open source video-editing

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21

I had these set at their default values. What would you recommend?

Does a site exist out there on the web where people share their collective knowledge specific to editing video in blender?

thanks

22

I don’t make usage of the sequencer really so no idea :), I do know that increasing them will probably solve some of the issues you had though.

LetterRip

23

Have you tried http://www.openshotvideo.com ?
It’s an open source non lineare video editor for Linux and, even if it is not officially “released” , it works…almost :slight_smile:

24

Proxies take care of the slow playback, although I’ve had problems with them working in 2.49; they’re fine in 2.48. You can feed the compositor into the VSE by using the “Add Scene” option. If your mouse is over the preview window, you can use the spacebar to start and stop playback. For rotoscoping, take a look at Cinegobs, it has some good keying functions, including keyframed shapes. (Cinegobs is Windows only, however.) I recommend setting the cache as high as you can. Max is 1024 MB, and that’s what I use.

25

I’ve just tried Kdenlive (http://www.kdenlive.org/) and I must say it’s awesome. Here’s what I was trying to do and what Kdenlive did well:

  • insert 200-images clip at 720x576 px / 25 fps (PNG)
  • insert a few 720x576px stills and play them for 3 seconds each
  • insert an oversized (1280x752px / 15 fps) OGV video (that was shot with recordMyDesktop) and play it at 25 fps
  • insert 2 audio clips and sync them to video

I had performance problem doing all of above in both Blender and Cinelerra, so I couldn’t sync audio at all. Blender was a little bit better than Cinelerra, but I couldn’t find an obvious way of making the oversized clip play at 25 fps or scale it down (I’m sure it can do it, but I just couldn’t find it anywhere). Cinelerra could scale the clip down in a very simple way, but its performance was very poor.

The system is a 32-bit Arch Linux box running on Core2Duo CPU with 2G RAM.

Kdenlive had no performance problem. The interface is much cleander than Cinelerra or Blender albeit Blender folk may prefer its interface. I kinda like the Blender UI, but it is not too intuitive for editing, that’s for sure, so I’ll stick to 3D and animation in Blender and do editing in Kdenlive. Kdenlive also allows me to use SVG files directly, so I don’t need to create intermediate PNG files before compositing.

Now the cons of Kdenlive:

  • documentation is poor or very difficult to find
  • it doesn’t have some of the powertools that Cinelerra has (motion tracking, for example, although it’s on its way)
  • it’s hard-wired to KDE, so it’ll pull kdelibs and other dependencies

All in all, as a relative newbie to the field of video editing, Kdenlive seems to me like the most newbie-friendly editing software.
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