Stream #0

Kdenlive 0.7 Beta Released

2008-10-08T07:45:52Z

After 10 months of work, and waiting, the Kdenlive team have released the 0.7 Beta version of their Linux based non-linear video editing software.

Kdenlive 0.7 Beta had been built specifically for KDE4 and features many improvements over the previous 0.6 version.

Main features, from the Release Notes, include:

* Capture video from your camcorder, webcam or screen
* Mix a large number of different formats (depending on your FFmpeg install): mpeg, flash, mp3, ogg, png, jpeg, dv, hdv
* See the result of your work (effects and transitions) in realtime
* Export your work in several formats (hdv, dv, mpeg, ...)
* Create titles, slideshows and more

Read the full announcement on the KDenliv website.

Screen shots of the new version in action are also available.

Coupled with the new application release is a complete redesign of the Kdenlive website.

LiVES 0.9.9.1 Released

2008-07-16T11:20:55Z

The latest version of the LiVES video editing system, 0.9.9.1, is now available for download.

The release notes make interesting reading. Apart from "several fixes for hangs/crash bugs, numerous optimisations, a smaller memory footprint, and integrated LiVES to LiVES streaming", the latest version also supports Frei0R plugins, which as far as I know were previously only supported by Open Movie Editor. Version 0.9.9.1 of LiVES also contains Weed technology. Don't know about Weed? Read about it then!

Complete details of changes can be found in the change log.

Almost at the same time as this latest release, the LiVES team has started a fund raising drive, with a targe of US$6000. Further details of how the money will be spent can be found on the LiVES website.

Big Buck Bunny - The Blender Movie

2008-06-10T22:16:24Z

It's been available for two weeks or so now, and the hype has died down a little, but it is still worth mentioning the new animated movie feature, created with open source animation tool Blender - Big Buck Bunny.

This is essentially the follow up production after the quite successful Elephant's Dream last year. Which I must admit to enjoying more than this latest effort.

For more information about Big Buck Bunny, the Peach team or Blender, it's probably easiest to send you on your way with a fine collection of links:

Big Buck Bunny Homepage
All the Press info
Download to your heart's content
More About Blender

Big Buck Bunny from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.

Open Movie Editor Releases New Version

2008-05-23T07:16:07Z

Linux based non-linear video application, Open Movie Editor, has released a new version. Originally new sourced were rolled out on May 21st, with a small bug fix update now available from May 23rd.

I've compiled and installed the new version from source and generally it works well, with a few minor quirks that are sure to be ironed out shortly - for example the audio and video codec rendering options are woefully short of all the libraries I have installed on my machine. Never mind, I always render out a project in the highest quality anyway and then transcode directly with FFmpeg. This might not be optimal for everyone.

As usual, existing Project files are recognised (these are saved in your /home/username directory usually anyway), so work can easily continue on earlier timelines.

Features of this release include:

- Zoom buttons in timeline
- Preview in separate Window
- Images in node graphs
- Lift, gamma, gain 3-Way color-tool

The Zoom buttons are probably more intuitive for new users, although I've already become quite used to the old drag-the-slider zoom method. Time will tell whether this new functionality will be better.

Preview in a separate window works, but I can't quite figure out yet how I would use it. It only previews the timeline, and not clips yet to be added to the project. Previewing clips before they're added to the timeline would be a really useful feature.

I've not yet tried node based editing or the new colour correction tools.

Full release note details can be found here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?groupid=142766&releaseid=600862

Source code download here:

http://www.openmovieeditor.org/download.html

New FFMpeg Changes Headers Location; Breaks Stuff

2008-05-19T14:28:51Z

Recently, and it's hard to say exactly which SVN snapshot this occured in, the FFMpeg project changed the location of a number of its header files. This has caused soem havoc with other applications that use FFmpeg for video decoding or encoding.

Amongst other things, Open Movie Editor complained that certain libraries were not installed, which they plainly were. This could be seen from running a simple "ffmpeg -i" command to see what which libraries FFmpeg had been configured again.

Trying to re-compile Open Movie Editor from source struck some problems, in that OME was looking for FFmpeg headers in the wrong place. To overcome this issue, so that OME would compile and then install correctly, I made the following changes.

The first crash will be with regards to avformat.h in the file nle_main.cxx

nle_main.cxx and the other two files you need to make some small edits to can be found in the "src" directory created when OME is unpacked.

There are three files you'll need to edit in the text editor of your choice:

nle_main.cxx
VideoFileFfmpeg.H
AudioFileFfmepg.H

Open each of those files and near the beginning (around line 35) will be references that look something like this:

#include

You'll need to find where avformat.h, avcodec.h and swscale.h are residing on your machine.

You can do this by using the following command:

>sudo find / avformat.h

On my machine, a build of Debian Lenny, these files can all be found in /usr/local/include

I edited the files so the code looks like this (example from VideoFileFfmpeg.H):

#include
#include
#ifdef SWSCALE
#include

Once you've saved those files, OME should now be able to find the FFmpeg header files and build correctly.

Hopefully a new version of Open Movie Editor will soon be available where these issues have been rectified in the source.

