Recently in Video Category

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.

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.

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.

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.