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

AMD 939

[mabu]

As I type this, I'm looking over at my new Athlon 64 3500+ system I've been building. Unfortunately, the darn thing was shipped without a CPU heatsink so while I've got the new system put together, I am waiting for the heatsink to be delivered before I can try it out. It seems 939 parts are pretty scarce around here.

I'll be very interested in responses here because I don't have a video capture card installed and am looking into it.

My system is an MSI K8N Neo2, 1GB DDR400, GEForce 6800GT 256MB, 2x300GB Seagate SATA Barricuda drives, 1 Sony DVD drive, 1 Sony dual-layer DVD+/- burner.

I too would like to run dual boot. The last time I set up a PC this way, I installed Windows second and it wiped out my partitioning that Unix set up.

If I want to do dual boot with XP and Linux (or better yet FreeBSD), what should I install first?

Re:AMD 939

[ZephyrXero]

I run a dool boot (WinXP/Gentoo) and have ran into the problem of Windows not recognizing my Linux partitions, and Linux not being completely stable writing to an NTFS partition. My solution was to divide my harddrive into 3 partitions. I have a 120GB SATA Seagate. I gave Windows 20GB, Linux 20GB, and then made the remaining 80GB a FAT32 partition because both OS can read and write to it easily. I use the Windows and Linux partitions strictly for programs and use my 80Gig for all of my files (ie..audio,video,art,personal files). So far it's working great :)

hw/sw

[farnsworth]

For software, Cinelerra is the best editing suite out there. I haven't used Final Cut Pro, but Cinelerra is much more useful than iMovie. I haven't used Premiere is years, and Cinelerra is on par with what I remember of Premiere. Cinelerra should be able to do everything that you need.

I've only done DV over firewire capture, and for that I would guess that any old firewire card would be fine. For analog capture, I'd look into using a Hauppauge 250 for capture. Just `cat /dev/video0 > /home/me/projects/bills-wedding/capture.mpeg`. You could also get the 350 which does hardware mpeg decoding (and you could hook a crt up to the tv out, too.)

The only thing that absolutely stinks about video on linux is the choice of mpeg codecs. I can do everything I need to create a decent looking movie, but once I mpegify it to burn it to dvd, the picture quality looks terrible (to my eyes, anyway. some people say it looks fine). I just got a Hauppauge 250 so I could do all my editing/compositing in DV, write that back to the camera via firewire, then capture the final cut with a dedicated hardware mpeg card over analog connections.

I actually looked into getting an old mac that I could stick in my garage and remotely mpegify my final cuts and burn them. At the time it was too much money for what I was doing (and I never did figure out how to script iMovie anyway), but it may be worth it to you.

Re:Get a Mac instead.

[swillden]

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.

I disagree with this, after having done the comparison.

I got a mini DV camera for Christmas, and bought my wife an iBook. Although I didn't want to hog her new computer, I did think for a while that maybe I should use it for video editing. After trying for a while, I'm using Kino on Linux.

The problem with iLife tools is that although they're very polished and slick, they're also somewhat limited. Some of the problems I found are:

• iMovie can't handle the anamorphic "widescreen" format that my camera optionally produces. I looked to see if there's some filter I can use to stretch the video out to its correct aspect ratio, but there isn't one. Kino just does it.
• iMovie won't output any formats other than its own, DV or Quicktime. That's fine if you are going to use iDVD (see below), but that doesn't work for me.
• I couldn't find a way to make iDVD produce a DVD without a menu, and it wasn't obvious how to make my own menu themes since I didn't like the ones Apple provided.
• iDVD will not output the DVD image in any format at all, as far as I can tell. You can only burn the DVD but, of course, the iBook doesn't have a burner.

There were some others as well that I'm forgetting, because I gave up on using the iLife tools for video editing a couple of weeks ago.

Now, my situation is a little different than that of the questioner, because I'm not really willing to spend much money on buying video editing software. If there were something in the range of a hundred bucks, I'd consider it it, but certainly no more... I spent all my money on the iBook and the camera!

IMO, for typical home movie stuff, making DVD slide shows for weddings (which I've done), Linux is perfectly adequate, and depending on what you want to do, may actually be a better choice than a Mac.

Gimp runs much better on Linux than on OSX, too, which is valuable when building slide shows.

How about an Amiga?

[tonsofpcs]

How about an Amiga?

Many network stations in non-major [not NYC/LA/etc] markets still use NewTek's Amiga-based Video Toaster and Toaster/Flyer systems (The Toaster is a 4-input digital switcher/SEG, the Flyer is the NLE addition) for editing and effects. The Toaster comes with Lightwave (it is a bit slow on the Amiga systems, but it is still a great 3D package). You can pick up full Toaster/Flyer systems on ebay for cheap, and they do wonders. Then, you can transfer flyclips (the Flyer's video clip format) to your PC or Mac and do compositing/rotoscoping/insertion work on it using Mirage and/or Lightwave 3D if you need to.

--
The Amiga may well outlive us all.

Re:Capture hardware

[dghcasp]

[...] but they don't bring is video that's useful for editing (mpeg2 - it's not a great editable format for nearly any platform, let alone linux

Actually, MPEG-2 video works fine for editing, as long as you configure it to capture for editing: Set it to use I-frames only (no B or P frames.) It's much smaller than any reasonable editable AVI format (3 Gb/hr instead of ~ 40 Gb/hr) and most capture cards will let you configure that way (although it's usually really buried deep.)