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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!"

5 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
    1. Re:Get a Mac instead. by swillden · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
    2. Re:Get a Mac instead. by Dragonmaster+Lou · · Score: 4, Informative
      • 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.

  2. Capture hardware by ip_vjl · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:cinepaint by Quarters · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.