Video Composition on Linux
First posted 2006-04-14 00:00:00.000004+00:00
At 2am in the morning the obvious way to avoid doing work would be to go to bed. Instead somehow I seem to have found a more exotic way: trying to get video editing and linux to play nicely together.
Assuming that you want to do things graphically rather than with lots of command line invocations (which have their place, but which I get tired of rather quickly for anything graphical and creative) there are two options: kino and cinelerra. Cinelerra is the far more powerful of the two, supporting overlaying tracks on top of each other with masks and combinations, and lots of layer effects and transformations. However it is also rather difficult to use. For day to day combining of video clips Kino is far more appropriate.
Kino is in the debian main repository but if you want to be able to work with the file formats from typical low end digital cameras you will need mencoder. This isn't in debian main for legal reasons so I suggest you add
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ sid main
to your sources.list and pick up a copy of mplayer and mencoder, the w32codecs and ffmpeg. You may need some other packages, I just installed things at random that looked relevant until it worked. This should be all you need, however unfortunately the versions of Kino and mencoder don't play nicely together, at least with videos from my camera. To fix this I edited /usr/share/kino/scripts/import/media.sh. Find vstrict=-1 and replace it with vstrict=-2.
Now you should be able to run kino and start playing. It should all be fairly straight forward. One thing I didn't notice for a while is the Split Scene option. This is the two arrows pointing away from each other on the toolbar and is enabled in Edit mode when you are part way through a clip. It turns the clip into two clips, split where you want. This gives you lots more power to move around and assemble the bits of video footage you have.
Video composition can be a long and slow process, if you decide to give it a go be aware you may suddenly lose hours of your life without noticing. Most importantly though, have fun. :-)
If you are looking for some stock clips to include in your creations the BBC has some available.