Building The Ultimate Video Editing Suite 68
PlainBlack writes "Once upon a time, I was the Chief Engineer at a small TV station, but got out of that line of work about the time that people were talking about replacing video tapes with hard drives. Now I'm looking to build myself a professional grade editing suite using only open source tools so that I can dump as much money as possible into the hardware. My question to Slashdot is, what are the best open source tools for such a suite? I'll need both video and audio editing; a bank of wipes, fades, and other effects; a great paint program; and a titler (text overlays)."
Kino, Cinelerra (Score:4, Informative)
The tutorials at http://www.robfisher.net/video/cinelerra1.html
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VirtualDub (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, it is open source.
See also (Score:4, Informative)
VirtualDub like program for linux? (Score:2, Informative)
Very Little Out There (Score:5, Informative)
I've looked into Main Actor (from mainconcept.com) and am considering using it. I've tried Cinelerra and found it frustrating to get up and running. Under KDE, there is KDEnliven, a video editor in an early stage of development (and, IMHO, the one with the most potential in the long run). There's also Jashaka (or Jakasha-- something like that), which I've heard has a good number of features, but is not well supported or backed for future development.
From my point of view, there has to be at least one solid video editor that works with different formats, allows easy out to DV, VHS, and to AVI and MPG files, as well as a full featured DVD authoring program that makes it easy to import different video format files and allows easy GUI editing of the menus and play sequences.
I've only been in the open source world for 2-3 years, and recently looked back to where things where when I started and where they are now. Video editing is still not a priority and not a task I'd expect to do with open source software. Judging from what I've seen in the past few years, though, I'm hoping it'll be there in another 3-4 years.
Jahshaka (Score:2, Informative)
This looked like it could be quite good a little while ago, and they seem to be coming along nicely. May be worth a look
- Gef
Re:Very Little Out There (Score:2, Informative)
Looks like it will take some time until it becomes usable, though.
Me too! (Score:3, Informative)
Me too... except I don't have any money. At all. I've been browsing through: http://www.linuxartist.org/ and trying different things in their Video - Animation [linuxartist.org] section.
Re:VirtualDub (Score:3, Informative)
If all you need to do is trim or process your video (resize, recolor, etc.) virtualdub is great. If you're looking for real editing (combining scenes, doing a multicamera edit) you need something with a timeline, multiple a/v tracks, etc.
Re:Kino, Cinelerra (Score:3, Informative)
Define your terms (Score:4, Informative)
Once you reach a certain budget level, you will be able to do everything you define as 'professional', after that what you are paying for is either speed of operation or storage capacity.
Honestly, with the state ofthe market as it is, saving a thousand dollars on software might buy you 30 minutes a day of increased hardware speed, while not spending that will probably cost you more than 30 minutes a day of software usability losses.
I know this won't be a popular answer on slashdot, but if you are going to be spending a five digit sum on this, you might as well devote a few percent of your raid-array budget to buy some commerical software, either Premiere or Final Cut Pro depending which sode of the mac/pc divide you prefer, and if your budget is much lower, pick up an recent secondhand Mac and get iMovie for free.
Adobe... (Score:3, Informative)
[shameless_plug] Hoodlumz Productions [hoodlumzproductions.com] [/shameless_plug]
Forget open-source tools for now (Score:3, Informative)
I used to be an Avid editor but didn't have the budget or clients to afford one of those on my own. Based on some feedback from friends I decided to go with a a Matrox RT2500 and later upgraded to a Matrox RT.X100 [matrox.com]. The RTX100 is fantastic. It's basically a PCI card with a breakout box that has stereo audio in/out, and component and Y/C in/out. There's also two firewire ports on the back. It uses Adobe Premiere for its editor and installs a plugin which lets Premiere use the RTX100 for realtime effects. Basically anything you find in an online suite you'll find here as a realtime effect. Titling, wipes, ADOs, keying, colour correction, etc.
The RTX100 also comes with DVD burning software called ReelDVD [sonic.com]. I've only used it twice so all I can tell you is that it works and has lots of features, none of which I've yet to really take advantage of.
I pretty much use that on a dedicated machine with Premiere 6.0, Photoshop, After Effects, and Sound Forge. I also use some open-source tools such as VirtualDub [virtualdub.org] and DubMan [sourceforge.net]. I haven't upgraded to Premiere Pro yet as the Matrox drivers are still in beta.
My only suggestion is that if you do get a RTX100, then buy one of the recommended systems to use it in. The Matrox forums are full of people who complain that the RXT100 doesn't work right or at all yet admit they don't have a compatible system. Especially watch out for via chipsets as the RTX100 won't work on those at all.
Re:Adobe... (Score:3, Informative)
As for video, it's a completely different situation. OSS video editing just isn't capable of doing what a professional editor or videographer needs. It won't be up to snuff until there are companies out there who will benefit by having it out there for clients the same as Sun benefits by having OOo as a libre and free solution to not using Office.
Open vs Closed Source (Score:3, Informative)
You can get them to want to create an attractive interface, but they don't have the deep design skills fostered by the commercial groups.
Because of this, it would be very difficult to get something as good and complicated as Final Cut Pro in an open source project.
I would personally recommend a balanced approach.
I think it's an unbeatable compromise, and it's what I run personally.
Even CmdrTaco has a PowerBook. What more can I say?
Hope that helps.
D