Sunday, September 27, 2009

Video editing




One of the key things people have approached me about is "Will Sony Vegas work?" Of course it always ends up being a pirated version and so the answer has always been no. (Winners don't Warez) I've recently gotten started up again in the wonderful world of video and definitely can say for certain there is much being done to improve free video editing in the Linux world. Kdenlive, even though has not hit 1.0 yet [currently 0.7.4], is amazingly powerful. It contains all the features and effects that you can expect in a commercially available piece of video software, except it isn't heavy on the what I call shinyness of the GUI itself (A MAJOR reason that high end video software completely sucks on a PC, like how Pinnacle Studio 10. Really shiny, but extremely slow and lacking in features. Since it was written for KDE, it's shiny already =D) Instead it brings together the best in everything having to do with the audio and video subsystems of Linux. Unlike an older, less maintained video editor I use called Cinelerra, there is one window for the entire program, and the live preview is quick and responsive despite how many effects are piled on. It works great with Pulse Audio so no sound problems here. Another great feature is in the way that it renders the final product. Most commercial applications use their own rendering engine, and therefore produces only a limited number of output codecs and efficiency varies from program to program. Kdenlive uses ffmpeg, a powerful command line rendering system that can be scripted. Since it can be scripted it is extremely easy to render a long video across multiple machines - your very own render farm. Got two computers? Render it in half the time. On a side note, I've been looking into a way to simplify a renderfarm system to be submitted to the development staff.