Building The Ultimate Video Editing Suite

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)."

Re:VirtualDub like program for linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. It's called Avidemux. Get it here:

http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/

What's it worth to you?

[MalachiConstant]

I''m the editor in a small (3 people total) production company. I think you need to look at how much aggravation you're willing to put up with and how "Professional" you want to be. Are you okay with telling your clients "we can't do that" if they ask for some particualr effect or style the OS software can't do? Are you willing to spend the time and effort an OS solution is going to take?

I think you may be overestimating the need for massive hard drives at the expense of ease-of-use, hardware availability and cost. We use a single 120 gig hard drive for all our editing. We edit an hour-long show each week as well as commercials, some corporate videos and a twice-a-year dance show that runs at about 5 hours of footage without having too many space problems. A second 120 gig drive would be more than enough. The video is compressed when captured to about 1 gig every 5 minutes, but it looks so good the viewers won't notice it.

The two main expenses for us are the BetaSP deck (about $10,000) and the computer itself (about $5000 with capture card). Final Cut Pro is $1000, but you may be able to buy an older version for less. Version 2 is fine, version 3 adds some better titling software, and version 4 has lots of bells and whistles you may not need.

If you're shooting on MiniDV you can cut about $10000 off the cost right there. MiniDV decks are cheap and you can capture over firewire so you don't even need an expensive capture card. You can even use iMovie if all you need are basic transitions and titling, but I think you can only use one video track (plus titling) and two audio tracks.

For editing graphics we use The GIMP until we can afford photoshop, but all titling is done in FCP.

Basically if you're going to be making money at this the up-front costs are well worth it. Especially on something as complex as video-editing software I'm happy to pay for a solution that "just works" instead of having to worry about computer problems when I'm working.

Compare it to 3D modeling. If you're going to spend 40 hours a week doing paid work would you rather use Blender for free and accept the limitations it has, or pay for Maya or 3DS Max and get your work done?

When most of the cost is the hardware (camera, computer, VTR), it may be worth it to pay the $1000 for software that will do what you want with minimal fuss.