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Vegas is somewhat analogous to Final Cut Pro (though cheaper and not quite as powerful) or Adobe Premier Ah. OK. I was looking at the wrong thing (Soundforge). Thanks for the info. I don't do anything like that, but have you looked at Cinelerra or Kino? A/V friends claim that Cinellera is essentially Adobe Premier. I'd be interested to know what your opinion is.

I bought a TV card specifically to do this but never used it because this has worked so well:

I play the tape on a good VCR. The video and stereo audio output are hooked up to a Sony Digital Handycam (it's a DCR-TRV350). And the camcorder Firewire cable is connected to the PC.

This lets the Camcorder do all the heavy lifting. It outputs standard digital video which I capture with kino. I also use kino to do the clean-up, capture a frame (as a jpeg) and export some sound to use as the title screen for what will be the final DVD. The sound gets exported as a .wav which I convert to mp2 with ffmpeg.

Still with kino, I break up the video into chunks (about 4-6 minutes each) for chapters so I can skip through the DVD when it done. I then export the video in DVD format, telling kino to split chapters into seperate files (this makes chapter creation automatic in the next step).

I then use 'Q' DVD-Author to build the DVD filesystem. Although 'Q' DVD-Author can create the DVD automatically (calling dvdauthor), I prefer to tweak the dvdauthor.xml file to do some fun menu things and run dvdauthor manually.

I check my DVD (while still a directory on my hard disc) with totem, or mplayer. Finally I write it out using growisofs from the dvd+rw-tools project.

All this is running on a Debian system that is several years old. Nothing fancy or top-of-the-line here.

That's pretty much it. Been working great for me.

As for that TV card? Well, I watch TV with it - it's hooked up to my cable.

what about cinerella and kino ...
i dont edit video's myself so i wouldn't know if they are good, stable, ...
but linux people tend to suggest those 2 to media enthusiasts
anyway here are the links
http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3/Cinerella
http://www.kinodv.org/Kino
My first impression from the screens some to be that cinelerra
is the biggest project of the two and gives you more options than any sane person can handle
while kino looks like a fast quick and dirty simple editing app
anyway i hope i was of help, good luck!

yes, there are uncrippled machines that can do what you want (and then some). you probably have one sitting on your desk

if you're running under linux, you've got a couple options. kino (http://www.kinodv.org/ will allow you to capture live raw video (plus sound) from a standard dv camera with an ilink (aka 1394a) connection. it takes a little effort to get setup, but it's worth it. you'll then want to use ffmpeg to re-encode the files so that they're less huge and then save the encoded version.

if you have analog cameras, a $50 capture card (we use ati's all-in-wonder) can act as a frame grabber --- it may take a little finagling to get the sound working, but once it's all hooked up you should be good to go. use xawtv to preview and make sure that everything is behaving as expected, then use ffmpeg to capture the video. make sure you encode at fairly high bit rate and be careful about what combinations of codec and containers you choose (in particular, you probably want to stick to msmpeg4v2 encoded .wmv files if you intend the video to be played back on windows machines). if you've installed something like VLC on the playback machines, you can use more interesting codecs like h264 and still achieve quite impressive playback quality at much lower bitrates.

there are ways to do similar things in windows, although i have much less experience doing so and tend to use developers tools (like graphedit) to put together the directshow filters that will capture video and sound from some source, encode, mux, and then output the file. i'm sure that there are pieces of software out there that can do this. if you have access to some it people, writing your own should be fairly easy (there's a handy book on the subject here: http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Microsoft/dp/073 5618216/sr=8-1/qid=1156903037/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-273 5593-2181510?ie=UTF8)

if you're not inclined to build your own solution, virtualdub http://www.virtualdub.org/ may be able to help you. i haven't used it myself, but it's a pretty widely used app.

the one thing to bear in mind with all these proposed solutions is that you're going to want to make sure you've got fairly big and fast disks and quite a lot of space free. you're also going to want to make sure you've got a reliable backup strategy in place since you no longer have the luxury of the original tapes. if you have any other questions, feel free to email me: (my slashdot user name) 'at' yahoo(dot com).

Insightful? How about Kino or Cinelerra or Lives or Mainactor?

That's strange. AFAIK, all digital camcorders still record everything in (mini-)DV format which is a well-established standard. That's what my camcorder (Sony) uses, and it's well supported in Linux:

The reference for Linux is Kino, but Freshmeat has several projects for software to interact with DV stuff: http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=dv+video

-chris

I'm sticking to GPL projects because I don't know about other ones as well. This is not meant to diss the BSD crowd.

• ALSA everyone welcome to submit a driver for their card. I might add that most Linux Kernel drivers and most drivers for a number of other projects (X, CUPS, gcc backends, etc.) are fairly open and you can jump right in.
• gentoo packages you might not get into the main distribution right away, but the community is very open and will try out pretty much anything you have to contribute. Like drivers, above.
• GIMP and GTK at least, pre-2000. Now there are a lot more developers, so jumping in isn't quite as easy.
• kino has a very flat hierarchy. linux1394 is the same. Like drivers, above.
• MediaWiki

Okay, but I also think that cataloging open source projects is kind of fruitless, since there are so many. The internet connects people with common interests. They develop projects. Some are more open than others. Still, if the project gets too rigidly hierarchical, someone will fork the code and head off in a different direction. Example: the different flavors of BSD.

Hark! I hear the sound of somebody who hasn't use Linux in years.

Support for most printers is there out of the box. Both my HP Laser and my Epson Printer/Scanner were supported out of the box on the current and previous versions of Ubuntu. That's printing *and* scanning.

Again, on the latest version of Ubuntu, there's an option in the main menu, under Graphics, called gtkam which you might notice because it has a little picture of a digital camera next to it. Click it and you can interface with most digital cameras. No driver installation necessary. Alternatively, just plug your memory card into your card reader and an icon for the card will appear on your desktop. I'm having a hard time imagining how they could make it any simpler.

Several of the Linux audio players have in-built support for the iPod. The default media player for Kubuntu, amaroK, does, as does the default media player for Ubuntu, Rhythmbox.

OK, this one is supported but you're going to have to install an application to deal with it. Luckily, Ubuntu comes with a graphical utility to install programmes. All you have to do is tell it to install Kino and you're sorted.

So please, when you're going to diss Linux, at least have the decency to try it first.

I have grabbed HDV (MPEG2 1920x1080i, stored on DV tape) with mpg1394grab. It works like a charm. If you have a monster PC like Cinelerra's web site recommends, HDV editing is actually quite smooth. And that's working directly on the HDV footage, not using some "intermediate".

Herman Robak
hermanr on Freenode

• MainActor
• Kino
• Piranha
• ...