Video capture/editing?

[Mark Kane]

On Sun, Jun 04, 2006, at 06:51:05 -0500, Laurence Sanford wrote:
> Some time ago I purchased a Pinnacle video capture/editing package to
> be used on a windows computer. Honestly, this is the last thing I
> keep a windows computer around for. The capture setup is a PCI card
> with a breakout unit on it, the editing software, obviously Studio. A
> number of things have driven me to the point where I simply cannot
> stand the windows/Pinnacle setup any more, mostly a lack of stability.

I know what you mean here. After building new machines with fast
hardware, reinstalling Windows, and not even having that many programs
installed or running...it would freeze up, be slow after a week, have
the explorer.exe constantly crashing, etc. I couldn't reboot every
week, so I finally switched to FreeBSD on the desktop and everything is
going great.

> Looking through the ports collection I found avidemux2 and kino. What
> I need to know is this - will one of these two programs replace the
> basic editing functionality of pinnacle for me, and can I use the
> same capture hardware? I suspect the capture hardware will be an
> issue, but I'm certainly open to suggestions. Thanks in advance for
> any input.

I use Avidemux2 on a daily basis for converting video files. It's
awesome for converting and setting simple in/out points in a clip, but
it doesn't have the functionality of a timeline or effects, etc. You
can load in another clip and "append" it to the current one and then
export it to whatever format though.

I have not been able to try Kino yet. For some reason,
whenever I start it, I get: 

(kino:8760): Gdk-CRITICAL **: gdk_window_move: assertion `GDK_IS_WINDOW
(window)' failed

...and the program never starts. I've contacted them about it, but the
developers were not sure. It could be that I'm running the amd64
version of FreeBSD, and it may work fine in i386.

There are a couple other programs you might want to look into --
multimedia/jahshaka and multimedia/pitivi. I've used Jahshaka 1.9a9 from
ports and it's not the easiest to use nor the most stable, although
the functionality looks great. They have an updated 2.0 RC3 on their
site for which the screenshots look amazing, however it's still an RC
so it's not been updated in ports yet (and it seems to be a hard one
to compile yourself). I have not tried Pitivi.

On the hardware, I'm not sure if it would work. I do most of my
capturing on the one non-FreeBSD machine I have left -- a Mac with
Final Cut Pro. However, I have been able to capture directly from my
Canon GL-2 via Firewire on my FreeBSD machine using fwcontrol(8). From
there, I take the .dv file, run it through ffmpeg to output it to a
format that Avidemux2 can load, and then use Avidemux2 to export that
further or do basic cuts.

I suggest trying them all and seeing what works best for you. :)

Hope that helps.

-Mark

P.S. There is one other editor that looks amazing, however it has
not been ported to FreeBSD yet (and I can't get it to compile either).
It's called Cinelerra:  http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3

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