The Grumpy Editor's video journey part 2: Video editors

Just thought I would thank our favorite editor for his work on this article.  And for the
feedback comments as I feel it helped me on my first movie project.

I was most familiar with kino as I have used it for the last several months getting our home
movies off our Sony miniDV camera.

I did evaluate some of the mentioned software in the article and the comments.

Kdenlive:  Just never got it to work on my Gentoo system.  I built three versions and didn't
have success with any of them.  Version 0.4 that is in portage never would load any of my
video I had captured.  The other versions 0.5 and a SVN just crashed on start-up.  Obviously
something on my system was not right and I didn't invest the time to find out.

Open Movie Editor behaved just like our editor, just didn't like any of my video.

I ended up using kino to capture raw video from the miniDV and to make specific cuts that I
wanted.  Used some of their FX too.  Since I was new to making a movie I was not up to doing
too many effects.

I used Audacity to play with the audio and mix different audio together.  Overall this was
easy to do but I did have some local audio issues as it didn't seem to mix well with other
software that was using /dev/dsp.  This again is probably my own fault not having things setup
right.  The point being that Audacity works sufficiently.

I used cinelerra to put all the pieces together.  Using the drag and drop editor I put the
individual scenes and mixed my desired audio clips.  Then rendered the project to a DV file.
I did run into it crashing a few times but it did recover perfectly.  It really was minimal
though and basically just worked.  I'm sure I used a very small percentage of the capability
of the software as the only effect I used was a "Title" effect to put text upon the finished
video.

The finished product was rendered by kino.  I took the DV output from cinelerra and created a
Flash video.  Maybe this could have been done by cinelerra but since I knew kino did a nice
job with this I used it instead.

Here is a link to the project if anyone is interested.  It's a spoof of the Ghost Hunters TV
show.

http://www.spectralreview.com/2008/02/25/kitty-ghost-hunt...

or on YouTube:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ywkLdnmAnSc

Thanks again for your work on this article.  I was happy I was able to do this project under
Linux but look forward to the day when I could use one polished app to get it done.  I did put
all the Free Software I used in the credits of the movie.  Should have mentioned LWN but
forgot.