A Linux Video Production Experience
Every winter I go to visit my family and I shoot about two MiniDV tapes worth of fun family footage. Before my switch to Kubuntu, I edited my family holiday holiday movies in iMovie, which is all right for simple stuff, but it’s really easy to hit iMovie’s limits really fast. I’m too cheap to buy Final Cut Pro, and Final Cut Express is too limiting for what I like to do with video, so I decided to make the move to using Cinelerra and a whole host of support applications on Linux to do my video production. After having done four videos in Cinelerra, I’m ready to share some of my solutions to problems that I encountered while working with video in Linux.
The experience will be broken down into six sections, including this one. Note that I’m skipping a bunch of steps in the process, like most of the the actual nitty-gritty editing, since I’m not really motivated to do a post about them. If you want to see one, though, leave a comment below. 
The topics I’m going to cover are:
- Capturing & deinterlacing DV footage from a consumer-level videocamera in mencoder
- Color correction in Cinelerra
- Processing a bunch of still photos in ImageMagick for import into Cinelerra
- Rendering test videos & the final video/audio for DVD encoding
- Encoding the final video/audio to high quality DVD-ready MPEG-2 using Avidemux
And very briefly, here’s what you need to do if you want to follow along:
- Build Cinelerra CV from scratch. Trust me, the latest SVN builds are light years better than the point releases in terms of stability and speed.
- Make sure you have the newest versions of Kino, mencoder, ImageMagick, and Avidemux that you can get, plus whatever DVD authoring environment you like (I generally use KMediaFactory ’cause super-customized DVD menus aren’t my biggest priority).
- Go through all of the recommended performance settings for Cinelerra and enable what you can.
- Configure the audio offset for your sound card.
- Use Background Rendering when you can.
After setting all of this up, I was able to comfortably edit a 40 minute SD (720×480 anamorphic) production on a 1.5GHz Althon XP machine with 1.75GB of RAM and ~60GB of free space for project files.
I’ll be posting a new article every week for the next five weeks. Come back and check them out, and let me know what you think! And remember, I’m not a video professional (yet) and my only deep involvement with an open source project right now is with Inkscape, so I’m just telling this from the perspective of a technically-inclined user who likes open source and wants his videos to look really good.
(Note: throughout the series, you’ll see a cute little Welsh corgi in most of the still and video examples. Her name is Tasha, and she’s a new addition to our family. )
All articles in the Linux Video Production Experience tutorial series are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.