Sorry to be a nuisance, but I'm having trouble with installing avidemux2. Could someone possibly tell me exactly which packages/dependancies I need to install and where I can get suitable versions for my system? I'm using Mandriva 2006 Free.

Thanks very much,
- QS Computing.

Back to nrobison's questions...
Editing video on Linux isn't very good right now.
There are really nice things coming down the pike, but they're not here yet.
(PiTiVi comes to mind)

Avidemux is good for simple cuts/joins.
It's also good for resize, transcoding to another format, and there are some
quality type filters as well.
While not the perfect editor, it is a must have.

I use Lives for video editing. It will do alot of stuff to alot of different
formats of video, but it's really slow and they're just getting started on
multi-track.
I like it because by default, it keeps videos that are in work as a series of
JPG's in /tmp/lives-temp, and you can muck about with them individualy without messing up Lives itself.

But as I said before, your not going to find the things you have with Windows.

If you want to try Cinellera though, I recommend the "Dynebolic" live cd.
It has Cinellera on it, and it will read/write to your hard drive.

http://dynebolic.org/

For qscomputing, at the Avidemux site:

http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/

Go to Docs > English > Install and it will list dependancies
and options.
You can get away without Spidermonkey if you use an older
version like, 2.0.42.

Mandrake packages:
http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/2/simple/2

Mandrake 2006 Avidemux:
http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat....i586.rpm.html

Have fun!

Thank you very much for the dynebolic site. I'll check it out

OK it seems to be working.

Just a problem with mencoder: whenever I encode my footage from Cinelerra into MPEG using mencoder, the footage appears in the top-left quadrant of the screen, with the rest of the screen filled with green. I've tried with Quicktime DV and OGG Theora/Vorbis formats with the same results.

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

My guess is that it is Cinelerra.

As I said, the option "match output size" does not work as good as you'd want. This means that if the size of your input file is small (for instance 320x288) and if you have set Cinelerra to output to a large size (for instance 720x576 via "Settings -> Format -> Custom -> Video") the original movie may appear in the corner of your 720x576 MPEG2 movie. Use the right mouse button on the video track in Cinelerra and choose "Match output size."

But then again, I may be wrong.

Did you use the mencoder command, without extra resize options (!):
(Afterwards, encode the PCM audio to MP2 with Avidemux2)

The only solution, in my opinion, is to make sure your Input movies allways match the size of a DVD (i.e. 720x576 for PAL). The frame rate conversion seems to be handled okay by Cinelerra/Mencoder. Resizing/cropping video material is never handled well by non-lineair video editors (Cinelerra, ULead, Adobe Premiere) because they are designed to take more than one file (with different sizes/framerates) as input in one project.

I used exactly the same command that you gave me first time.

I just tried again with some footage I'd made in Cinelerra. I took out a very complex effect so that it would render faster, and then it worked fine.

There is a Windows program I've been using to encode MPEGs that seems to get the right settings, maybe I should just use that. OTOH, I'd prefer to do it all in Linux.

I think I'll be working with either VCDs or SVCDs; what settings do I need for them?

Thanks,
- QS Computing.

my feeling is a lot of cinelerra's issues might be distro and hardware specific; i hacked at it for months and could never get it running on suse 9, eventually had to give up... looking through the code i see tons of hard-core assembly optimization which is, i'm sure, how it does its magic, but maybe is what also makes it so finicky?

ended up going with mainactor, and it's been fine. some people give me a hard time for using commercial software on an opensource os, but heck, people have to get work done! mainactor is still a little barebones compared to fcpro, and the faux-win95 interface makes it basically feel like using an old version of premiere. however, i -like- old premiere, and find fcpro increasingly frustrating, bloated, and poorly organized so its all good. anyway it's totally usable, has good DV capture & good mpeg2 compression.

--skullmunky

I checked out Dynebolic 1.4.1 (live CD). It contains Cinelerra 1.2.1. That version looks and feels the same as version 2, but it has an uglier looking interface.

I'll try to save something as mpeg2....

Well, I have been through most of the editors. Stay far away from the zs4 editor. Its from T@b but windows users may know it as zweistein. But it really does not seem able to do anything.

My general opinion of linux software is close but no cigar. Linux has a ton of programs that have not been completed. If you use a windows program it usually will have most options available. But with linux the programers put a prog together with minimal amounts of options and only workling on a few systems. Then we have to sit around and wait for the next update... which is always a pain to update. Maybe one day 10 years down the road someone may get a video editing program working well enough to use but by then I will have kids and wont give a crap.

I am tempted to punch out the $200 for main actor just because if I pay for it it better work. I used it on windows a couple of years ago and it worked fine. I will switch distros if I have to.

I booted from the Dynebolic 1.4.1 (live CD) and tried to save something as Mpeg2 in Cinelerra. Elas, Dynebolic still uses Cinelerra 1.2, which does not save to Mpeg2. Only version 2 does.

Hi Hellodio,
I was glad to see the ball is still rolling in this thread.
Just wanted to note my recent experiences for others reading this thread and trying to select their preferred editing software...
I have been playing with Cinelarra's previous incarnation, Broadcast 2000, because it came with Suse9, installed and worked.
Runs okay for me as far as performance goes. Has some good features -- but employing them can be peculiar, unintuitive and hard to get used to: I may have to give up on it.
What then? -- after reading this thread I'm too scared to try to install Cinelarra 2. Looks like it's not an install for newbies.
I haven't got to the point of worrying about the saving/exporting issues. I'm only aiming at lo-fi, just good enough to watch on a TV.
I can see why a person would pay money for Mainactor. The demo version that came with my Suse9 works well.

I got Dynebolic and am having a crappy time just getting the window manager to act right,
any suggestions?
i really want to use dyne because it has all the video progs i am interested in.
i got a old (pronounced archiac) PC that will boot dynebolic and virtually anthing else, but
the dang mouse wont go anywhere when i boot dynebolic.
Where do i start hunting to fix this problem?
TIA,
fred

Dear FredGoodlukng,

I too had a hard time to get around Dynabolic's windowmanager. I used the right mouse button a lot. The menu on the right lists your hard drive partitions. When you click on one, an XFE file browser pops open. Coincedentally, it's my favourite filebrowser! It's an (simple, intuitive) alternative to KDE and Gnome's standard browsers (Nautilllus and ...).

Your partitions are mounted in the directory called ... (ooops, sorry deleted the Dynabolic image from my hard drive...).

One has to fiddle about a lot to get the hang of Dynabolic. But I'll only try it again when it supports Cinelerra 2.

If I were you I'd install it and give it a try. Just save as quicktime DV and convert it to your preferred format as described alsewhere in this thread.
I installed from an RPM package (dunno where I got it from..., try http://rpm.pbone.net).

Cinelerra 2 compliled from source on my preveious Debian 3.1 Sarge distro.