Video editing

From openSUSE

this page is to be translated from french. Not being english native speaker, this is quite difficult for me (Jdd sysop), so thanks if you can help

Many people like to make videos with a camcorder (like DV camcorders) and then edit them to make a movie.

It's fairly unpleasant to have to do this with Windows^®. We will see how at least part of the work can be done under SUSE Linux/openSUSE.

The basis is Kino or Cinelerra, but this doesn't just work out of the box.

Hardware and applications sources

Video editing requires a lot of power and storage size. The computer I used for the notes here (only for the first draft, this note will be edited later) is a Sempron, 512Mb RAM, 80Gb HDD. SUSE Linux 10.0.

Video editing requires some drivers that aren't open source. You can find them in the Packman repository.

Drivers setup

To copy your video from a DV camcorder to the PC you need a IEEE1394 card. The necessary drivers are:

• ieee1394
• ohci1394
• raw1394
• video1394

You can load them manually:

modprobe raw1394

For example.

We can also start them together.

Starting point

There is no YaST module to configure ieee1394 (in SUSE Linux 10.1). You may need to launch the modules by hand if Hal doesn't do the job. It's really not difficult to script this if necessary.

Notes:

• 30Gb is not too much space for video editing
• Some utilities will need to be compiled so you will need your Kernel sources and a compiler..

Kino

Setup

Kino comes standard with SuSE Linux 10.0, 10.1 and 10.2 (install with YaST). But Kino will not be shipped in binary form with 10.3 and later.

Probably, the first thing to do is to go to preferences (NB: the initial writer of this page is french and use french versions, so the name of the english menu entries is only guessed. Feel free to fix this - and then remove this note, thanks) and to give it a target data folder with enough free space.

I could not manage to setup a default folder, due to a display bug in Kino. so you might need to enter the pathname by hand in the first window.

Kino finds the raw1394 module and is ready to export in /dev/ieee1394/dv/host0/PAL/out (Meaning??)

Capture

There is the same file name bug explained in the previous paragraph, so one needs to key in the file name - minor.

Once the camcorder is connected (be warned that there are some faulty cables that can explain a connection failure) and set on "read" one can proceed.

You have two buttons raws. Upper one for capture, bottom one for cassette move

Press the red button... and the PC become sleepy, when the image come on the screen. If you want sound, you must rely on the camcorder's speakers.

Note that under Windows^®, with nearly the same PC, the plague is the loss of one image from time to time without any notice from the software. This is a real problem, not when using only one track (the image loss is barely visible), but when using syn sound from other source, because the sync is frequently faulty and difficult to resync.

Reading

Recording stopped after 3 minutes or so, go to editing... no sound.

Opening of Kmix, where nearly all was muted (the mixers conflicts are a plague in Linux). Opening "pcm", the sound come, horrible.

The images goes in slow motion, sound also. However the fast fw works. System unusable.

However, VLC (Videolan) reads the captured file perfectly, so the problem is with Kino.

Export

Kino has a bunch of export formats.

The AVI DV type 1 mode (sound+image) have nearly the same size (780 Mb for 3"30') than raw mode, but is not read by VLC.

The mpg mode asks for mpeg2enc that is installed on my config.

Export to DV is very fast, but to mpg very slow (20 minutes). Good result, only 20Mb as resulting file size.

But Kino don't know how to use that file without converting it to DV again.

So, too slow, unusable if not as capture and converter.

DVR

DVR means probably "Digital Video Recording". In fact, I I understood it correctly, it's about recording TV with ad hoc cards, not home made video. This don't mean the given products are unusefull, but they orientation is different.

DVBcut

I found DVBcut in the Kde nemus. At first glance it's a product to cut mpg files. It's read files prodiced by the Windows^® program Nero, but not the ones done with Kino. The first use is simple, but the final goal not obvious :-(.

QDVDauthor

Nice little thing, but with the version tried, most clic give a "not already implemented" message :-(.

Should be a graphical interface to DVDauthor. This one have a good reputation but is a CLI from an XML file.

AVIdemux

This seems to work. It's the equivalent of VirtuaDubMod under Windows^®. With it one can transcode video files from one format to another or extract part of it.

Anyway, one have interest to divide his video clip in small parts so as to make each work faster. Working on a 5 minutes clip is pretty easy, though a 2 hour movie can freeze your computer for days (not a crash, many hours working only).

Dvgrab

The best aver find tool to copy a DV movie from camcorder to hard drive. I don't use any other tool now.

It's enough to switch on the camcorder (connected, of course), lauch DVDgrab in an xterm and let it work alone. Control C to stop before the end (without losing anything).

This product (found by Yast) seems from the same author as Kino (same web site).

Working details

Kdenlive

Kdenlive is very promising and needs to be seen.

Video editing with Kdenlive

Cinelerra

Seems the better product now. Exists now for a very long time. Insist to say one need a cluster of computers to make video - not that friendly :-).

Anyway I could compile and install it without problem. Not Kde aware so the link to /usr/bin/cinelerra have to be made by hand. The application itself can be found in /usr/lib/cinelerra.

There is much to say

Main Actor

Main Actor is present on SUSE for a long time now. It's not free nor open source and only a demo version was available freely on SUSE. The same one is available online.

This version is fully functional, but wrote a big "Main Actor" on all the images.

Capture works :-).

The last known Linux version (Mars 2006) is the version from SuSE 9.3 available on the main concept site.

It's a cross platform product, with the same feature and Key for Linux and Windows^®.

The price/feature ratio is attractive, price being approx 200€, and the manual speaks of utilities able to generate clouds...

However it needs a strong configuration to run it and the windows versions are subjects to frequent crashes. Need to say the customer support is very good (I could have a fixed dll with a very little delay). It installs without problem, but my Linux machine is too weak to make it run.

See Also

• http://www.lucike.info/page_projectx.htm
• http://www.zs4.net/
• jahshaka-2.0_RC2.1-1.src
• http://www.diva-project.org/

References

• Movie making manual
• Website about DV