[NBLUG/talk] Editing .avi files - Flip Video Camera

William Tracy afishionado at gmail.com
Sat Aug 18 10:19:39 PDT 2007


On 8/18/07, Dave Sisley <dsisley at sonic.net> wrote:
> Thanks William (...& everybody):
>
> I didn't get to idvid, but I got a decent command-line conersion going with:
>
>     ffmpeg -sameq -i originalFile.AVI outputFile.mpeg

For starters, mpeg isn't a great choice to convert to--it's lossy, so
right there you're decreasing the quality of your video. It's fine for
a final version going onto the net, but not for something you're not
finished editing.

> Now I'd like to edit it.  Of the 3 programs I've been fiddling with,
> cinelerra looks the most promising (the other 2: kino & avidemux).
> However, when I load the file in cinelerra and try to play it, I can
> only hear the audio - I don't see any video.  There's a big, separate
> window that I'm sure is supposed to display the video, but it shows nothing.

What you really want is to get the video in dv format. It's lossless,
and all the major video editing packages read it natively. Usually,
the easy way to do this is to let Kino do it (it uses ffmpeg
internally, and it already knows the magic command line flags to use).
Unfortunately, you already mentioned that isn't working. :-(

If you are familiar with reading Bash, Kino stores the commands in the
following file (at least the Debian/Ubuntu package does):

/usr/share/kino/scripts/import/media.sh

Unfortunately, the dv format is more picky than avi or mpeg; coaxing
ffmpeg to convert into it can be tricky. Give me a minute here, and
I'll see if I can remember how to actually make it work. :-)

BTW, here's William's extremely brief guide to Linux video editing programs:

Kino is extremely easy to learn, and has lower hardware requirements
than the other Linux video editing programs I've seen, so it's the
main one I used on my old computer. Unfortunately, it is buggy, buggy,
buggy (save early, save often)!

Cinelerra is nice, but has fairly high memory requirements, and has a
*very* steep learning curve. I got bored and moved back to Kino. If
you do take the time to learn it, though, it is a professional level
softare package.

Avidemux wants a higher screen resolution than 1024x768 :-( so I
haven't gotten to play with it yet.

-- 
William Tracy
afishionado at gmail.com -- wtracy at calpoly.edu

I'm right now looking for a summer software engineering internship in
northern California! My resume is online here:
http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/People/WilliamTracy



More information about the talk mailing list