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

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.

See also

[Tune]

Linux DV HOWTO on Kino plug-ins

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.

What's it worth to you?

[MalachiConstant]

I''m the editor in a small (3 people total) production company. I think you need to look at how much aggravation you're willing to put up with and how "Professional" you want to be. Are you okay with telling your clients "we can't do that" if they ask for some particualr effect or style the OS software can't do? Are you willing to spend the time and effort an OS solution is going to take?

I think you may be overestimating the need for massive hard drives at the expense of ease-of-use, hardware availability and cost. We use a single 120 gig hard drive for all our editing. We edit an hour-long show each week as well as commercials, some corporate videos and a twice-a-year dance show that runs at about 5 hours of footage without having too many space problems. A second 120 gig drive would be more than enough. The video is compressed when captured to about 1 gig every 5 minutes, but it looks so good the viewers won't notice it.

The two main expenses for us are the BetaSP deck (about $10,000) and the computer itself (about $5000 with capture card). Final Cut Pro is $1000, but you may be able to buy an older version for less. Version 2 is fine, version 3 adds some better titling software, and version 4 has lots of bells and whistles you may not need.

If you're shooting on MiniDV you can cut about $10000 off the cost right there. MiniDV decks are cheap and you can capture over firewire so you don't even need an expensive capture card. You can even use iMovie if all you need are basic transitions and titling, but I think you can only use one video track (plus titling) and two audio tracks.

For editing graphics we use The GIMP until we can afford photoshop, but all titling is done in FCP.

Basically if you're going to be making money at this the up-front costs are well worth it. Especially on something as complex as video-editing software I'm happy to pay for a solution that "just works" instead of having to worry about computer problems when I'm working.

Compare it to 3D modeling. If you're going to spend 40 hours a week doing paid work would you rather use Blender for free and accept the limitations it has, or pay for Maya or 3DS Max and get your work done?

When most of the cost is the hardware (camera, computer, VTR), it may be worth it to pay the $1000 for software that will do what you want with minimal fuss.