IndexSoftware

Kino, unlike Blender, is expressly built as a video editor. The developers’ goal in building Kino is to offer “easy and reliable DV editing for the Linux desktop with export to many usable formats” (citation). I think they’ve hit that mark dead on.
Kino’s installation is trivial via yum on Fedore Core (sudo yum [...]

If you intend to distribute your video content via the web then you will want to minimize the size of your video file in order to incur the least cost in terms of bandwidth. There are three strategies that will lead to lower video file sizes: using more efficient or aggresive compression, reducing the [...]

Audio and video applications require low latency times in order to deliver high data rate content. On Linux, if you want to run audio applications such as Ardour or Rosegarden, which use JACK, then you either have to be willing to run them as root, or you have to set up the Realtime Linux [...]

A little time spent with Google quickly shows that there’s a good number of video editors available for Linux, but where does one start? Wikipedia has a list of non-commercial, open source video editors for Linux and other operating systems, but it’s unfortunately presented with little context and no evaluation of the individual packages. [...]

On boingboing yesterday it was noted that there will shortly be a new flavor of Linux distribution focused on providing support for multimedia creators. Ubuntu Studio, scheduled to be available in April 2007, will include Cinelerra-CV (the community version). This means that Cinelerra-CV will soon be available as packaged software for Ubuntu, making [...]

If you’re planning on using rosegarden, when you recompile your kernel you’ll want to make sure the following options are set like this in your .config:

# CONFIG_HZ_100 is not set
# CONFIG_HZ_250 is not set
CONFIG_HZ_1000=y
CONFIG_HZ=1000

Doing this got rid of a start-up warning from rosegarden that told me I didn’t have a high enough resolution system timer [...]

Cinelerra is the most sophisticated of the open source Linux video editing packages I’ve looked at. The developer describes Cinelerra as capable of turning an appropriately powerful Linux box into a “50,000 watt flamethrower of multimedia editing.” Although this is certainly hyperbolic (and the author has a penchant for the hyperbolic), Cinelerra is [...]

Sometime before 2004, I’m not sure exactly when, J.D. Lasica, working with the Internet Archive, published an Open Source Media Manifesto. It’s still an interesting read, especially with regards to some of the ways it’s gotten out-of-date.
We hold free expression and public commentary to be fundamental to living in a democracy. If we are [...]

Most digital camcorders these days support IEEE 1394, AKA FireWire, for transferring video to the hard drive of your computer. Linux has good support for a variety of IEEE 1394 devices, and compatibility listings can be found at linux1394.org. We purchased the Pyro PCI 64 (API311) card from ADS Technologies, Inc. We [...]

Blender is primarily a 3D modeling and animation suite, so it may seem odd to include it in this discussion. Blender was developed as an application capable of all the tasks in a CGI production pipeline, so it provides a non-linear editing mode (the “sequence editor”) capable of most video editing tasks. On Fedora [...]