Well I have written about free video editors for Linux a number of
times, this is the third article in this series. It’s taken me a
few years to get to this point of discovering good quality software
for Linux because there are so many open source projects that people
have started and then abandoned, and finding the really good ones,
which are mostly being produced by professional companies, has taken
a while.
Here is an article
from Linx Magazine and it lists a few options
For my setup, AppPC
which has potentially sufficient storage and RAM, will be the system
that long term is set up for tasks like this. Obviously it doubles at
the moment with Gimp editing mosaic projects for NZ Rail Maps but
this won’t be happening forever and so, it is natural to look at
using its ample resources for video production, and possibly in the
future, audio editing as well.
There are some
really good high quality video editors out there. Last time I wrote I
was taking a look at Blender and Handbrake among others. I am
currently working on a tricky project that has involved bringing
together a number of clips shot in two different formats. About half
of it was shot at 640x480 in MOV format and the other half in
1920x1080 MP4. The problem is melding together these two resources
that are greatly different in size as well as aspect ratio. After a
lot of mucking around I finally used Avidemux with two video filters
to put black borders onto the original video clip (changing its
resolution to 1920x1440, which gives it a 4:3 aspect ratio) and then
scale this to 640x480. A little trick to remember is that video
filters in Avidemux will not work unless you choose a different video
mode other than “Copy”, in other words you tell it to re-render
the video output. This also gives you a chance to downsample the
video at the same time. The combination of these settings brought the
final clip down from 14 GB to 0.5 GB in size. Handbrake was useful
for converting the MOV clips into M4V but I could not work out how to
re-aspect the HD clips in it so that ended up being what I used
Avidemux for, as well as joining a number of separate clips into one.
So I now have two
separate clips each about 80 minutes in length and the same format,
to put together in a video editor, along with a few still shots. I am
trying out several different software applications to see what is
going to work best. Here is what I have attempted so far:
- Blender is FOSS and has a lot of support for it, but not as a video editor. This function is not well supported in the wider community. When I tried using it, I found it was clunky and not very intuitive. This led me to look into other alternatives.
- Da Vinci Resolve is a free version of a commercial product. It is complex to install, and wouldn’t work out of the box for me. Because of this I haven’t looked further into it.
- Lightworks is also a free version of a commercial product. It looks promising, but so far I haven’t tried installing it.
- Cinelerra is another of the few that are FOSS. There are two versions, HV which is the full deal, and GG. If you want to use HV, you have to compile it yourself from the source code. GG is a whole lot easier, with native packages in a repository that install directly onto Debian (and a few other distros). So I have installed it, for testing, and will see how it goes. The software looks reasonably good but the interface so far is confusing, it has also crashed once.
- Kdenlive is another fully FOSS package. It is officially part of KDE, and is produced as an AppImage. This makes installation very simple and straightforward as it involves just a download. So I have this installed as well, for testing alongside Cinelerra-GG. At the moment Kdenlive is the one I am trying the most.
So we will see how
things go with the last two packages with this project and which
option is the easiest to use and gives the best results. I hope to
have this project finished by the end of this week.
