Topic: linux newbie, A/V editing software advice needed

[john e. bogus]

I recently had to rebuild my computer, and being sick of getting shafted by microsoft, switched to linux this time around.  For the last couple days, I've been trying to figure out what my software options are for A/V editing (a search here was surprisingly unrewarding).  Audacity seems to be the universal pick for the audio stuff, but I have yet to make a choice for video capture / editing / DVD authoring software.  According to www.linuxalt.com I have the following choices:
VideoLAN Movie Creator ( http://trac.videolan.org/vlmc/ )
LiVES ( http://lives.sourceforge.net/ )
Kdenlive ( http://kdenlive.sourceforge.net/ )
Lombard ( http://yorba.org/lombard/ )
cinefx ( http://www.cinefx.org/ )
PiTiVi ( http://www.pitivi.org/wiki/Main_Page )
Cinelerra ( http://cvs.cinelerra.org/ )
Kino ( http://www.kinodv.org/ )
OpenShot ( http://www.openshotvideo.com/ )
From what I've been reading in various places online, Kdenlive, Cinelerra, and Kino seem to be the most popular ones.  My application would be syncing up my seperate audio and video masters, and authoring them to DVD with a simple text-based menu (some of you out there may already be familiar with my work, which I desire to continue in a similar fashion).  Is this possible with any of the freeware linux programs?  Would any one or combination of these programs be best for my application? 

What about burning and copying CD's and DVD's?  Is the brasero program all I'll need there (is it bit-perfect)?  Or is there something better? 

And then of course, I'll need a few other utilities....are there linux equivalents for programs like TLH, Imgburn, Lplex, Gspot, etc?  I consider all these programs essential, so if there are no linux equivalents, is there any huge hassle getting them to run in Wine?

So far the transition from windoze has been surprisingly painless....now I just to get back to making the sweet DVD's....TIA for any help and advice that others here may be able to offer!

[tim in jersey]

for burning CDs I like brasero.

Ripper X is a GUI frontend that uses cdparanoia (ie: secure rips like EAC for windows) for ripping CDs.

TLH works like a charm in in WINE.

I'm not a video guy, so I can't really recommend anything.  Hope this helps.

[john e. bogus]

Tim, it sort of helps, at least as far as audio is concerned....thanks!  Ok, so now that I have something of a starting point, I decided to try the exercises of burning both a CD and a DVD.  I previously had managed to get utorrent up and running in Wine, except several features don't seem to work....rather than creating a new folder (by using utorrent) to download something into, I had to create the new folder manually in another window (do they call them windows, when you aren't using windoze?)....and you can't open a torrent file directly into utorrent from the torrent file itself, you have to use utorrent to find and open the torrent file.  The show on CD finished downloading first, so I tried my luck with TLH in decoding the FLACs and preparing to burn it off....ran into the same problem of not being able to use the program to create a new folder for the decoded FLACs, and had to do it manually in another window (can't just right click on the FLACs folder and select "open with TLH", either)....somehow in this process, I closed out TLH and couldn't get it running again for the life of me.  Decided to experiment a bit, and discovered that Brasero would accept FLAC files without having to decode them first....so far, so good - I seemed to be getting somewhere....then I hit "burn", and to my horror, the program told me it was normalizing the tracks!  I quickly hit cancel before wasting one of the last few of my precious TY's.  Nothing in the program's documentation said anything about normalizing, or how to turn it off....perhaps I'll have better luck using it to burn a DVD.  Nothing in the program's documentation about being able to select DAO vs TAO, either....but it did give an option to add spaces in between tracks, so I'm assuming that the default is for DAO, correct?  So how do you turn off the normalization?  And if Brasero will also copy an already burned disc, why would I need Ripper X?  I'm sick of being shafted by microsoft, so I *want* to learn to like linux, really, I do!  Unfortunately, that hasn't been happening yet in attempting to venture beyond looking at webpages and getting into using some tools to do what we tapers do....

[Shadow_7]

LiVES, KDENLive, Cinelerra are probably your better GUIs for editing.

This is what I do (not for the meek):

ffmpeg - to decode the video to rawvideo.  One of the few formats that can be cat'd together to stitch multiple short clips.
ffmpeg - to use the rawvideo as input to various outputs.  (two pass mkv for youtube / input to mpeg2enc for DVDs / ...)

This makes a difference in time if you have some scaling and other CPU intensive things from the original video format.  If you have multiple outputs or do 2 pass encoding, since it doesn't have to redo the CPU intensives stuff 3+ times.  But I'm also on a somewhat old by todays standards computer.

netpbm tools - for fancy stuff, like chroma keying.  Very low tech and highly scripted (bash).  Various other image manipulation programs like imagemagick and the gimp, and even povray to do fancy stuff.

libsndfile to resample audio from high sampling rates down to lower ones.  I do some edits with audacity at the higher sampling rates, then resample.  It also gives me a step in there to use sox to change the speed of audio to match up external audio with the video source.  But mostly audacity for the edits.  At least until I learn how to use nyquist more directly (and scripted).

