DV editing with mandrake
 

Hi,

My wife and I are thinking (trying) to set up a small company putting miniDV footage onto DVD, mainly geared towards motorsport footage - in-car and spectator stuff.

We are using a combination of GNU/Linux and Windows, but plan to do everything on GNU/Linux eventually.

We are using Kino to capture the footage via firewire and doing basic editing. I'm making title sequences in Blender with YAFRay . I'm using Adobe Illustrator to make the text pages, but would be interested in a GNU/Linux equivalent.

At the moment I'm using a Windows app to burn the SVCD/DVDs but have started playing with K3b , and have pages and pages of tutes on making DVDs (plus menus) with GNU/Linux.

Our first product was a 11 minute SVCD of the footage I took of the local round of the Australian Rally Championship (Rally of Melbourne). I've sold 4 copies so far (!!), but it's showing at the local rally shop, so hope to have a few more orders coming in soon.

I have also been asked to prepare a DVD package from a friend's in-car footage of the same rally which he wants to give copies to his service crew and friends (this is when you find 50 gigs free on the hda harddisk doesn't go very far, and you don't bother deleting 250 meg of temp stuff as its not very much !!).

There are a number of sophisticated DV editing apps on Windows, but the impression I get is that they are either too wizardy based or they drown the footage in a kaleidoscope of transitions or effects! I don't have XP so cant use (or afford) the fancy ones like adobe premiere.

I've looked at cinelerra, but got put off by one tute page which indicated that using rendering effects reduced the quality of the footage. Can anyone confirm/refute this?

Anyway, As I'm starting out I very happy using GNU/Linux to do the editing and will soon (hopefully) not have to use the windows apps at all.

Cheers

Stephen
Still looking for a business name!!

System:
2.4 GHz Celeron 4
768 Meg RAM
hda 80 Gig Windows partition
hdb 30 Gig GNU/Linux partition
hdc LiteOn 1633s Dual layer DVD burner
hdd LiteOn CD burner

OS
Windows 98SE
Mandrake 10