linuxvideography.com

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Posted on March 31st, 2008 by joey. Filed in Uncategorized.
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A nascent resource on linux videography has appeared at linuxvideography.com. They’ve got forums too :)

Open letter to MainConcept at Mad Penguin

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Posted on August 24th, 2007 by joey. Filed in news.
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Matt Hartley at Mad Penguin writes:

This is an open letter to the creators of MainActor. MainConcept, I fully understand your need to better focus your efforts on your encoder business. But correct me if I ‘m wrong, is MainActor not the perfect vehicle for moving the MPEG encoder?

I would agree that supporting the application, MainActor, is likely more than you wish to support right now. But instead of writing it off, why not simply open source the code for this application, including its existing Deb and RPM packages, while using it to sell your Encoder products? Here, let me break this down for you.

MainActor + A Liberal Open Source License = Easy Distribution for Your Core Business Model.

Read the full story here.

An important consideration for MainConcept that I think Mr. Hartley overlooks is the amount of work it will take on their part to ensure that any source code they release does not include proprietary technology. What if they accidentally include code they wished to keep proprietary? Auditing the code would take some work. Further, MainActor was created by a team of people who in all likelihood feel a sense of pride in their work. Like giving away the family dog because little Billy’s allergic, they are not going to just hand it over to anyone. They’ll want to find a good home. What are the guarantees that if they do release the code, it won’t just languish with no developers attending to it? At least if they keep it, they can retain control.

Second Public Talk

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Posted on August 23rd, 2007 by joey. Filed in news.
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After a good run at the August mini-meeting of the Triangle Linux User’s Group (TriLUG), I will be doing another talk on video production with Linux tools for their regular monthly meeting on September 13th, 7:00 PM at RedHat’s headquarters on the scenic Centennial Campus in Raleigh.

The talk will be an expansion and refinement of the previous iteration. I’ll cover the basic linux tools available and describe their capabilities and usage. The most notable improvements will be to the Kino tutorial. This time we’ll see video capture, creating sequences of images and video clips, adding titles, and exporting for DVD and the web.

Petition to release MainActor Source Code

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Posted on August 22nd, 2007 by joey. Filed in editing, news.
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MainActor, a commercial product for video editing on a Linux platform, has been discontinued. This means that the source code could potentially be made open-source. A petition is circulating to encourage MainConcept to consider releasing at least some of their code. The author of the petition writes about it on his blog. In addition to signing the petition, you can lend a hand by digging it.

A similar initiative was started by the Blender Foundation many years ago, and they successfully bought the source code for something like a hundred thousand euros, and then released it as open source.

MainActor has always been a well reviewed product, although the price tag was generally too much for many people. A source code release from MainConcept would come in the form of a partial code base, with their proprietary encoding technology removed. An effort would need to be made to replace those parts with something like libavcodec. If Blender is a good model, the process will be slow, but the potential for an active community is vast. Today Blender has one of the largest, most enthusiastic, and fastest growing user communities out there.

Linux.com editorial on Linux Video

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Posted on August 12th, 2007 by joey. Filed in editing, news.
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Once or twice a year I look at FOSS video editing tools to see if they’re ready for everyday use by advanced amateur and low-end professional video makers, which is where I classify myself in the video production hierarchy. There have been several notable improvements recently that have moved FOSS video editing tools a little closer to practicality, but FOSS desktop video editing still has a long way to go before it can be taken seriously by people who need to turn out high-quality video productions on tight deadlines.

The above is from “Open source video editing still has a long way to go”, a feature article by Roblimo over at Linux.com.

Public Talk

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Posted on August 2nd, 2007 by joey. Filed in news.
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On August 15, 2007, at 6:00 PM, I’ll be giving a talk on video production in a Linux environment for the Carolina Open Source Initiative and the Triangle Linux Users Group. The talk will be in 208 Manning Hall on UNC campus. The majority of the talk will be in the form of a Kino tutorial, although I plan to give an overview of the other major tools.

ArtistX Live DVD

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Posted on May 15th, 2007 by joey. Filed in live distros.
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Unlike many live distributions that constrain themselves to fitting on a single CD, ArtistX comes on DVD and weighs in at about two gigabytes. As a result, they can pack in a lot of stuff. ArtistX boasts an impressive set of available softwares (the list below is taken from their documentation). Incidentally, the distribution’s website also provides a wonderful list of free media resources.

