I know absolutely nothing about video editing, and I really don't care to know very much, but I have a couple issues.

1. I have several short clips that I would like to trim at the beginning and ending, and fade-in, fade-out. Could that be as easy on video as it is with sound files using Audacity?

2. This one may be much more complicated. I have a music video in which the sound and video are not synched. The artists lips move before the sound. Is that fixable?

What have you tried so far ? Given how much you've posted here, you must know of kino. Not to your taste ? There is mainactor but that's beyond simple editing and carries a serious price tag. Cinelerra is in the same category although is free.

None of my posts, or any posts I can remember reading, related to video editing. No I didn't know of kino, but I'll check it out. I'm sure I want the simplest possible editing program.

OK. I installed kino, read the introduction and skimmed thru the rest of the Help file ... Based on what I saw there, I also installed mjpegtools and mencoder.

Problem: It won't load either .mpg or .avi files. It just sits there saying, "Importing file ... This may take a while" for a loooong time, then suddenly it says, "File Load Failed."

Looking thru the help files, I didn't see any thing about a way to fade-in / fade-out, but hopefully I can find a place on the video where that happens. It also didn't say anything about syncronizing the audio, but it did say it could save a file with the audio track separate from the video. That may be something I can work with.

Anybody have a clue about getting the files to load?

I had a similar problem with .avi that wouldnt load. I found out it was because some of them were incorrectly made with compressed (mp3) soundtracks.

I have tried about a half dozen different clips ... Same result ... Apparently kino would rather work with a DV file, whatever that is. Should I use some utility to convert the mpg/avi files before trying to load them? Which utility?

I have tried this on both the 64-bit and 32-bit OSes ... no difference. Could it be related to my video card? ... ATI using xorg drivers.

I wouldn't have thought thet your video card was to blame.

I know mplayer/mencoder has the ability to convert video/audio formats but I'm not very clued in how to do it.

Have a look here:

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/index.html
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Mencode...oduction_Guide

DV files is what you get from DV camcorders. Kino captures it from the a raw 1394 connection to the camcorder. Looks like it's not your use case.

If working with mpeg files, then avidemux might be what you are looking for. It also works with AVI files. But it doesn't seem to like divx but it's opening AVI from my former canon digital cam, mpeg from my phone and so on.

There is also LiVES that's being steadily developped.

Trouble with all these is that they all have multiple codecs/utilities dependencies. But with Marillat repositories, that shouldn't be a problem.

Ah yes! Avidemux works much better.