Blender Releases New Version - 2.46

2008-05-19T14:19:25Z

Today the blender.org team announced the official release of version 2.46, codenamed the "Bunny Release". While 2.46 release candidates have been around for a while now, the final product has some exciting changes in the Video Sequencer tool.

These include:

- Strip Blend Modes
- A reworked GUI
- A new consistent input filter
- Three way colour correction
- Proxy file creation and editing support
- Updated Preview
- True NTSC support
- Strip Transform
- Strip Markers

So, quite a lot of quality updates for video editing! Read more about the details here.

I might now need to learn how to use Blender for my video editing needs. A good place to start could be Eugenia's tutorial.

LiVES Releases New Version

2008-05-19T14:09:54Z

A few days ago, not sure if it was May 14th or May 16th as the website is contradictory, Linux video editing software, LiVES, saw a new version releases, numbered 0.9.8.12.

Unfortunately release notes specific to this version were hard to find, although it appears that 0.9.8.11 contained an Edit/Copy bug that the new version addresses.

The latest version can be downloaded here.

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FFmpeg: Update Installing on Ubuntu Hardy

2008-05-01T11:47:54Z

Having recently installed Xubuntu Hardy Heron on a laptop, I also needed to install FFmpeg. This post is really just a couple of notes for myself, updating my earlier How-To post regarding installation of FFmpeg on Ubuntu Gutsy.

New apt-get install line:

sudo apt-get install liblame-dev libfaad2-dev libfaac-dev libxvidcore4-dev liba52-0.7.4 liba52-0.7.4-dev libx264-dev libdts-dev libswscale-dev checkinstall build-essential subversion

Here I've added the swscale development libraries. Swscale is used for scaling videos.

If you are ever stuck behind a firewall or proxy, especially one that you have no control over and which does not understand certain SVN commands, there is a nightly Subversion snapshot available for download from the FFmpeg website. This alleviates the need to checkout the source with SVN.

New configure line:

./configure --enable-gpl --enable-libvorbis --enable-libtheora --enable-liba52 --enable-libdc1394 --enable-libgsm --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libfaad --enable-libfaac --enable-libxvid --enable-pthreads --enable-libx264 --enable-shared --enable-swscale --enable-avfilter --enable-postproc --enable-avfilter-lavf

Here I've removed --enable-pp as it is no longer recognised. And I've added --enable-swscale, --enable-avfilter, --enable-avfilter-lavf and --enable-postproc

Avfilter is the new FFmpeg library that replaces the deprecated vhook functionality.

One last note to self is to investigate the possibilities of AVIsynth scripting and FFmpeg.

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LiVES Lives!

2008-03-10T21:18:11Z

It's worth noting that recently there has been a small flurry of activity around the LiVES Video Editing System

On March 5th, the LiVES News page notes that development has begun again, the old Yahoo News Group has been discontinued and a new discussion forum launched. There's not a whole lot of new discussion happening there at the moment.

The LiVES download page also shows a new version rolled out on March 10th - 0.9.8.9. Essentially this release fixes a bug in version 0.9.8.8 which prevented clips from being encoded - a fairly fundamental problem one would have thought.

It's good to see some new work happening on the LiVES project.

Linux Powers The Spiderwick Chronicles

2008-02-28T15:17:22Z

An interesting article surfaced today talking about Linux based systems used in Hollywood, specifically on a new Paramount feature production, The Spiderwick Chronicles directed by Mark Waters.

The article has lots of good screen shots showing software in use, but I guess a little unfortunately many of the applications are proprietary and Blender doesn't get a look in. Still, it's encouraging to know how the Linux OS has penetrated this sphere.

Here's the article.

Kino 1.3.0 Released

2008-02-25T17:21:07Z

Yesterday a new version of popular Linux video editing tool, Kino, was released. The new version is 1.3.0 and contains the following changes:

Updated export scripts for FFmpeg changes (x264, mp3)
Improved speed on SMP systems by enabling FFmpeg multi-threaded codecs
Improved import (DV conversion) progress dialog
Added gstreamer-based Ogg Theora to the blip.tv publishing script
Added quality level option to the blip.tv publishing script
Updated Hungarian translation
Added Ukranian translation by Yuri Chornoivan

Congratulations to Dan Kennedy and the team.

The new source files can be downloaded directly from here.

Open Movie Editor - New Release Feb 9th

2008-02-10T17:56:33Z

The Open Movie Editor project has just released a new version of this Linux based non-linear video editing tool.

Amongst the highlights of this new version are the following items:

Inclusion of a new colour scheme called Shark
Colour scheme preferences are now restored at restart

Full release notes are available on Sourceforge.

While only a minor update to Open Movie Editor, coming just one week after the previous release on February 3rd, this source does include my first codebase contribution to an Open Source project - the Shark colour scheme.

Download the new version of Open Movie Editor.

The Future of Cinelerra

2008-02-08T09:58:11Z

It would be remiss if I did not at least mention the current buzz around Linux video editing tool Cinelerra. An article appeared on Linux.com a couple of days ago, outlining a new direction for the software that began life as Broadcast2000.

