Video Editing on Ubuntu
I recently purchased a video camera that I can mount on the side of my ski goggles and decided to have a go at video editing with Linux. I used a USB cord to plug the cam into my computer and manually grabbed the .avi files off the mounted drive. I installed Cinelerra and played around with that, however it kept crashing when opening the .avi files. I had a couple .dv files from a friends video camera, and those didn’t cause it to crash (although the program does crash pretty frequently regardless of the files you are working with).
Hoping another program would have better luck, I installed both Open Video Editor and Kdenlive, both of which were unable to handle the .avi files. Open Video Editor didn’t crash, however when trimming the clips, the audio became out of sync with the video. On Kdenlive, it simply crashed every single time I opened an .avi and the debug info seemed to indicate a resampling problem of the audio. However once I rebooted, I was able to add .avi clips to my workspace, but the sound was completely messed up and it crashed when trying to maniuplate the .avi. The audio problem on Open Video Editor, plus the debug information from Kdenlive leads me to believe there may be a problem with my installation of ffmpeg and the .avi that are coming off my camera. The .dv files work fine in all the editors.
Kdenlive seems to be my favorite so far, although I haven’t used any of the programs much. Cinelerra’s work flow and user interface are less than spetacular, and Open Video Editor seems fine for very simple edits, however was very difficult to trim a clip to a specific point. It looks like Kdenlive will be in the next Ubuntu realease, so I am using Windows Movie Maker, which I have on Vista in the meantime. It is actaully a very nice program to work with, and I produced my first video in about 20 minutes from the .avi files (my only other experience with video edting was using iMovie on my friend’s Mac once).
Fingers crossed the new release of Ubuntu will have Kdenlive working on my machine…