Sun, 02 Dec 2007

Video editing under Linux: Kino

Kino, a less complex, less powerful video editor, works fine. Loading/inserting files which you want to use is a rather painful process though - that's definitely better in Cinelerra, where you simply select all the files you want, then wait until they've all been loaded. In Kino, you have to go through the "load file" dialogue individually for every single snippet.

Kino wasn't able to export ("render") anything as long as I didn't run it with root privileges. Apparently it needs a certain kernel module, which it can't load without these privileges. I wonder if this was the cause of my problems with Cinelerra. The beauty of Kino is that it actually lets you know if there's any problem, and what the problem is. With Cinelerra, I just couldn't figure it out. I don't think I'll install and try Cinelerra again - glad I finally found something which works OK; and Kino probably has all the functions I'll ever want to use.

Posted on 02 Dec 2007 at 23:15 in /technology. -- Permalink

Installing Cinelerra (3)

OK - no difference to the status quo ante. No rendering.

Actually yes, there is a difference. Or did I just fail to notice this before? When I load files which I want to edit, I get the most horrible "audio block/sample failure" messages. A hopeless case, it seems.

Posted on 02 Dec 2007 at 22:34 in /technology. -- Permalink

Installing Cinelerra (2)

OK, now CVS doesn't cause any problems anymore, but I get several "possibly undefined macro" errors as a result of creating a "configure" file (autoreconf -i --force). I'm reinstalling Cinelerra from the Ubuntu repository now, just to see what will happen.

Posted on 02 Dec 2007 at 22:16 in /technology. -- Permalink

Installing Cinelerra (1)

As expected, svn worked like a breeze. Creating the "configure" file didn't work, however, because I didn't have CVS installed. Well, that can be helped.

Posted on 02 Dec 2007 at 22:11 in /technology. -- Permalink

Going for the newest version of Cinelerra

I prefer installing software from the Ubuntu repositories but in this case, it just might help to compile the latest Cinelerra version from the subversion repository. First of all, I had to get tons of libraries and "dev" headers. Using subversion will be a pleasure, but I'm somewhat curious to see what problems will come up during the compilation process.

Posted on 02 Dec 2007 at 22:05 in /technology. -- Permalink

Video editing: pleasures and pains of Cinelerra

It took me some time to find my way through Cinelerra but now it feels comfortable to select, cut and put together snippets of video. The software comes with lots of other functions, most of which are probably relatively easy to use, too. I haven't yet tried many.

The problem is, I just can't render video, even though the manual describes in some detail how to render video for a DVD. What I don't understand is that I don't even get any error messages (when I run Cinelerra from a terminal); it doesn't even crash, it just silently refuses to do anything. Audio rendering works fine. I guess the video rendering process needs something which I haven't installed - but as it is, I'm left without a clue as to what this could be.

Since video editing is pointless if you can't get an end product (to burn onto a DVD, upload to the web or just watch on a computer), I'm stuck here.

Posted on 02 Dec 2007 at 18:06 in /technology. -- Permalink

Video editing under Linux

No, I'm not really trying to "Become a digital video editing guru using Linux tools" (a helpful article!) but, after I've learned how to grab digital video from tape and save it on my hard disk (using dvgrab), I'm now moving on to the actual editing.

sudo dvgrab --format raw -buffers 200 --autosplit --size 100 source_

Posted on 02 Dec 2007 at 11:00 in /technology. -- Permalink