely think it’s an excellent use case and target market for these tools.
I think the thing that really sucks up most of my time when making videos is getting the encoding options right, although I’ve found ffmpeg to be pretty bloody good in this respect (not having tried gstreamer, but I thought it was more of an API than a tool). I want to just say /path/to/magicvideotool -format ipodvideo or -format DVD -buildsimple menu episode1.avi episode2.avi …
Excellent topic guys, and obviously of great interest, which I hadn’t realised.
Hmm, looks like devede and avidemux might be just what I’m after, but I’ll take a squiz at pitivi as well. Thanks everyone!
@Derek Its been awhile since I’ve played around with MythTV but doesn’t it include a plug-in for just such an occasion, MythArchive.
http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/MythArchive
It might not be what your looking for though. Makes me want to get mine back out. Had to put it aside since over the air broadcasts changed to digital, and it would have required an upgrade to continue.
Thanks. I haven’t looked through all the features yet, so this looks like it’d be excellent. Will check it out in detail later.
I’ve not done any Linux video work for a while. Ages ago I did a bit with something on Windows and managed to do a Video CD of a holiday with some titles, video and some stills.
I know I looked at Kino, but can’t remember if I actually produced anything. It looked like it would be good for simple work such as editing a clip down to the scenes you actually wanted.
More recently I edited a wedding video with KDEnlive, which I found to be quite adequate for the job. I don’t need fancy effects and the ability to handle multiple tracks of audio and video was useful. I can’t remember how much it crashed, but I got the job done. There was some issue with the DVD encoding as we couldn’t fast forward it on a DVD player.
I have a stack of DV tapes that I ought to do something with, so I need to look at this again. The encoding side needs to be made simple with enough presets to handle most cases. I’m debating whether to bother with DVD or just use Xvid or something for PC playback, but then I need some way to organise clips so I can find them. My DVD player can do Xvid, if the encoding is right, so I could burn a load to disc for archiving.
@jono – you say in the show that Kino is GNOME based, but it’s KDE based….
I’ve been doing video editing on Linux using Kino for about 5 years now, and found it to be solid once you work out how to make it work the way you want – it’s not particularly intuitive. @Aq – FWIW I made a DVD about 3 years ago using DVD Styler (http://www.dvdstyler.org/) which was relatively featureful even back then.
Personally, I think you’re wrong. I think that video editing on Linux isn’t moving quickly at all, and I’d love to see it move quicker.
Well its not certain to be in just yet. It needs to be tested and if any big crashers appear it will be pulled. Openshot looks horrid and isnt integrated well into gnomw desktop.
Kino is a decent editor once one gets over the fact that it only has a single editing track and behaves in a relatively unique way.
There’s a problem though – it handles DV.
How does one go about ripping HDV footage under Linux? DV cameras are on the way out and whilst HDV is recorded to miniDV tapes, it’s not the same format at all.
Given the popularity of cameras like the Canon HV series (HV20, HV30 and HV40), I’m surprised there’s not more solutions to this problem.
I used to do all my video editing under Linux but at the moment I’m stuck using Adobe Premiere under Windows because there’s no video editing app that’s mature enough for even simple editing.
PiTiVi is certainly not the answer and the development on it is moving at a snail’s pace. Whilst I admit that OpenShot needs some polishing, it’s nearly at 1.0 and has only existed for about a year. PiTiVi is moving but it’s not looking like it’ll be feature-rich any time soon.
I really hope that OpenShot can be improved enough to be included as my experiences with PiTiVi have been tiresome at best.
Yeah, right, because Openshot just wrote MLT from scratch as they went, in a year.
The general consensus of perceived speediness of development of openshot, when it’s using KDEnlive’s framework (which has been in development since what, 2002 or earlier), bothers me.
PiTiVi has it hard because they write the framework as they go (just like the KDEnlive/MLT folks had to). Openshot piggybacks on MLT, if I understand correctly.
in all fairness, even though its users may not be aware of this, but the developer of Openshot makes no secret that kdenlive played a big part in the speediness of developing Openshot. In fact he actually acknowledges that this is the reason that Openshot is developing faster than Pitivi and why he didn’t choose Gstreamer.
so i’m not sure why this bothers you.
And of course, Piggybacking helps drive innovation.