Sometimes on the first rawvideo generation I'll pipe it through yuvfps and yuvcorrect and other things (mjpegtools).  Depending on how much I hosed the settings on the camcorder.  Or if I want to do slow motion and things.

For DVDs I use dvdauthor, mjpegtools, sox (LPCM audio).  I generate the menus with povray.  Plot out the subtitle menu part with imagemagick and tweak them to spec with the gimp.  If I'm lazy I'll just do the simple dvdauthor way for menu-less dvds.  Sometimes devede to author/burn them if I'm really lazy.  Depending on if it was just a rehearsal or the big event.

At the moment I'm toying with povray to render each frame (png extracted with ffmpeg).  So I can do even more effects and overlays.  By no means an efficient use of time or disk space, but it affords abilities not inherently capable by default (yet).  And if I'm going to be using povray to generate the overlay in the first place, why not.

I handle audio separately until the final step in all cases.  This requires a bit of tediousness and math.  1601.6 samples ='s 1 frame at 48kHz.  But it's kind of needed since I don't use the gui's.  ffmpeg has some quirks like truncating the audio TO the last frame, i.e. not inclusive.  Which leaves you a bit short by default in terms of audio.  Especially if you want your video to be exactly X seconds long.

As mentioned there are GUI frontends which probably simplifies this a lot.  I just like having it scripted so I can run it on other machines without wasting RAM and other resources on a GUI environment or overly bloated apps.  Plus there's generally a quirk or two to work around with SVN version of application and odd camcorder formats.

As far as baseline video encoders/decoders. mencoder (mplayer), ffmpeg, transcode, avifile, mpeg2enc(mjpegtools), MP4box (gpac) .  With mencoder and ffmpeg being the two main players.  I like ffmpeg better, more human-esque command syntax, and IMO better audio capabilities (not to imply great audio capabilities).  It really depends on how intimate you want to get with the whole process.

[tim in jersey]

to disable normalize: edit>plugins and uncheck the normalize plugin.

[tim in jersey]

and for torrents you may want to give deluge a whirl.

[rastasean]

and for torrents you may want to give deluge a whirl.

^

Deluge works really well in Linux so you might as well run that and save wine for something else.

[frogger]

You didn't mention what variety of Linux you were using, my recommendations are based on Ubuntu but should work for most distributions.  I don't do any video but I'd like to learn it.  Here are some audio suggestions.  For CD/DVD burning/copy I like K3b, it uses cdparanoia and other programs.  For torrenting (which I do rarely anymore),  I use Transmission.   A possible replacement for TLH is shntool, it'll do lots of conversions and other stuff from the command line.  Sound Converter is a GUI for sound conversion.   I really like Audacity for my audio processing.  HTH.

[Shadow_7]

I run debian most of the time.  With a lot of extras via source for the latest SVN/GIT/CVS stuff.  I've started toying with ubuntu, but so far I don't like that it doesn't currently have ogle (dvd player with menus) in it's repository.  And other if you use a different WM than the default WM, everything breaks.  An issue for me since IceBuntu is still in it's infancy and I'm not a fan of Gnome or KDE.

Audio:
Audacity (trims and gain, sometimes EQ, or notch filter)
Sox (speed adjust and formats)
libsndfile (resampling / stereo -> mono -> stereo)
ffmpeg (audio extraction from video)
faad (convert AAC to WAV)
lame (WAV to MP3)

Video / Image manipulation:
ffmpeg (most everything)
mplayer / mencoder (TV capture card to pipe to ffmpeg / player)
mpeg2enc (for DVD compliant video, most menu stuff which can be hit and miss for ffmpeg)
yuvfps (when input and output rates match, it just passes it along, even if that's not the original FPS of the video)
yuvcorrect (to squish the color range / desquish hard blacks / fake contrast control)
gimp
povray
imagemagick
netpbm

Torrent:
ktorrent
transmission

media burning:
growisofs
k3b (if I'm lazy)
cdrecord (from sources / the old one that ships with kind of sucks)

media testing / playing:
ogle
mplayer
ffplay
xine / totem
vlc
kaffeine

[john e. bogus]

Many thanks for the responses, everyone....I really appreciate it.  I suppose I should mention a couple of things before going any further:  First, my version of linux is Ubuntu....but I wasn't aware that that made any real difference as to which programs would work, I was under the impression that just about any linux program would work with just about any linux variation with few exceptions.  Secondly, I'm not a command line type of guy at all....I have a very good knowledge of analog electronics, and can physically put a computer together and get it to work....but programming?  Forget it....speaking command line stuff to me is all gobbledeygook, unless spoon fed instructions come with it.  So command line type of programs are useless to me....count me among the meek in this department, for sure.

