Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Kdenlive - the KDE cross over
The codec support with Kdenlive comes from ffmpeg, which seems to be a bit better than Gstreamer. Some AVCHD clips from a newer camera, as well as few older Quicktime files, neither of which worked in PiTiVi, did just fine in Kdenlive.
Kdenlive also has some nice extras like the ability to grab your desktop in realtime and capture tethered firewire cameras.
When it comes to publishing your movies, Kdenlive has nearly unlimited options - everything from H.264 to Flash to Ogg. You can even export out in RAW DV format.
Of course all these features mean that Kdenlive's interface is considerably more complex than PiTiVi's. It isn't horrendous, but there is definitely a learning curve. Luckily, there are quite a few handy video tutorials on the Kdenlive site and the documentation is extensive.
The last editor I'm going to tackle is Cinelerra, the self described "50,000 watt flamethrower" of Linux video editors. In fact, Cinelerra is far too complex and powerful to do justice to in the limited space here. Suffice to say that if you're looking for the Final Cut Studio or Avid of the Linux world, Cinelerra is what you're after.
Cinelerra can do everything Kdenlive does and then some, offering countless color correction tools, sharpening filters, audio effects, motion tracking, and even supports OpenGL shaders on NVidia graphics cards for some serious video crunching power.
Cinelerra's massive set of features is a bit confusing at times and the interface is one part serious video editor and one part hideous, but once you get past the looks the functions will win you over. The only real downside to Cinelerra is that it seems prone to crashing. Luckily, it has a pretty good restore feature and if you live by the Windows motto - save early, save often - you should spare yourself too much trouble.
Cinelerra: the "50,000 watt flamethrower" of Linux video editors
The other problem is that the Cinelerra CV project doesn't seem interested in holding your hand while you figure out the complexities of the UI, but there are a lot of users out there on the web with tutorials, video, and how-tos that should answer most newcomers' questions.
Once you half-way master Cinelerra's complexities there isn't much you can't do, including edit and output feature length movies if you so desire.
Unlike on photography, when it comes to video Linux really does hold its own. Even the familiar complaint about less than stellar UIs doesn't apply here -sure Cinelerra takes a while to figure out, but so do Premier and Final Cut Studio, to say nothing of Avid.
In fact, even if you aren't a full time Linux user, it's well worth investigating the platform's video editors since all of them are free. If you find one that works for you, you'll have quite a bit of extra money to put toward cameras and lenses instead of software. ®
COMMENTS
@vidrazor
Care to expand on this? I admit that Ubuntu is not perfect, and in some respects going the wrong way at the moment IMHO, but it is a much more end-user targeted distribution that Fedora, where you have to run to keep up, or OpenSuSE where it sometime seems that the opposite is true, or the niche hobbyist distros (and I include Debian here, even though it is the basis for Ubuntu).
The fact that Ubuntu has a large repository that is kept up to date, has a documented lifetime for each of the releases (I tend to keep to LTS releases because my computers are tools, and spending time maintaining the OS is not high on my list of things-I-have-to-do), has a easy to understand patching strategy, and is actually targeted at ordinary users rather than hobbyists, are serious plus points for someone exploring Linux. Not everybody likes to wear hair shirts.
The other thing that Ubuntu is doing is reaching towards the critical mass where it is taken seriously by computer and software suppliers for mass consumption devices. RedHat or SuSE Enterprise releases will never appear in this segment of the market, merely because of model being followed.
It is quite true that if you are building a business model around Linux, that you may choose a more business oriented distribution, but Canonical are looking in that direction as well.
There can never be a one-size-fits-all distro, but what we are looking at here is what is prevalent. You don't have to like it, but if you make statements like you have, I feel that you have to justify them.
Thanks!
Been needing to edit some videos for upload. The basic editors were too basic, Cinelerra was too monstrous for a beginner, but I didn't know about Kdenlive. And, conveniently, I'm a KDE user. I'll give it a shot. Thanks!
Video manipulation in Linux
>> They run the software from Adobe, Apple, and Avid that's preferred by professionals
I'm going to dispute the lead-in sentences.-- I don't think Linux is in any way a back seat driver when it comes to professional usage of Linux in the professional video world. Take Pixar. Their production boxes run Linux, not OS X (Jobs founded Pixar). Any number of Hollywood movies, big and small were cooked up on Linux systems. Avatar, Lord of the Rings, Shrek, The Matrix, Titanic, and plenty more all used a significant amount of Linux horsepower in their creation. As for consumer use, most people use whatever was bundled with their computers or pay for the big proprietary programs that are backed by extensive marketing and promotion.
My needs are much more modest but I've used Avidemux for years now and it's taken care of just about all my video editing/converting/tweaking needs.
Ed
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Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
