GNU Linux -> Software -> For Video and Multimedia Editing

27.Apr.2015

Update: video series on GNU Linux Video Editing

TESTED! 🙂

and yes: It’s complicated… but it works 🙂

If you just wanna make some slideshows with music go for: http://www.openshot.org/download/

What sets these distros apart from others is that they use different components than those found on traditional desktops. These distros use a real-time or low-latency Linux kernal optimized to handle heavy audio and video work. They also don’t touch PulseAudio, which is fine for desktop but not suitable for audio/video production. Instead of PulseAudio they use JACK. Two of the most reputable distros for this task are KXStudio and AVLinux. These distros are also known for being extremely lightweight, for obvious reasons – they don’t want to consume your resources; they keep the resources free for your production work. To keep system resources free these distros are picky about their desktop environments – while AVLinux uses the light weight LXDE, KXStudio uses an aggressively stripped down version of KDE. https://www.linux.com/news/software/applications/810295-the-top-11-best-linux-distros-for-2015

http://www.blender.org/ Blender

blender for movie editing

“By the time I got to Blender, I was really starting to get disheartened. I’ve looked at Blender in the past but it was a totally different paradigm than anything I had used before professionally. For a start, the keys we all wrong. But, I was back and not about to be defeated. I searched YouTube for something to help, something that wouldn’t take me 365 days to go through the basics.

Here’s a list of a few that I found useful. And, after about 30 mins of watching, I got started.

I imported the video clips that I needed, check. I laid down the first video track, check. I played the clip back in the player/viewer, check. I was begining to get excited. I started cutting my 45 minute clip down to 5 minutes. Blender has markers: awesome! Cutting long clips without markers is an exercise in futility. Avid started the marker trend and it was a godsend. By using markers with the “m” key you can start to map in real-time, while you’re watching, where you want the cuts to happen. And once you’re done watching through, you can skip to each marker and make a cut. You can then non-destructively delete the clips that you just cut. You can then automatically close the gap between each of the cuts so you’re not screwing around trying to line up the ends of each consecutive clip.

Creating transitions was really simple too and reminded me of using Adobe Premiere. There are some “normal” transitions too, ones that you would expect to see on a film or TV drama, rather than just the “fractal swirl-over fade-back bubble” transition that all of the other apps seem to love.

Another nice thing about Blender is that the audio is able to be unlinked from the video. There are many uses for this, and I was happy to see that I could do it so easily. The next thing I tried was titling. You can go the 2D or 3D route. I chose the 3D route as this can give you much more flexibility for reuse. So, I overlayed this over the video perfectly, and then I chose the format and size that I wanted to render out with, and hit the GO button. It rendered out fast and perfectly.

The winner

I have found my new, open source video editor: Blender! It’s not Avid, FCP, or Premiere, but it’s more than that. It’s a true suite of tools that I would say can go head to head with the best of what I’ve used in the VFX industry. And, I’m genuinely surprised!

One more great thing about Blender: it’s fully scriptable in Python. Wow.”

Source & Creditz: https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/495169-dream-studio-the-linux-for-music-movies-and-art

http://www.64studio.com/

64 Studio Ltd. produces bespoke GNU/Linux distributions which are compatible with official Debian and Ubuntu releases. Specialising in multimedia and digital content creation platforms which we develop for our OEM partners, we also offer support, documentation services and consultancy. Our software is already included in several shipping products in the professional audio market, with more to follow. In addition, we offer a free download product which has won critical acclaim for its stability and high performance. Thinking of giving our free distro a try? You can download an installer for version 2.1 (both 64-bit and 32-bit versions). This will install Debian with X.org, the Gnome desktop, Linux kernel 2.6.21 with realtime preemption patches (including a realtime SMP kernel for AMD64 and Intel 64 dual core and multi-processor machines) and a selection of creative applications. These applications cover audio and music, video, 2D and 3D graphics, publishing for the web or print, and the internet and office tools a creative user is likely to need for their daily work. Adding your favourite packages from Debian Etch is as easy as apt-get, or a few clicks in Synaptic. To upgrade from a previous install to the latest release, please see the upgrade page. You can take a look at our open bugs and wishlist tickets on our development site. Please note that these releases are free software, and come with no warranty. However, the software is stable and is in daily use by thousands of creative people around the world. If you would like to send feedback or make a suggestion for improvement, please subscribe to one of our mailing lists or try the forums on this site. For other communication, please have a look at the contacts page. Developers and users who are interested in getting involved with the 64 Studio project are most welcome.

Musix

Musix GNU+Linux is a Live CD and Live DVD Linux distribution based on Knoppix, Kanotix and Debian GNU/Linux. It contains a collection of software for audio production, graphic design, video editing and general purpose apps. Some of the programs included are: Rosegarden and Ardour (audio processor), both for musicians; Inkscape for vectorial design; GIMP for manipulation of images; Cinelerra for video editing and Blender3D for 3D animation.

 

Get Musix HERE

http://www.openshot.org/download/

Simple. Powerful.

OpenShot Video Editor is a free, open-source video editor for Linux licensed under the GPL version 3.0. OpenShot can take your videos, photos, and music files and help you create the film you have always dreamed of. Easily add sub-titles, transitions, and effects, and then export your film to DVD, YouTube, Vimeo, Xbox 360, and many other common formats.

Links:

http://www.junauza.com/2008/08/7-best-linux-distributions-for.html

http://opensource.com/life/15/1/current-state-linux-video-editing

https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/495169-dream-studio-the-linux-for-music-movies-and-art

often ask myself what the current state of video editing is for free and open source software (FOSS). Here are my thoughts.

