phillc: May 2008 Archives

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

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 <ffmpeg/avformat.h>

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 </usr/local/include/libavcodec/avcodec.h>
#include </usr/local/include/libavformat/avformat.h>
#ifdef SWSCALE
    #include </usr/local/include/libswscale/swscale.h>

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.

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.

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.

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.