Video Editing on Linux

Anyone do any video editing on Linux? If so what software are you using to do it ? I'm slowly migrating to Linux and was wondering about running video editors and if any of them are any good, but all I can find is articles dating back to 02 with the state of play back then (and I would hope things have changed since then).

 

For basic Video editing (which is what most of us do anyway) Kino is the best. For more advanced video editing you will have to look into Cinelerra or Jahshaka. I have not used Cinelerra any so I cannot comment on it but Jahshaka seems to be fairly good, its a little hard to use initially but after the initial learning curve its pretty good and has many very advanced features that I have not even begun to explore.

 

there's also Kino if you use KDE, which is a decent MPEG editor. It's not good if you are trying to edit AVI's or whatnot, but if you can pull the video off your camera, it should work pretty well.

 

Personally Video editing is something I do in Windows. Moviemaker is far more versatile than Kino and once you give the Sony Vegas video editor a try you will never use anything else (it even better than Apples' Final Cut Pro) So unless you are just trying to support opensource (which is a good thing) than I would just use windows for graphical work, for now anyway.

 

All and all, there is no stable way to capture dv1394 directly into mpeg2 that I can find. Maybe I am too ignorant, but is there any?

 

Kino (and the command line dvgrab), will grab dv from the firewire port and let you save it in raw DV and AVI format, in both type-1 DV and type-2 DV (separate audio stream) encodings. For me, the easiest thing to do was to capture to a raw dv file, and then use something like mencoder to encode it to mpeg.

BTW, Kino is not only for use in a KDE environment. I use Gnome and use it too.. The other app that I see, that has a lot of promise in this area, is pitivi (it's basically at an alpha state now). In terms of easy to use small video apps, the Linux world is still catching up, but I'll take my bumps there anytime, rather than use anything else in Windows or OSX.

Video for Linux resources

Kino Video Editor
PiTiVi Open Source Video Editor Wiki

 

I don't have much spare disk space to capture raw dv file, and I hate to transcode XX GB raw file into 1~2 GB mpeg2 file. That takes me double of time that I was doing in XP. And this is one of the reason I still keep XP in my desktop.