Open Movie Editor: February 2008 Archives

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.

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.

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:

• Addition of Gnome menu item, so that the application doesn't always need to be started from the command line.
• Split clips now retain effect information
• Glitches removed from Timeline cursor for an enhanced editing experience
• Improved clip zooming
• Bug fixed where OME would crash if a clip was resized during playback of the timeline.
• Other critical clip modifications now disabled during playback, for improved stability.

Full release notes are available on Sourceforge.

Download the new version of Open Movie Editor.

Looking for decent reviews of many available Linux video editors? Well, besides having the audacity to think my review of Open Movie Editor is decent, someone else has taken quite a lot of time to try out other open source video editing software.

The Grumpy Editor's Video Journey begins with capturing content from his DV camera and finally creating a DVD from it. While both these articles are worth reading, the middle part interested me most, where he expounds upon Avidemux, Kino, Cinelerra, KDEnlive, LiVES and PiTiVi.

While it's not news to many, this set of reviews is really just someone else affirming that Linux Video Editing is not yet at a very advanced level. We can all do something about this! Get involved with a project. Devote some time and energy to helping build the video editing tool you need.