Building The Ultimate Video Editing Suite

PlainBlack writes "Once upon a time, I was the Chief Engineer at a small TV station, but got out of that line of work about the time that people were talking about replacing video tapes with hard drives. Now I'm looking to build myself a professional grade editing suite using only open source tools so that I can dump as much money as possible into the hardware. My question to Slashdot is, what are the best open source tools for such a suite? I'll need both video and audio editing; a bank of wipes, fades, and other effects; a great paint program; and a titler (text overlays)."

Comments

Kino, Cinelerra

[noselasd]

Perhaps Kino and/or Cinelerra have some of the features you need ?
The tutorials at http://www.robfisher.net/video/cinelerra1.html
an d http://www.robfisher.net/video/kino.html might show you what they can do.

Re:Kino, Cinelerra

[TheWanderingHermit]

Cinepaint is FilmGimp (I think) -- not for editing, but for touching up frames in video files.

VirtualDub

[sreeram]

I use VirtualDub only for editing home videos (i.e., not on a professional scale). But from what I can see, it is immensely powerful. Also, while it may not have the high-level features like fading-in/out that you seek (someone correct me if VDub can do these too), it does kick ass for low level editing (there is a ton of filters included within).

Of course, it is open source.

Re:VirtualDub

[ip_vjl]

VirtualDub is an excellent program, but it really isn't an editor. Read the first paragraph at virtualdub.org and Avery Lee comes right out any says this.

If all you need to do is trim or process your video (resize, recolor, etc.) virtualdub is great. If you're looking for real editing (combining scenes, doing a multicamera edit) you need something with a timeline, multiple a/v tracks, etc.

See also

[Tune]

Linux DV HOWTO on Kino plug-ins

VirtualDub like program for linux?

[shfted!]

Can anyone mention a program like VirtualDub for linux? I've looked at all the existing software packages, and they were either very featureful and non-intuitive, or quite simple but lacking in basic features (like supporting various codes in avi). What I'm looking for is something reasonably featureful (editing avi and mpeg and conversion, etc) and as easy to use as VirtualDub. Does such software exist?

Very Little Out There

[TheWanderingHermit]

I've spent a good deal of time searching and there isn't much out there that's open source. My company is currently doing data mining, but that's only to pay for starting and running a video/digital film production company. I found Premiere to work well, but I'm planning to switch to Mac and use some of the tools available there. There is almost nothing available in open source for DVD authoring. There is some simple software out there, but it's command line and, while I'm used to console programs and do a lot of programming, when I'd doing something like editing (or DVD authoring), I want an easy interface so I can focus on what I'm creating, not on what I have to do to make my tools help me. (I've noticed an open-source-denial system that works like this: Question: "Why isn't there open source software that does this?" Programmer's Answer: "Why would you want to do that?" -- instead of admitting there is a desire for a program, but that there is little desire to develop that program.)

I've looked into Main Actor (from mainconcept.com) and am considering using it. I've tried Cinelerra and found it frustrating to get up and running. Under KDE, there is KDEnliven, a video editor in an early stage of development (and, IMHO, the one with the most potential in the long run). There's also Jashaka (or Jakasha-- something like that), which I've heard has a good number of features, but is not well supported or backed for future development.

From my point of view, there has to be at least one solid video editor that works with different formats, allows easy out to DV, VHS, and to AVI and MPG files, as well as a full featured DVD authoring program that makes it easy to import different video format files and allows easy GUI editing of the menus and play sequences.

I've only been in the open source world for 2-3 years, and recently looked back to where things where when I started and where they are now. Video editing is still not a priority and not a task I'd expect to do with open source software. Judging from what I've seen in the past few years, though, I'm hoping it'll be there in another 3-4 years.

Re:Very Little Out There

[icespeedskater]

The Polidori is developping a front-end for dvdauthor.
Looks like it will take some time until it becomes usable, though.

Jahshaka

[Gefd]

jahshaka.org

This looked like it could be quite good a little while ago, and they seem to be coming along nicely. May be worth a look

- Gef

Me too!

[Zarf]

Now I'm looking to build myself a professional grade editing suite using only open source tools so that I can dump as much money as possible into the hardware.

Me too... except I don't have any money. At all. I've been browsing through: http://www.linuxartist.org/ and trying different things in their Video - Animation section.

Define your terms

[Andy_R]

"professional grade" can mean a lot of different things, from realtime manipulation of uncompressed streams down to anything that can edit DV.

