Video Editing Stuff

(...if you don't speak penguin or overgrown-cat (OSX), then go read elsewhere)

This is the beginning of a section on video. I learned some things I know I'll forget, so here we go:

There are notes on:

• Using my HD Camcorder on Linux
• Cheat notes on Cinelerra
• Audio under Linux

Evaluating software on the Mac, I was a bit disappointed to see that Avid has withdrawn the once-available free demo version of their software. A trial version is about the only way they'll ever see me touch a piece of software that'd cost $1,695 if I were to get serious about it. No, I think I'll be content with sampling what I've got available to me. Ultimately, all I'm trying to do is get a bit of breadth to my experience. At present, the only things I've ever used are Cinelerra, Kino, and a plethora of command line utilities. As far as being a video editor type guy, my tools and technique are state of the art for the late-80s or so, given that back then they were manually writing numbers in text files to create the shapes of the faces in The Abyss.

• Norkross Movie is actually pretty decent. It takes a bit of getting used to, but once you've got your head wrapped around the way that it does effects, it's pretty intuitive and being able to adjust the brightness of various clips with a slider and such was quite nice. It's got a lot of the same concepts as Cinelerra, but seems to have fewerr windows and thus less complication. I'm still not sure that I would sit a newbie in front of it and expect them to crank out something, but it does seem more intuitive. Of course, it's not freeware and you will end up spending money on it if you want to export something without watermarks.
• And now, on to MediaEdit 3. It's got a fairly hefty hard drive install, weighing in at 22MB. It's also fairly intuitive, but Norkross felt a little better to me for all of the 10 minutes I tinkered with it. The video adjustments were a little easier to find, although it seems that ME3 isn't oriented towards realtime. Once I adjusted brightness, for instance, I had to wait for it to re-render a brighter version of my clip. I imagine that stacking several effects together could get nasty. I also managed to crash it by moving around a still picture a lot, too.

-- SeanNewton - 29 Jul 2008