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editing HD video: linux vs imovie

On June 18, 2011   /   Apple, Linux, Opinion   /   17 Comments
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tux vs imovie

Yesterday, my kids were making a home movie to send to my mother in law. They’d made up some songs, which I’d recorded and were shooting the video to go with them. I suggested that they should edit the video in iMovie on my macbook pro. I figured that they should be able to cope fine with it – they’ve used macs at school to edit video and together with the “legendary” ease of use and “just works” approach of Apple software, it should be no problem. Sadly, they never got to try. The camera I use is a Canon HG20. It has an inbuilt hard drive and records video in the AVCHD format. This is an HD video format for consumer grade cameras and is used widely in mainstream cameras by the main camera makers. I have the latest version of iMovie ’11, which claims to have support for the AVCHD format. However, apparently, this support is limited and selective. Unfortunately, I have a camera that produces unsupported files. After trying to import the files into iMovie, iMovie simply says there has been an error importing the files, and would I like to make an archive of the files

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KDEnlive 0.8 Released – Best non-linear video editor for Linux

On April 30, 2011   /   KDE, Linux   /   14 Comments
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kdenlive screenshot

For a long time I’ve been a big fan of kdenlive. I’ve written a two articles about it. One is a general overview of video editing on Linux and the other is more specific to kdenlive. For a number of years, video editing on linux – at least at a consumer level – has been patchy at best. This is somewhat ironic given the heavy use of linux in major Hollywood block film production. However, with the advent of kdenlive, things are looking pretty good and with the release of version 0.8, there have been some great features added for the more advanced users, while still retaining a simple and easy to use UI. The new features include: Rotoscoping. This is an advanced technique for tracing over live action to create life like animation; Perspective image placement; Widget layouts. This allows you to quickly switch between different layouts for different workflows. Very handy for more efficient editing; Light Graffiti. Audio Spectrum and Spectrogram. Stop Motion Capture. Tooltips with quick explanations for filters/effects. There are some really useful tools there for advanced video editing and is increasing the compositing features of this editor. In addition, many existing features have been improved

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Ubuntu Makes Another Poor Technology Choice – Battle of the Movie Editors

On May 2, 2010   /   Linux, Opinion   /   31 Comments
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Yet again, with Lucid Lynx, Ubuntu has shunned a much better technology for no good reason other than what appears to be NIH syndrome. Ubuntu 10.04 came out last week, and included a movie editor in the default install for the first time. The movie editor they chose: PiTiVi. Now PiTiVi has been around for a long time, but has progressed very little. It can do very basic video manipulation. It can cut and split files, and move them round on a time line. That’s pretty much it. Furthermore, as far as I’m aware, it currently does not support the most popular HD video format used in cameras today – AVCHD. It lacks any video or audio filters, does not do transitions, nor titling. I know that Ubuntu tries to provide basic tools that will appeal to the average user – hence the replacement of GIMP with F-Spot in the default install, but in my view support for HD video formats, filters and transitions are the bare minimum features anyone looking to do video editing in the current environment would require. Furthermore, these features are provided by kdenlive in an interface which is just as simple as PiTiVi. But under

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