Once you reach a certain budget level, you will be able to do everything you define as 'professional', after that what you are paying for is either speed of operation or storage capacity.

Honestly, with the state ofthe market as it is, saving a thousand dollars on software might buy you 30 minutes a day of increased hardware speed, while not spending that will probably cost you more than 30 minutes a day of software usability losses.

I know this won't be a popular answer on slashdot, but if you are going to be spending a five digit sum on this, you might as well devote a few percent of your raid-array budget to buy some commerical software, either Premiere or Final Cut Pro depending which sode of the mac/pc divide you prefer, and if your budget is much lower, pick up an recent secondhand Mac and get iMovie for free.

Adobe...

[Cyno01]

Looking at the above posts, Adobe needs to get on board with linux. So many people need things like photoshop for work, and the gimp while comparable, isn't the industry standard (much like the Office vs OO.org situation). Premier is another great aplication, but unfortunatly, IIRC, its windows only (adobe dropped their mac product line, right?). I've used premier, maybe a little too much, you can check out some of my work at my homepage link, and i wish i could have used it booted to linux. We've been playing around with CinePaint some and like it, but were still doing final cuts for the next movie in premiere. Might as well go for another link...

[shameless_plug] Hoodlumz Productions [/shameless_plug]

Re:Adobe...

[TheWanderingHermit]

I've seen reports of Premiere 6.0 and Photoshop working on Linux with Codeweavers Wine (Or maybe it was the regular Wine -- not sure). As far as Office vs. OOo, it's quite different. OOo is almost completely file compatable w/ Office. I've already seen evidence it is ready for production. One of my clients, an attorney in the Washington, D.C. area, who is the top name in his field in that area, asked me about OOo and is already starting to use it in his offices, without any reported trouble. He likes it.

As for video, it's a completely different situation. OSS video editing just isn't capable of doing what a professional editor or videographer needs. It won't be up to snuff until there are companies out there who will benefit by having it out there for clients the same as Sun benefits by having OOo as a libre and free solution to not using Office.

Forget open-source tools for now

[FattMattP]

I put together an edit suite for myself about a year ago and thought of doing the same thing. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of open-source video tools out there, and of the ones there are, not all of them are very polished. I finally decided to just go the Windows route and use some open-source tools here and there to augment what I had. I wanted to spend time working on video not trying to get different hardware to work together (I already suffered through that with video on the Amiga).

I used to be an Avid editor but didn't have the budget or clients to afford one of those on my own. Based on some feedback from friends I decided to go with a a Matrox RT2500 and later upgraded to a Matrox RT.X100. The RTX100 is fantastic. It's basically a PCI card with a breakout box that has stereo audio in/out, and component and Y/C in/out. There's also two firewire ports on the back. It uses Adobe Premiere for its editor and installs a plugin which lets Premiere use the RTX100 for realtime effects. Basically anything you find in an online suite you'll find here as a realtime effect. Titling, wipes, ADOs, keying, colour correction, etc.

The RTX100 also comes with DVD burning software called ReelDVD. I've only used it twice so all I can tell you is that it works and has lots of features, none of which I've yet to really take advantage of.

I pretty much use that on a dedicated machine with Premiere 6.0, Photoshop, After Effects, and Sound Forge. I also use some open-source tools such as VirtualDub and DubMan. I haven't upgraded to Premiere Pro yet as the Matrox drivers are still in beta.

My only suggestion is that if you do get a RTX100, then buy one of the recommended systems to use it in. The Matrox forums are full of people who complain that the RXT100 doesn't work right or at all yet admit they don't have a compatible system. Especially watch out for via chipsets as the RTX100 won't work on those at all.

Open vs Closed Source

[daviddennis]

For some reason, open source developers seem to like the technical challenges of replicating what already exists in closed form (Linux, OpenOffice, etc) instead of blazing new paths.

You can get them to want to create an attractive interface, but they don't have the deep design skills fostered by the commercial groups.

Because of this, it would be very difficult to get something as good and complicated as Final Cut Pro in an open source project.

I would personally recommend a balanced approach.

• Buy the best PowerMac G5 you can afford.
  
• Get and use Final Cut Pro
  
• Install X-Windows and you can use whatever open source products appear
  

Then you have the best of the open and proprietary worlds, and you can decide on a case by case basis which one you prefer. And your basic platform is about 50/50 open source.

I think it's an unbeatable compromise, and it's what I run personally.

Even CmdrTaco has a PowerBook. What more can I say?

Hope that helps.

D