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Building a Video Editing Box?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the home-executive-producer dept.

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!"

3 of 143 comments (clear)

  1. Get a Mac instead. by LordNimon · · Score: 4, Insightful
    is Linux up to the task?

    No, it's not. Get a Mac, and you'll have all the tools you need, the ability to play a few games, and a Unix OS to satisfy your geek side.

    --
    And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
    To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
  2. If you're going to have Windows on there anyway... by Sancho · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ...you really might as well go Windows all the way. Periodically I look at the Linux tools for video capture/video editing. As far as I'm concerned, they're not there yet, which is a large part of the reason that I still have Windows on my desktop. There are some really advanced filtering tools on Windows so you can really make your final product shine. Check out AVISynth and its related documentation, as well as VirtualDUB (if you're going the mpeg-4 route) our QuENC (if you're going the mpeg-1 or mpeg-2 route).

    Also, if you ever intend on doing analog captures, you should consider using a striped raid array for a scratch drive for capturing. This way you can capture losslessly compressed AVI (with HuffYUV) and have as much data to work with. Be wary though that you should try to capture in a multiple of your final resolution--the less pixel interpolation you do when resizing, the better.

  3. The quick answer is, "no." by RandomCoil · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Linux is not up to the task. There are a number of perfectly competent consumer-level Windows applications in the $100 range that will satisfy your needs. Adobe Premiere Elements, Sony Vegas Studio, and Ulead's video application come to mind*.

    As for hardware, the easiest approach is to simply make sure you have firewire. I'm assuming that if you're editting videos, you're also shooting them, probably on a digital video camera. Most such cameras have an analog video input. Digitizing an analog source using a DV camera is probably the easiest way to import the analog video into a computer. It avoids the cost of the capture card, the hassle of installing it, and any possible driver issues, and it completely negates problems with your computer dropping frames because, say, the anti-virus software fired up mid-capture. The only downside is the additional time required to dub and then import the analog video, but since neither process requires baby sitting, it may not be a big deal.

    *Pinnacle Studio is another possibility, but I had a video project that, after spending many hours working on, decided it would not render until I had removed and re-inserted the various video transitions. Quite obnoxious.