I’ve spent many years in the visual effects (VFX) industry from the perspective of being either an artist, compositor, video editor, or systems engineer. (I’ve even got film creds on IMDB!) In the past, I had the pleasure of cutting on, training people on, setting up, and supporting Avid Media Composer, the cream of the crop of professional real-time video editing tools for film and TV alike—at least before things like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere became useful enough to professionals.

In the VFX industry these three tools are used extensively among studios for cutting video and film and are both very simple to use for noobs and professionals alike as well as can be pushed very far in the hands of guru artists. The VFX industry has for the most part of the last 30 years been reliant on Mac and PC for video editing, primarily because all of the Linux-based FOSS tools have been less than great. This is a shame because all of the best 3D and 2D tools, other than video, are entrenched in the Linux environment and perform best there. The lack of decent video editing tools on Linux prevents every VFX studio from becoming a Linux-only shop.

That being said, there are some strides being made to bridge this gap, as I discovered over the last few weeks. They are not Hollywood big, production ready strides but they are useful enough for what I need to do which is basically a bunch of build training and demo videos as Senior Systems Engineer for Red Hat’s Systems Engineering EngOps team.

I’ve installed and tested a number of tools before overcoming my fear of learning how to edit video in Blender. (When I first looked at it, the program seemed convoluted.) So, here’s an account of the tools I looked at and what I thought about them. Let me qualify this by letting you know that I’m currently running Fedora 21, KDE, and Gnome (because I can’t decide which to stick with) on a Lenovo T440s with a VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics Controller (so, no accellerated openGL unfortunately). I approached this as I would if I was an impatient artist trying to find THE tool for the job, with no time for messing about for little or no results.

Pitivi

Pitivi was recommended to me, so it was the first app I tried out. It’s written in Python, so I thought maybe I can have fun with scripting this because I have a specific thing I’d like to do with overlaying timecode over the video based on the frame count showing actual passage of time regardless of the cuts made to the clip. (It’s a demo thing.) It looked great and professional-esque, almost Avid/premiere like. So, I brought in a video clip… and CRASH! I opened it again, brought in a clip, no crash, so that’s great. I added another video track… and CRASH! I tried at least 15 more times before giving up on it. And it’s a shame, because it looks like it has potential to be simple to use and not overly garish.

I’ll try again when version 1.0 is released. Normally, I persevere with beta versions because I’ve been involved with beta testing software all of my professional life, but this was frustrating and I wasn’t getting anywhere.

OpenShot

For OpenShot: Open it, check. Bring in video, check. Cut video into timeline, check. Playback video, check. Add a title and hit render, then I waited… and waited… and waited. Then, I checked htop, and nothing happening but I couldn’t cancel out of the render. CRASHH!! Oh no.

So, my take was that maybe this one can do the job if you don’t want titles? It’s free closed source competitor, so it may possibly be more useful? I don’t know, but I moved on.

Lightworks

With Lightworks, I thought: now we’re talking. Lightworks played a very large part in the professional video market about 10 years ago and was used by many PC based studios. It has cut some really cool films along the way and was very expensive then as I recall. So, these days they have released a free version for all platforms. This version gives you all the rudimentary things that you may want, and there’s an RPM or deb download available. It installed without issues, then when I double-clicked the icon, nothing happened. No OpenGL, no video, no worky.

Could someone try this out and tell me what it’s like? Or, if you’re feeling generous, throw me a nifty laptop with at least a Nvidia 870M in it please.

Avidemux

For Avidemux, I installed it and opened it. Are people using this for editing? I looked at this as I’ve seen so many other writeups mention this as a editor which it most definately isn’t. I moved on.

Cinelerra

For Cinelerra, I tried to download it and found the homepage had no download link (at the time). I noted that the team there seems very focused on the Ubuntu user. Then, I downloaded, extracted, and opened it. I brought some video in, hit the garish, big green tick to accept the import, hit play, and found that it didn’t work. Bummer.

KDEnlive

KDEnlive is a relatively new discovery for me. I installed it, opened it, lay down some tracks, and cut with my “industry standard” keyboard shortcuts. All seemed pretty smooth. So, then I overlayed the end of one video over the start of another video track so that I could apply a transition, but I couldn’t find any. The list of transitions was bare. Hmmm, maybe I have to go back and find out why this is.

So, I’ll report back later on this.

Source & Creditz: https://www.linux.com/learn/tutorials/495169-dream-studio-the-linux-for-music-movies-and-art

I use kdenlive for that.
Kdenlive is a fully featured, heavy duty professional quality video editing software, and if you only want to make a slide show with background music, kdenlive can easily handle that for you.
I have used kdenlive for something very similar myself (a slideshow with music), and mine turned out great in the end, but it took me a few practice attempts and a little time to learn some of the basic tricks for using kdenlive.

Something I found great in Ubuntu that I don’t think people can (or should) attempt to do in certain vulnerable operating systems is go download a few YouTubes on any subject we want to learn. That way we can keep winding back and replaying the same videos as many times as needed to ‘get’ all the information. (I use video download helper plugin in firefox).

Here are some links to a few of the how-tos I watched to help me with kdenlive,

Howto: Kdenlive – Amazing Linux Video Editing Software – Nixie Pixel

YouTube – An Intro to Video Editing with Kdenlive Part 1 …

An Intro to Video Editing with Kdenlive Part 2: Creating your …

YouTube – An Intro to Video Editing with Kdenlive Part 3: Using …

YouTube – An Intro to Video Editing with Kdenlive Part 4: Using …

YouTube – An Intro to Video Editing with Kdenlive Part 5 …

There are lots more great kdenlive how-tos out there but those are the ones that helped me get started. It’s easy really, but kdenlive is way more advanced than that non open source program you mentioned, so there are more options there and that can be a little bewildering at first, but probably not if you have some good video how-tos.

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