I'm not going to do a Cinelerra history lesson here, go and read the Linux.com article. What is more interesting is the desire to build a new Cinelerra (Cin3), completely divorced from the original Heroine Warrior sponsor.

I've actually been following the Cin3 discussion on the Cinelerra mailing list for some time now. At this stage discussion seems to be centered around what the new name for the software will be and what GUI toolkit to use. There's a long way to go before Cin3 - or Verite as it may now be known - becomes a stable usable product.

And that's where the problem lies. Cin3 may be another 2 or 3 years away from being production ready. What happens in the meantime? How much effort will be expended on developing and maintaining the existing Cinelerra 2? While such a long lead time may be needed for a community driven application of this complexity, it does open the opportunity for other projects, both commercial and Open Source, to carve out a large video editing market share on the Linux platform.

Already Blender incorporates a reasonably full featured video sequence editor. I wonder about the viability of spinning that off as a standalone piece of software. What if MainConcept did indeed decide to open source their now defunct MainActor editing tool? Perhaps Adobe, or Sony, or Pinnacle will take the plunge and release a Linux version of their video editors. If the Linux desktop continues to rise in popularity, these scenarios are distinct possibilities.

Already Cinelerra suffers from an image problem, allegedly being too complex to learn and generally unstable. Let's hope the Cinelerra community team can forge ahead quickly to create an easy to use, but powerful, open source non-linear video editor.

Real World Open Source Video Editing

2008-02-07T12:34:52Z

A short while ago I wrote a review about Open Movie Editor. Essentially this review was written after a couple of hours testing various video clips and assessing the functionality within OME. Now, I can write about what OME is like on a real editing assignment.

Recently I was given a DVD full of PAL DV material and asked to create a compilation from the individual clips. A fun little project that should only take a day or two. Open Movie Editor was the obvious tool for the job.

The good news I can report is that even after 10 to 12 hours of constant video editing, OME is still a very stable piece of software. I only managed to induce two crashes - once when trying to undo multiple edits in a row and once when vigorously moving clips around on the timeline. Other than that, Open Movie Editor was easily up to the task.

I'm not an advanced video editor, happy within my comfort zone using something like Adobe Premiere, but also not using all the intricate features. However, Open Movie Editor does still lack a few basic features, that would have greatly increased my productivity. Changing playback speed of a clip is not possible within OME. I needed to change the framerate of target clips using FFmpeg and mjpeg tools to achieve this effect. While fade transitions are easy enough, I'm sure they could have been even quicker if such a function was built into OME. Precise frame editing, for splitting clips for example, would also make life easier.

There are some really nice features in Open Movie Editor though. Audio automations are a breeze, the media browser window provides easy access to your video library and the list of render options is quite vast - dependent on FFMpeg, Libquicktime and other shared video libraries.

So what did I produce in my 12 hours of work? A fun 4 minute clip, which is still a little rough around the edges, but generally a good laugh. Here's a link for your viewing pleasure:

http://kapitalmototv.co.uk/play-183-0.html

Edited in Open Movie Editor, with some clip transformations using FFmpeg and mjpeg tools. Follow this with final transcoding to x264, again with FFmpeg for more finite control, and you have an Open Source Editing project.

The Kapital Moto TV site uses open source products where possible. The server runs on Debian Etch, the site is served with Apache, built largely with PHP and data is stored in a MySQL database. Content is a mix of QuickTime generated H.264 and FFmpeg generate x264 video files. The Flash player is not open source, but is free as in beer.

How-To: Alter Video Speed with FFmpeg and mjpegtools

2008-02-06T11:09:51Z

Unfortunately my Linux based non-linear editing tool of choice, Open Movie Editor, doesn't currently support directly altering video playback speed. For example, if you wanted a portion of your new compilation to run at 200% of original recorded speed, it can't be done within OME. This exact functionality was something I needed for an existing editing project.

After some thought and investigation, such changes can be achieved through using a combination of FFmpeg and yuvfps, which is part of mjpeg tools, to alter the framerate of the desired footage. If your original file is PAL based, with a framerate of 25fps, changing the framerate to 50fps will result in the video running twice as fast, for half as long.

I didn't initially have mjpegtools installed, but on my Debian based system this was easy enough with

sudo apt-get install mjpegtools

Next, the input video needs to be converted to yuv4mpegpipe format, passed through yuvfps and output to a new avi file. Here's the command line I used to create a clip at 50fps:

ffmpeg -i input.dv -f yuv4mpegpipe - | yuvfps -s 50:1
-r 50:1  | ffmpeg -f yuv4mpegpipe -i - -b 28800k -y output.avi

Change the 50:1 ratios to whatever framerate you require. e.g. 100:1 for 100fps. Be sure to set the output file bitrate to a relevant quality level. Omitting this flag will result in a poor quality AVI output file by default.

The resulting AVI file was easily played back with Totem, and handled on the timeline admirably by OME.

Thanks to Victor Paesa on the FFmpeg mailing list for pointing me in the right direction.

Some other options to investigate include the new Libavfilter for FFmpeg and converting the original footage to a raw data file, which will lost the audio.