I'm back...

After giving Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon a good drive I'm impressed by the OS but not at all of what's out there in terms of video production tools. KDEnlive was the NLE that impressed me most and to be quite fair - if it would have been on the Mac or a WinPC it wouldn't have impressed me at all. Other softwares like PiTiVi or Kino is quite useless. Cinelerra must be the most chrash prone piece of software I've ever tested. I suspect "breathing to close to the screen" is on the list of crash descriptions.

Most of the video projects out there have been in alfa for many years. The totally useless Jashaka package is currently in version 2. But it's still alfa. Maybe the team should rethink the version numbering.

Cinepaint is useful but for very small things like retouching frames. Nothing you can't do as easy or easier in a package like After Effects.

Right now Linux have two commercial packages that makes the latform interesting and that's Fusion and Nuke. None of those are Non Linear Editors. Right now simple and free softwares like Windows MovieMaker and Apples iMovie looks like high end finishing suites compared to whats available on the Linux platform.

I fear this blog isn't going to be as active as I had hoped.

Blogging at a temporary stand still

I've decided to upgrade my Linux box - an older 32 bit system - and I'm replacing it with a quad core Intel system in the beginning of next week. I will be back soon.

Ask MainConcept to release MainActor

MainConcept has canceled the development of their commercial non linear editor called MainActor. It was available for Windows and Linux. I think we can conclude that sales wasn't that good. Ask them nicely to donate the source to the Open Source community. They have nothing to loose from releasing it. It may even help sales of their excellent codecs.

Sign the petition online.

My Ubuntu Studio experience

I'm installing Ubuntu Studio on an Intel box with a Nvidia 7300GT card and a 1920x1200 monitor. I gave up this weekend trying to install it on my Matrox Pahrelia AVPe card. Matrox and Linux does not seem to befriend each other. At least not from my perspective.

Ubuntu Studio is booting correctly but I have freezes that seems to be Nvidia related. I'll update to all the latest drivers and let you know how it goes.

LinuxMovies Wiki

Check it out. Run by Drew Perttula in Berkeley.

Installing Cinelerra on Ubuntu

Cinelerra is not in Ubuntus repositories. Here's how you install it:

How to install Ubuntu Studio

A very nice guide on how to install Ubuntu Studio can be found @ howtoforge.com.

Tip for developers

I've been looking at a few of the NLE's available out there for Linux and I feel the need to give some advice: Rough trimming is a bad thing to have to perform on the timeline. It's extremely clunky to not have the option to mark head and tail before laying an edit down on the timeline. Trimming is fine to do on the timeline but that should only involve seconds and frames. If you've logged a thirty second shot and want to use 12 frames from it it's insane to drag it to the timeline to trim off 29,5 seconds.

Cinelerra vs. MainActor

An interesting comparison between Cinelerra and MainActor. MainActor was a commercial package and looked interesting until MainConcept canceled the product. MainConcept have become big by writing Mpeg2 and DV25 codecs hosted by apps like Premiere Pro.

What on earth has Codecs got to do with editing?

Why o why do we use Codecs for video editing? Codecs are - in my experience - the single most frustrating work flow distractor to any video operation. Why not image sequences all the way? Image sequences are a lot easier to work with in compositing - you don't even need a compositor to adjust single frames. I've wrestled with som many commercial codecs (Cineform, Apple QT Pro, Sheer and a multitude of in-between codes) and I've always found image sequences to be the only thing that always work "right out of the box". Most high-end software relies heavily on image sequences. Starting with the earliest SGI boxes. The reason is simple. You can trust them.

Codecs are great for distribution. Not post.

Linux Journal on video production software

Here's an interesting article on the state of things concerning video apps on the Linux plattform. I wouldn't go so far as calling it "The State of the Art" as the article does but here it goes.

The article lists what would mostly be described as hobbyist software. Since it is now exactly ten years since MacOS and Windows got built in support för IEEE1934 video devices and those plattforms are now moving on to more "state of the art" ways of getting digital video onto harddrives it kind of amazes me that Linux are still actually wrestling with it. Right now HDMI is replacing FireWire on a lot of devices. The one thing developers should really look a right now are things like XML. It's getting less and less important to be able to run DV25 over FireWire with new things like on board memory stick recording like Panasonics P2 and Mpeg-2 capturing straight to micro drives. IEEE1394 is not going to stick with the prosumer market for much longer and the high end market have never - and never will - touch DV25 och HDV over FireWire.

Ubuntu Studio

It seemed to be on a rocky road until the final release of this Ubuntu based distro. I've downloaded it and today I'm going to install it to se what's in it. You can check it out - or try it out - on ubuntustudio.org.

Right now the content seems a bit audio centric. That's great - but the Linux community needs a simple and professional NLE right now. No bling-bling. No page turns, spinning boxes or crazy water ripple effects. Just hard core simple ground and pound real time editing. In and out. Cuts. That can be exported as XML or even EDL. With an offline proxy.