Video

I shot a video last night just for the heck of it to test my system under Ubuntu. I wanted to figure out very simple editing with the tools available on my system. It turns out, the same setup works the same as it did before on Fedora.it works about as well to boot.

The editing software is avidemux. I did not set out to use this software. It is just the only one I could get to work in a short period of time. I've gotten cinalera to work too, but it is so frigging complex that I have difficulty keeping it working over a long period of time.

If I had a choice, I would use Microsoft Movie Maker. It is so goddamn easy even I could get things done in a reasonable amount of time. I'm not a magician. I'm not a director. I am not picky. I just want simple editing features. I want them to work every time.

Needs:

• Cut out bits
• Stitch short videos together from different sources (different resolutions and and such)
  
• Mute, and other simple sound controls
• Automatic sound video syncing. I do not want to be concerned or asked about it. Just do it for me.
  
• Substitute audio (dubbing)
• Put text up on the screen

Wants:

• Push button effects
• One click DVD creation, drag and drop, click go
• Giggle reduction
  
• Rotate video (from holding the camera sideways)
• Zoom and window in window kinds of editing that is easy

I want a video editor with a Power Point interface. Drag and drop text. Drag and drop effects, graphics, whatever. At the moment, you have to split your video output in to pieces. Manipulate those pieces in different packages with different formats. Worry about moving things around and loosing quality. Then, stitch everything back together after hand building every little bit of it. It is a bit like having to rebuild your car's engine every time you want to turn it on and go to the store.

Cameras are point and shoot. Video editing software is like juggling live ferrets.

Editing video on Linux is almost impossible for me because of the crap sound support in Linux. I only have a sound card on the motherboard. It is junk. That is not really the trouble. Linux has crap sound support in general. That is my experience any way.

When I play a video in the editing software, the sound skips every second. This makes it impossible to line up video and audio by watching the video play. This makes it impossible to separate audio from video and perform many true advanced editing techniques. Once I get the sound out of sync, I will never get it back on my current system. This kind of problem prevents me from ever doing any serious video editing on my current system. I'm not worried about it.