Shadow_7, between the programs you mention for video editing (LiVES, KDENLive, Cinelerra), would you recommend one over the others?  You mentioned that you sometimes stretch or compress the audio to make it maintain sync over the entire running time....I've always done the opposite (I'd rather do nothing to the audio other than normalize and trim the ends), and stretched or compressed the video by 1-3 frames when necessary....do any or all of these 3 programs have this feature?  The windoze program I was using did, and I considered it essential....I would much rather stretch or compress the video content rather than alter the audio.  Other than that, I don't do any other processing of the video, so no need for things like chroma adjustments, etc.  Is one of the programs better than the others for transcoding to mpeg2?  What about the ability to use both hidef (via letterboxing) and standard 720 x 480 in the same project for multicam shoots?  (a friend recently got a hidef camcorder, so this has been newly added to the mix when we get together and shoot multicam)

Tim, thanks for the tip on turning off the normalization in Brasero....was able to successfully use it to burn a CD, but for some reason I couldn't get it to burn a DVD - it wouldn't recognize either a video_TS folder or the various ifo's, bup's, and vob's dumped straight into the program....I think it wanted me to go through the extra step of creating an iso image first.  However, K3b worked instantly by just dropping in the video_TS folder....no hassles there at all.

Other than running natively in linux, would there be any advantage to using any of the torrent programs mentioned instead of utorrent via Wine?  I like that utorrent isn't java-based, and is generally considered to be more efficient than other programs, at least as far as windoze was concerned. 

I did get TLH working in Wine....my earlier problem was that it was hiding "underneath" utorrent.  But what about other utilities such as Gspot and Lplex?  Do they have linux equivalents?  I haven't tried these in Wine yet...

The big workout will come after next weekend....some nice 24/96 audio and multicam video will have me neck deep in learning to use this new software, and surely I'll have more questions.  Again, many thanks to everyone for all the help and suggestions so far!  I'm slowly getting used to linux, and it isn't bad at all from what I've experienced....I want to learn to like it, really I do!  The only hassles I've really run into is finding a way to turn off the stupid autocomplete and annoying keyring stuff....

[Shadow_7]

LiVES is the only one I've actually used.  Cinelerra has way too many deps to install from sources / however it's packaged.  And I loathe pretty much anything KDE.  Although KDENLive is a popular item.  Perhaps Kino as well.  I'm on OLD computers, relatively so going command line saves time.  And ensures that I have complete control over how many generations of conversions my videos undergo.  Otherwise you can get by without in some cases.

The inherent problem with video editing, particularly anything new-ish like HD.  Is that you need the latest and greatest to do them well.  Bug fixes and just basic support for odd formats.  Which will likely entail at least compiling something from source at some point.  Or waiting six months to two years for your distro to catch up.

I tend towards concerts and the likes.  While 1/2 second per hour is not a severe amount of drift per hour.  With music and 60p, being 30 frames off by the end of an hour concert is noticeable and annoying.  And for fast-ish content like the drummer, noticeable enough drift after just five minutes.  So I adjust speed with sox to compensate for the difference between my camcorder and audio field recorder.  You can do this in audacity, but I like to kick off a script and go to sleep.  You really can't stretch the video if your input is 30000/1001 fps and your output is 30000/1001.  Some video codecs are set in stone, relatively.  Baring the use of multiple camera angles anyway.  I only have one camcorder. 

I sample at a high rate 24/192 and speed up at that rate.  Then resample to distribution formats.  Otherwise I'd rather just trim and adjust gain and be done with it.  But if you need to adjust EQ and other things I find that doing that at the higher sampling rate before resampling does noticeably better than just recording at a deliverable format.  There's some libsndfile resampling magic that does wonders for my high noise floor mics going this route.  Plus sox and audacity have issues with > 4GB data files.  Which at 24/192 is basically ONE hour.  Scripting it allows me to break up a 2.5 hour concert into 3x data files.  Or just break up the huge stereo files into 2x half as huge mono files.

Lives has a lot of nifty things, but when you first load a clip you have to wait for it to process it.  Which for HD video takes a good long while.  At least on my old-ish computers with minimal RAM.  And some things are still pretty primitive so you kind of have to go command line.  Not that you have to use complex command lines for simple things.  Most times it's <application> <input file> <output file> and it magically figures it out.  If you don't like the defaults, then you have to get a bit complex.  Enough so that I have most of my common edits scripted in bash.  But a lot of this stuff could be accomplished in audacity or lives, if you have the time and interest to wait. 

I've started recording enough that I find having a flow that's mostly set it and forget it, rules.  Run some scripts, come back after a while and find the sync point, trim to size, and publish.  If I had faster computer(s), I could output in probably 24 hours from a 1+ hour concert.  But I don't so it's like a week.  24 hours for audio (automated / scripted), 24 hours for video (automated / scripted), 24 hours to line the two up and trim and merge.  A good nights rest and publish on the 4th day after the event.  If all went well.  Most of that time is waiting on my turtle equivalent computer to process the data.  Which I can spend doing other things like mowing the yard or designing the graphics for the DVD menus.  Maybe generate some intros and stuff in povray.  Depending on the project at hand.

[tim in jersey]

  And if Brasero will also copy an already burned disc, why would I need Ripper X?

I use it because I like the frontend, and I also like to rip to FLAC and mp3. FLAC for home listening (easier than digging out CD's) and mp3 for the i-Pod in the car, gym, etc.