Free Movie Compositing Software?

General Forums Off-topic Chat
#1

Hey guys,

I am going to be making dance videos soon.
I just got my kodak camera yesterday and i am pretty excited about it.
Today i took some test videos, just to see the quality. It was pretty good.
I connected it to my compute and soon found out that the videos are storved in .mov/quicktime format.

Are there any free movie compositing software which accept .mov.
I am looking for a good program which also allows tracks, transitions and all that stuff that movie maker has.
I have movie maker but i don’t like it at all.

Thanks in advance.

#2

Ever tried the Video-Editor inside Blender?
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Video_Sequence_Editing
Would be my first choice…
Free Video converters are spread thruout the internet, (Any Video for example)
Hope you like it.

#3

Eh, i dont think i would be too good using the composer in blender lol…

#4

well… .mov is just a container format. Check to see what the actual video codec is. There are programs out there that will analyze the stream and tell you if it’s h264, mp4 or whatever it is they’re using. One of those two mentioned is most likely, tho it’s rather an odd format for a camera, i have to admit. every camera i’ve ever used has either been mp2 or some variant of AVI. One was Mjpeg…

Anyway, you could always convert from that to some other format before you did the editing, tho it would probably be best to get something that accepted them as-is. You could try setting up a tool like AVIsynth to frameserve it. That will likely add a teeny bit of overhead to your video editing RAM and CPU usage, but it would be the best way i can think of for a couple reasons:

  1. You will be able to use any video editing software you’d like and
  2. You’ll be able to encode the resulting video to any format you’d like without the loss of quality you’d get otherwise from converting beforehand.

That said, finding something that will frameserve a .mov file might prove to be an interesting challenge… I dunno if FFmpeg will read your codec or not, but if it does then AVIsynth will most likely be able to frameserve it.

#5

pictures trak wrecka in Richard Simmons outfit

throws up

As it’s been noted many times, the NLE business is very competitive and there haven’t been any free solutions that come close to the commercial products in terms of ease of use and reliability. I’d suggest buying an old copy of Premiere:

^ someone said it doesn’t support AMD so if you have one, you might want to check to see if it’s going to be compatible.

#6

uhh thanks guys.

osxrules: lol, ewwww. I am not interested in buying.

Squiggly_P: eh, i could do that but i need something more efficient.

#7

I think the program you’re looking for is Jahshaka. It’s a great program; I use it all the time.

EDIT: Though I must warn you that development seems to be dead/slowed down greatly.

#8

jahshaka is great once u figure it out, btw i want to see these dance videos ur talking about

#9

um try wax

#10

I’ve composited commercials and video using Blender, both the VSE (I rewrote that wiki section to make it understandable) and nodes (use the Image input node to stream in each video clip, and then a time node feeding the mix node to switch between the two. Again, see wiki for examples on doing cuts with the nodes (under Mix node).

#11

Good call man, i am looking into it.

lol ill open a thread up and add my video links there.

i’ve seen that already and it doesn’t look too appealing.

Hey PapaSmurf,
i don’t know if it’s efficent at all for videos.
Yet again i have never used the compositor. But i’ll read your wiki and decide the extent i can use blender to.

Thanks guys. If you have anymore please do comment.

#12

Just downloaded and tried to fire jahshka up. it keeps on crashing even before it opens.
I uninstalled and re-installed it… no change.

#13

That’s really unfortunate… What OS are you using? Video card?

#14

Perhaps LiVES?

Edit: Just read it’s only on Linux… So if you’re using Windows you’re out of luck…

#15

You could always download a dynebolic live cd and nest it on your hard drive so that you could take out the cd and make use of the video apps on it - I believe it has cinelerra and some other apps for video djing… just a suggestion, since my opinion is that you just need to get familiar with Blender’s VSE - I use it at work for putting together demonstration animations sometimes, and it works very well. You just have to research PapaSmurf’s workflow that he put up, because rendering to frames and then editing seems to work best.

Good luck, the only other suggestion would be to download the free trial of Sony Vegas and try that…I bought a copy at work and I like it, but I prefer Blender for the compositing and integrated 3d elements :slight_smile:

#16

im on windows.

aww mayn. I was happy for a split sec. Thanks anyways.

nah won’t work. I’m on windows so i dont think it’d work.

Mayb ill try the trial version of sony vegas.

#17

LiVES can be used from the dyne:bolic LiveCD - it’s the only way to use it from Windows (or if you really want to, an Xbox). The only downside is the new versions aren’t on the CD yet, so it’s out-of-date.

I think I’m going to try out Jahshaka, it looks pretty cool. My LiVES on my Fedora install…

#18

Seriously - Give Blender’s VE a shot!.

I’ve played with other free tools -Wax, Jashaka etc, and keep coming back to Blender for compositing.

The only down side is (on Windows) that you still need to mix the audio and video separately, apart from that, what do you need that it don’t got?

#19

Wow, consider yourself lucky. Jahshaka looks promising the first five minutes, then the promise dies as if it had come from a politician. It’s buggy, its functions are only partially implemented, it’s unnecessarily complicated and cryptic, the commands are hidden, it’s slow as heck… let’s just say that, if you’re masochistic, you just missed a lot of fun.

It’s unlikely, as you’re doing a music video, but if you can do without elaborated transitions, Blender’s sequencer would do (in the other hand, you have lots of options for 3D transitions.) It’s a rock of stability when compared to Jahshaka, and it’s pretty easy to handle.

#20

The only down side is (on Windows) that you still need to mix the audio and video separately, apart from that, what do you need that it don’t got?

On my end, I have ffmpeg integration on windows, and I can mix the audio and video out that way - it might not be total audio control, but it isn’t bad. I thought that Mac was the platform still waiting for ffmpeg integration?