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One of my friends recently bought himself (well, he's part of a married couple. I'm not sure if "himself" is appropriate, but anyway...) a mini-DV cam. So we decided to play with it - we filmed two short lightsabre battles. Due to continued use of the &$#@!!! zoom button (WHY? WHYYYYYYY?) about 3 seconds of footage was worth using, with huge amounts of the subjects cropped out of the rest. There's a little footage further on that's probably quite useable, but there's no narrative allowing it to link with the previous footage. It might as well just not be there at all.
Anyway, after some playing around, we managed to get his firewire card working, and transferred the video over to a PC. Then, we added some laser blades to the lightsabres... later, I edited the footage anew, adding blades, clash effects, flares, and removed the unnecessary bits from it.
SO! Having progressed so far through it, I started to wonder about putting the three seconds together.
The nightmare begins!
First off, I had used Cinelerra for an earlier experimentation, so I thought I'd give that a try. I could import the video to the file, and render that to disk without issue less than a third of the time. It might crash randomly, or (much more likely), it would render a corrupt video stream. Sometimes, it might render nothing at all.
After some experimentation, I found a particular render combination of wrapper and codec that would work. (Ironically, I was trying to render an uncompressed video stream to either an AVI or a Quicktime wrapper, but it would have none of it.) Once I had that working, I decided to add an appropriate sound effect. Well, that was fun. The first sound effect went in OK. I rendered that. The timing was a bit out, I thought, but hey. It's me causing the problems, not the software, just because I don't fully understand what I'm doing.
So, I throw in a second sound effect, move the first one slightly, and then put in some more. Render those. Hey! What's happened? My video stream has corrupted... but not the output video stream. Noooo, the video stream in Cinelerra itself! It's gone green, with some corrupted stuff at the bottom. Hmmmm. The output stream is also corrupted and looks just the same as the one in Cinelerra. And the sounds! Overlapping, echoing, it's all wrong!
How to fix... I know! I'll delete the video stream, and insert the images all over again. Timings for the sounds appear to be correct. So, let's render this to a different format. This time, a blank screen. Then Cinelerra crashes. The problems continue, always the same: corrupted or non-existant video stream, sound timing problems, software crashes.
So, I have a chat with a friend of mine who does video editing (amongst other stuff) for a living. It seems likely that I might be doing a few things wrong. So I follow his advice, and play with appropriate settings and all sorts of things. Success? Not a shred of it. Cinelerra is SATAN!
After much hair pulling and bitch-slapping, I come to a conclusion: video editing on Linux is a pipe dream, nothing more. Then, doing some further exploring, I visited The Status of Home Video Editing on Linux & Unix at OSNews.com. This lead me to...Main Actor!
Main Actor. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways: one potato, two potato, three potato, four! Main Actor rocks. Main Actor is great. Main Actor doesn't crash. Main Actor renders properly. Also, I like saying Main Actor. I'm not really sure if there's anything else I can say about it, except that I'm very happy with it, and that I'm pleased I spent the money registering it. I recommend you do, too, as it's a great solution to the problem posed by video editing, in Linux.
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