I was able to boot into the distribution on my MacBook Pro (the PCs I have access to can’t boot from DVD media). The distribution really does have everything and the kitchen sink. It was unable to recognize the built-in hard drive, which I believe is a result of some Macintosh weirdness. It readily recognized my HFS formatted USB external drive and my FAT formatted USB flash drive. My only real disappointment was that Kino was unable to do IEEE 1394 (FireWire) capture, possibly because of some Macintosh weirdness.

The bundled software includes, but is not limited to:

  • 2D Graphic Software:
    • Gimp (experimental version)
    • Inkscape
    • Nip2
    • Krita
    • Cinepaint
    • Synfig
    • Rawstudio
    • Skencil
    • Hugin
  • 3D Graphic softwares:
    • Blender
    • Wings3D
    • Kpovmodeler + Povray 3.6
    • K3D
  • Video softwares:
    • Cinelerra
    • Kino
    • Openmovieeditor
    • Kdenlive
    • Pitivi
    • Avidemux
    • Devede
  • Video and Music players:
    • Mplayer
    • Helix Player
    • Videolan
    • Xine
    • Kaffeine
    • Kmplayer
    • LastFM
  • Music software:
    • PD and externals
    • Rosegarden
    • Ardour
    • TerminatorX
    • Cecilia/Csound
    • Gnusound
    • Mixxx

Linux DVD Authoring

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Posted on March 27th, 2007 by joey. Filed in distribution.
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Linux’s primary DVD authoring capabilities are provided by the dvdauthor utility, which you can get from most binary package repositories. Most of what dvdauthor does is to create a proper file system structure out of mpeg2 files that you provide. This makes it a bit clunky to use manually. However, since it provides arbitrary control over the menuing system, and even allows you to do a bit of scripting, it is an incredibly versatile tool—much more so than iDVD, for instance. As always, the down side of flexibility is the difficulty of use.

Fortunately, there are a number of projects that build on top of dvdauthor, making DVD authoring more accessible for us, the unwashed masses. DVDStyler is under current development and certainly will allow you to create a basic DVD using your own images and fonts. RPMs of DVDStyler are available from rpm.livna.org. ‘Q’ DVD-Author is another project, for which binaries are more difficult to come by, that provides a fuller set of capabilities.

Audio Filter and Transition Support

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Posted on March 7th, 2007 by joey. Filed in editing, cinelerra, kino, ffmpeg, mencoder.
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The following table summarizes audio filters that are supported by the various packages. There is a complete listings of plugins available for cinelerra. The AUDIO FILTERS section of the mencoder manual describes each of the audio filters operation in more detail.

Effect Cinelerra Kino ffmpeg mencoder
Compressor
EQ
Reverb
Delay
LADSPA
Crossfade

These filters and transitions cover much of what you need to produce good clean audio. The support for LADSPA plugins in mencoder gives mencoder the broadest range in effects since there are so many existing LADSPA plugins available (including compressors), but at the same time it is limited in that it does not support automation, i.e. varying plugin parameters over time. Cinelerra has full automation support for nearly all parameters via auto keyframing. Kino’s audo effects are mostly geared toward compensating for its lack of multitrack audio—it’s current “audio filter” list includes: dub, fade in, fade out, gain, mix, and silence; all typical mixing functions, not what one might initially think of as effects.

Video Filter Support

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Posted on March 5th, 2007 by joey. Filed in editing, cinelerra, kino, ffmpeg, mencoder.
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The following table summarizes the video filters supported by various video editing packages.

Filter Cinelerra Kino ffmpeg mencoder
scale
flip/mirror
rotate 1
crop 2 2
2:3 pulldown
2:3 pullup
hue/saturation
white balance 3 3
brightness/contrast
gamma
blur
sharpen
chroma key
difference key

In addition, Kino has a very nice “soft focus” filter that does a convincing job of simulating the Hollywood starlet “I’m ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille,” sort of look. Both Kino and Cinelerra also boast a selection of the usual fare of cheesy filters, like the kaleidoscope, sepia tone, oil painting, or charcoal sketch effects.

Note:

  1. mencoder only supports rotation by 90 degree increments.
  2. Both Cinelerra and Kino support panning and zooming, which can be used to achieve a crop-like effect. Kino, however, doesn’t have a lot of flexibility in specifying the output format; instead it assumes that the output will be either NTSC or PAL, either 4:3 or 16:9, and DV, mpeg for DVD/VCD, or one of a few web distribution presets.
  3. Cinelerra only offers a “color balance” tool, that allows colors to be shifted toward red, green, blue, or cyan, magenta, yellow. Technically, you can set a white-balance with that, but it’s a pain in the but. Kino, offers a much more useful white balance filter that lets you sample your white point from the frame, or set a color temperature in degrees Kelvin.