Building a Video Editing Box?

RexDart asks: "I'm building a new AMD64/939 box and would like to build into the system: capabilities to capture video from analog and digital sources; edit; add text and overlays; and maybe do the occasional DVE. This is for home movies, wedding videos and occasional project for work. This will be a dual boot Linux (Red Hat or Ubuntu most likely) / WinXP system. Open source, free, software would be ideal (Audacity will definitely be installed), but commercial solutions are not out of the picture. I'd like to keep the media production on the Linux side of the system and reserve WinXP for gaming, but is Linux up to the task?" "Given the above considerations, the questions:
1) What's a good recommendation for video capture hardware?
2) What's a good recommendation for software?

I don't expect a definitive answer, but would like to narrow the starting points of my research.

Thanks!"

Comments

Capture hardware

[ip_vjl]

For capture hardware you can save yourself some hassle by looking at the analog firewire converters like the Canopus ADVC line.

This way, you never need to worry about drivers, just plug the thing into a firewire port and it makes any analog device look like a firewire camera.

I have the older ADVC100, and it makes capture easy. I can move the thing from computer to computer and platform to platform with no problems.

Re:cinepaint

[Quarters]

No no no no no.

There are no editting capabilities in CinePaint. It has not been used to edit a movie.

CinePaint is a paint program with a time component, that's it. You can read in a sequence of frames and work on them in pixel coordinate space and time.

Re: Hidden feature of the ADVC-100

[Anonymous Coward]

A hidden feature of the ADVC-100 (not sure about the newer models) ... press and hold the button for 15 seconds - the unit now strips Macrovision.

Re:AMD 939

[Computerguy5]

Keep in mind that, unless you tell it to overwrite your linux partitions, the only thing that the Windows install will overwrite is your MBR. That means that you can install linux first, and then Windows, as long as you have a bootable linux CD or floppy that you can use as a rescue disc and get to a shell to run lilo again.

I dual boot Windows and Linux, and while I'm still using a linux install from way back, I've replaced Windows several times. Each time I just toss in a Debian Woody CD (Debian is my preferred distro), type 'rescbf24 root=/dev/hda1' at the LILO prompt, and then as soon as I get to a root shell, type 'lilo'. I recreates my MBR just as it used to be, and so I can just reboot, have a LILO menu of whether to boot Windows or one of my various kernel configs, and go on my merry way.

Think of a Mac Mini as a pehipheral

[Andy_R]

The slower MacMini configured with the larger hard drive and the DVD writer costs $649, and includes iMove and iDVD.

Compare this to the price of:
a DVD writer
a firewire card
an 80Gb drive
movie editing software
DVD authoring software

Use your exisiting mouse, keyboard and screen (consider the belkin KVM switch if you'll be giving it heavy use).

Once you factor in the knowledge that you'll have a tried and tested set-up, good software, no driver issues, a shallow learning curve, and just 1 small desirable multi-purpose box on your desk rather than 3 or 4 specialist ones, then it makes a lot of sense to think of the MacMini as a video editing box in addition to your Linux machine, the fact that it has it's own CPU and OS rather than inhabiting the same beige shell isn't really that relevant.

Re:Get a Mac instead.

[CompVisGuy]

The recent MacWorld Keynote said that Final Cut Express HD will cope with the widescreen format, and I believe this is true for the new iMovie, too. Advice: Buy a Mac with a version of Final Cut HD.

Re:Get a Mac instead.

[Dragonmaster Lou]

• The new iMovie supports HD camcorders and 16:9 widescreen formats. It's available January 22nd either bought separately or with any new macs bought after that.
• No reason why you can't output to QuickTime or DV and then use a program to change the DV to something else (I often use D-Vision to create Xvid AVIs). What formats did you have in mind?
• I believe the new iDVD lets you create menuless DVDs as well. Comes in the same box as the version of iMovie I mentioned above.
• The new iDVD does let you output the DVD to a disk image

• Looks to me like your gripes have all been answered. If you have any other questions, you can feel free to ask me -- I'm pretty handy at Mac video editing for an amateur.

Re:TV through the DV bridge???

[log0n]

Not a prob..

A DV bridge is like a capture card in that it bring video into a computer, except that (usually) it's an external box and does the dedicated de/endcoding in hardware rather than software. It also works only in the DV format (or sometimes DVCAM) which is exactly what you need for editing or TV/DVD production.

Usually it's firewire, and while USB2 is fast enough, don't get a USB dv bridge - firewire does works out of the box w/o drivers (even under linux).

Basically, a DV bridge translates whatever you send to it. If you have an external VCR or Dish! receiver, or anything with a compatible video source (RCA, SVHS, etc) it'll capture/play it. If you have a mini DV camera or tape deck, it'll losslessly transfer it to the editing computer. In essence, you choose the channel on the VCR, or the tuner, or the sat receiver - and that gets piped into the DV bridge.

Check out www.canopus.com

The ADVC 100 or 110 is probably what you need. Unless you're working with film, or maybe high def (HDV, HDcam, etc) cameras, it'll be all you need.

The most common other standard besides NTSC is PAL (also SECAM, but don't worry about that). Most DV bridges work in both NTSC and PAL.