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

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.