Slashdot Mirror
Two Steps Forward for Linux Multimedia
chill writes: "A while ago Heroine Virtual had a video editing program out called Broadcast 2000. Then something weird happened and the program was pulled from release with the homepage saying it was too dangerous legally to put out. Something about liability. Anyway, the successor to that program, called Cinelerra, is now available in beta form. Give it a shot and see what is what." And Dominic Mazzoni writes: "Talk about a tough act to follow. On the same day that Mozilla 1.0 was released last week, we released version 1.0.0 of Audacity, our GPL cross-platform audio editor that has been under development for nearly three years. It is based on wxWindows and runs natively on Linux (of course!), Windows, Mac OS (both 9 and X), and some other POSIX systems. Version 1.0.0 just adds a couple of minor features and bug fixes, but it is basically stable and quite useful, though it has some limitations. In addition, we also released a snapshot of our unstable development branch as Audacity 1.1.0. This version adds support for 24-bit and 32-bit samples, automatic resampling, LADSPA plug-ins, and internationalization, plus it has many nifty new UI enhancements."
According to the website, Cinelerra is not intended for end users, because it is not user friendly. They suggest looking at Kino. From Kino's website:
:^)
Kino is a simple non-linear video editor. Although it has windows and menus, it is actually a keyboard driven program. It uses many keyboard commands that are similar to the vi text editor.
Hmm. Sounds very user frienly.
I'll give Kino a try though when my new digicam arrives!
I wonder if this will work
:%s/fat/muscle/g
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
German company MainConcept makes a video editing software for Linux and Windows platforms. Check out MainActor.
The cross-platform compatibility is done with Qt, so the basic user-interface quality is very good. Some strangeness in some video editing UI concepts, but otherwise excellent.
I've tried the Linux demo version abt two years ago. It was rather nice even then.
Price $99.
I was looking for something to enable me to rip from audio cassette (dialog/speech only) to wav and then mp3/ogg. Audacity was the only (or best) product I found that allowed me to visually see the tracks so I could splice and dice the two sides of the tape together, remove the pops, and so on.
The only two limitations were that it's mp3 support is limited to predefined bitrates (why not an external command line?), and recording large (ok, huge) wavs caused it to skip sometimes. But then sox saved me.
In summary, as a wav editor it is brilliant!
There are 10 kinds of people; those who know ternary, those who don't, and those now hunting for a dictionary.
If package dependencies are a support issue that HW don't want to deal with, make an apt repository to serve out the RPMs.
Reminds me of Broadcast 2000 (from the same authors). When I once downloaded the source, and started looking at it, the source tree contained about 10 general-purpose libraries (maybe some of them modified?), and I recall very soon finding a note somewhere basically saying "Do not try to compile this yourself! If the binaries work at all, use them! This will probably not compile!"
Now looking at the source of cinerella, I see directories such as:
Maybe the HW people can roll up some spiffy software, they sure don't know how to do it the clean, unix-like way! It was quite a surprise to download the huge Broadcast 2000 package over a modem line, only to discover it contained half a dozen libraries I already had installed. So be careful of what you promise.
(Not to mention their over-arrogant way of expressing things. Somebody already commented on their page, and as I understand from cinelerra-beta1/make_packages, the package info is along the lines of:
Summary: Complete production environment for audio and video
Provides: Everything
%description
It's about transforming the impossible into reality.
I wouldn't say that's very descriptive.)
I doubt, therefore I may be.
About cinelerra: As I understand it, the author of broadcast 2000 (which is the same as cinelerra) had an agreement with a company that packaged broadcast 2000 and sold it with support. At some point it appears someone threathened to sue the author, and he withdrew the project.
You can still find the sources to broadcast 2000 on the internet (I even think it is part of the cinelerra sources) and there is also a patch floating around that adds ogg vorbis and openDivx support to it.
Its about a month since I last checked out Cinelerra. At that point it was rather complicated to build - the makefile has errors that will allow the build process to fail but will make it appear to the user that it went OK. When built, it does work, but it is limited in its supports of Video encodings, which is a shame. The DV import module crashed for me, which means that I would have to convert all my DV streams to MPEG2 or MOV format, which is not so great. If you wish, however, the mjpegtools can be used for this.
Cinelerra has a number of transitions etc, which is great. However, a month ago, there were many glitches, and in general the program did not seem stable.
Several people mentioned MainActor. This program works well (for me) and the demo edition will work for as long as you wish, although it will print "MainActor" on any frame rendered by the program. (Read: If you do not manipulate the individual frames, you can actually edit all that you want, but transitions will have the stamp and so on). It does cost money though, and is not OSS. MainActor also have support for text effects, titles and so on. (Which I have not seen on any other Video editor for Linux).
If you are taking up video editing on Linux and you have a DV camera, you should definitively check out Kino. (at sourceforge). Disclaimer: I recently got cvs write access to kino. Kino is build for DV editing, and will keep the DV metainformation, etc, while editing. It has a nice interface - both menus, toolbars and vi style keyboard shotcuts. But, there are currently no support for transitions, titles, or anything like that. Kino cvs, which currently depends on libdv cvs, contains a module called "dvscript" that can be used to create some simple transitions, as well as streams from pngs, etc. I believe it is the plan to eventually integrate this functionality into kino proper.
If you are taking up editing, but mostly with analog video, you shold consider buying an analog to DV converter (An external box that works with Linux costs about $199 + a firewire card). In any case you also want the mjpegtools (sourceforge) to be able to work with captured streams, remove noise, constructs streams that can be used for videoDC's etc. Mjpegtools also support some hardware accelerated capture cards and jpeg compressors.
Kino can export a playlist to a format the mjpegtools can read, which means that it is easy to create e.g. mpeg2 or DivX streams from your DV input.
For your VideoCD creation needs, check out vcdimager.org.
Mads Bondo Dydensborg
A couple of points:
1. I'm under the impression that "these guys" is actually "this guy". Incredible as it sounds, I think this entire app is the work of one brilliant and somewhat eccentric developer, Adam Williams.
2. I don't think he's a Windows developer at all; in the documentation that comes with Cinelerra, he provide an explanation of why he chose to use symlinks rather than use the usual libraries.
garethw