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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!"
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!"
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
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.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
...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.
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.
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.
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.
Video Production Support