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.

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.

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.

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.

So we have about 15 or so editors, but no one as the overall favorite yet.

I haven’t run across Open Video Editor before. It looks nice. Does anyone have any direct experience with 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.

A few of the main advantages to using Blender over anything else on Linux right now for video editing IMO:

1. It’s rock solid compared to ANYTHING else out there on Linux.
2. It has a huge dev community pushing it along very quickly.
3. Using its proxying features you can smoothly edit and scrub through HD video on a low spec laptop or desktop. Try that with pretty much anything else.

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.

It’s a fork of CinelerraCV and as far as I can see, it’s under heavy development.

so i’m not sure why this bothers you.

And of course, Piggybacking helps drive innovation.

“Whilst I admit that OpenShot needs some polishing, it’s nearly at 1.0 and has only existed for about a year.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.