[MPlayer-users] Linux viceo editor?

[Phil Rhodes]

This is one of the things that linux really doesn't have.

There have been several bold attempts, Cinelerra not least among them, but 
it's possibly one of those areas that open source is always going to have 
problems addressing. Nonlinear editors are big, complex pieces of software, 
which will require a lot of people who are working for free to keep their 
minds on one thing for an extended period. This is rare; remember that the 
only reason FOSS has a 3D rendering package is because someone gave it away 
fully formed. The only reason it has a competent office suite is that Sun 
gave one away. I could go on.

More than that, though, there's the issue that an NLE is a very user-centric 
thing, and it needs to work in the way that editors need it to work, not the 
way that's easiest for software engineers to write. All software engineers 
suffer from this problem to an extent, but the FOSS community, since usually 
nobody's being paid, is (in my experience) particularly likely to make the 
following assumption:

- I am a software engineer
- Your problem can be solved with software
- Therefore I know everything about your problem.

Needless to say this is a hopeless fallacy and most coders don't seem to 
realise they're doing it. Cinelerra is a good example of it, or at least it 
was 18 months ago when I last looked at it.

The last problem is of course hardware compatibility. It's still an absolute 
chore, at least compared to a commercial OS, to make any sort of firewire 
device work under Linux, let alone a DV camcorder. And DV camcorders are now 
yesterday's news; how long do we have to wait before we can read SxS cards?

Nobody should take this personally; hardware compatibility is late on linux 
because of the need to reverse-engineer the products of often uncooperative 
hardware manufacturers, but at the end of the day if Blackmagic release a 
new tool and I have to wait three to five years for support to be mature, 
well, I simply don't really have that option, regardless of whether I have a 
personal interest in using free software or not.

Because of this I don't think it's very likely that FOSS will ever come up 
with something on the level of something like Final Cut, Premiere or After 
Effects unless someone commissions one, pays millions of units of currency 
to develop it, then gives it away.

P

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Van Snyder" <van.snyder at sbcglobal.net>
To: <mplayer-users at mplayerhq.hu>
Sent: Saturday, August 14, 2010 9:24 AM
Subject: [MPlayer-users] Linux viceo editor?


> What video editor do Linux users of mencoder recommend?
>
> I have LIVES.  For clips of more than about 1000 frames it is unbearably
> slow.
>
> A fast simple editor that can only delete segments, and encode the
> result, would be useful.
>
> mencoder can already do this, but an interactive front-end that shows
> the first and last frames of the region to be deleted, and allows to
> browse frames as easily as LIVES does, would be helpful.
>
> For those who don't have LIVES, here is a description of the simple
> functionality described above.
>
> LIVES has two regions where it displays frames.  The left one is the
> first frame of a selection.  The right one is the last frame of a
> selection.  When a clip is loaded, the left one is the first frame of
> the clip and the right one is the last frame of the clip.  Below each
> region is a widget displaying the frame number.  One can adjust the
> frame number either by typing a new one into it, by selecting up- or
> down-arrow parts of the widget, or by dragging one or the other end of a
> slider that extends across the LIVES window below both regions.
>
> After one selects a region, LIVES allows one to do many things with it,
> but the interesting one for this simple job is simply to delete it.  At
> that instant, LIVES deletes the selection, which can take an hour on a
> dual-core 3.0 GHz computer with 2GB of memory for a clip of only 20
> minutes duration.  It also renumbers the frames, which is unhandy if one
> wants to repeat the editing session with slightly different requirements.
>
> It would be better to batch the "delete" requests and apply them
> together, preferably by invoking "mencoder" with an "edl" file listing
> the frame regions to be deleted, when an "apply" action is specified.
> Perhaps "apply" should be coupled to "encode."
>
> Ideally, this should be coupled to mencoder by a modification of
> mencoder that allows to specify skip regions in the "edl" file using
> either frame numbers or seconds.
>
> "undo" and "redo" features would be nice, but the bare-bones
> functionality of deleting unwanted parts of clips doesn't really need 
> this.
>
> _______________________________________________
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> MPlayer-users at mplayerhq.hu
> https://lists.mplayerhq.hu/mailman/listinfo/mplayer-users


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