Good to know that there is another thing I don’t have to rely on Windoze for, i.e. video editing. I recently have to transfer some footage from video tape (yes, I mean VHS) to DVD and not withstanding the fact that my capture device does not support Linux (nor can I find drivers for it) I was forced to use Vista to author the DVD. I’m pleased that I now know of an alternative and that it will shortly be in my primary operating system – Ubuntu
Looking at the above posts, I see a few people talking about the lack of features in pitivi.
While I can agree with this (I nearly wrote pitivi off the other day for not having any effects) I now realise that without a huge number of users, then we are not likely to see such quick progression of pitivi in terms of bug fixes or new features.
While ubuntu including pitivi is not really the point of this shot, I think the inclusion could be really important for the speedy development of this application.
Whether this application should be developed more quickly than something else is another matter entirely, it is clear that something like kdenlive doesn’t fit in with the Gnome desktop so well.
Another interesting project on video editing is “Lumiera” – http://lumiera.org/
It’s a fork of CinelerraCV and as far as I can see, it’s under heavy development.
I have a stack of mini-DV family videos I have to edit. A few years back I used kino and it was generally a pretty good application. Blender is a great application and one those apps that are a bit daunting the first time you fire it up. That being said I’m going to give it a try as a video editor. Kdenlive is progressing nicely as well. Pitivi has a nice interface but is falling behind in terms of features.
I’ll add another young video editor to the mix: http://yorba.org/lombard/.
So we have about 15 or so editors, but no one as the overall favorite yet.
I played with Kino, Cinelerra and PiTiVi. Kino did what I expected of it, in it’s limited way. I managed to burn a DVD movie that played on a standard DVD player.
PiTiVi appeared to work, but the output video file had completely messed up audio.
I didn’t find Cinelerra too complicated. maybe it just worked the way my brain works.
I think video editing on Linux is so early in its development that none of the applications is a clear winner. If PiTiVi gets the community and uder base behind it so it gets the support and development then that’s great. We only need 1 winner for the desktop to be come more mature.
@mg “The “rendering profiles” idea is what I think you need”
I absolutely agree.
On Windows I used VideoStudio and I just selected to create a PAL DVD and it did all the magic under the hood.
If all the codecs are on the system then simple profiles for most use cases would be great. I have no idea about bit rates and the different encoding methods and to be honest as a user I don’t really want to.
As I mentioned above I liked the editing and PitiVi made sense and was easy to use but it was the final encoding that defeated me.
If you look at WinFF which just does transcoding with no editing. It has the advanced options, but also a simple drop down list for the most used profiles. These profiles can be added to as well through a text file presets.xml that gives the FFMPEG specific switches for each of the settings.
Would it be possible for these to be converted to the gstreamer way of working and then used as simple profiles.
The list for WinFF includes Audio AVI Blackberry Creative Zen DV DVD Google Android iPod-iTunes LG Microsoft Mobile Phones MPEG-4 Neuros OS Nokia Palm PS3 PSP Quicktime Rockbox Tuna-Vids VCD Walkman Websites
There are sub sections for each of these but again it is all in plain english.
I would expect 5 or 6 of these setting would suit most peoples needs as a start and then like FFMPEG a system to expand the preset list would over time allow all the extra presets specific people need to be included.
Transmageddon (http://www.linuxrising.org/transmageddon/) just does transcoding; Christian, the author, will be building up a set of rendering profiles over time, and these should be available to PiTiVi with a bit of i-dotting and t-crossing.
You’re right in that video editing is much better now than it has ever been on Linux. I could not have made the LugRadio documentary a couple of years ago, because the software just wasn’t there.
That’s not to say it’s perfect though, there are still stability issues with kdenlive and some common effects are still missing. That said, I should try pitivi and OpenShot out, as it’s been a long time since I used the former and have never used the latter.
Installed PiTiVi, Kino and DeVeDe again last night on relatively low powered notebook with Xubuntu 9.10. I used Kino to capture the DV from my camera. Did the editing in PiTiVi and then used DeVeDe to create a DVD ISO.
I liked the experience and it worked the way my brain worked. I specifically liked the auto-layer creation when you drag a clip. Very easy.
This might encourage me to upgrade my main desktop from 8.04LTS to 9.10 to be able to get the latest apps.
Looks like there may be a Christmas video made and editing on Linux this year….
My only thing now is that compared to using something like VideoStudio on Windows I have to use 3 different applications for capture, edit and authoring the DVD where all of this is done in VideoStudio so the workflow is easier and less disjointed.