Video editing tool (mainly fading screenshots)

Darillian · n00b Joined: 25 Jun 2007 Posts: 13

Hey guys,

I know that there are many "looking for a video editing software"-threads in the board, but somehow the people always recommend Kino there, and this thing somehow doesn't suit me. I want a video editing or actually video creating software which supports fading in of static screenshots and features like a "have the picture follow a path during a scene"-thingy. I tried Kino for this purposes, but I have to say, that it takes WAY too long to import a single gif or png, I actually don't know how long it takes or whether it imports the graphic at all, but I can at least say that it takes too much time...
I plan to do a movie for a browsergame, which means a lot of screenshot material and few outgame movie scenes of space battles, e.g. zooming into a static planet picture and then switching into a Star Trek spacefight or something. I hope you can tell me of a program which suits my needs and has at least some good documentation and tutorials available, because I don't believe, that there is a piece of software that fits my needs and is simple in addition to that.

Greetz
Darillian

Darillian · n00b Joined: 25 Jun 2007 Posts: 13

Ekhm, it would be really cool, if someone could actually answer my request, I didn't post it here for fun :twisted:

bunder · Bodhisattva Joined: 10 Apr 2004 Posts: 5934

Darillian · n00b Joined: 25 Jun 2007 Posts: 13

orange_juice · Posted: Sat Jul 21, 2007 11:42 am Post subject:

Hallo,

I am also looking for a video editor, and I thought I could post here instead of creating a new post...

What I would like to do is to acquire the 15 or 20 seconds videos from my camera refine them -if needed- and actually replace the audio part of the video with an audio file created for this purpose.

I tried cinelerra but it could not at all even playback a video because it kept crushing...

Kino, does not seem to have any audio manipulating capabilities...

Any suggestions?

Kind regards,
orange_juice

Darillian · n00b Joined: 25 Jun 2007 Posts: 13

Which version of Cinelerra did you try? Because I'm using cinelerra-cvs, so the "unofficial" fork of it and it works really well, although it is actually masked in portage. Just unmask media-video/cinelerra-cvs in /etc/portage/package.keywords and emerge cinelerra-cvs and it should work fine...

orange_juice · Posted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 9:40 am Post subject:

I have unmasked and tried to install both available versions in portage:

orange_juice · Posted: Tue Jul 24, 2007 12:31 pm Post subject:

I found that

vap0rtranz · Posted: Mon Aug 20, 2007 5:58 am Post subject: video/audio sync

I've tried lives but can't overcome audio running normal speed while video runs warp 9. ugh! I wish there were better docs on these programs because the ones online don't say much about the playback options
_________________
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orange_juice · Posted: Mon Aug 20, 2007 12:15 pm Post subject: Re: video/audio sync

echo6 · Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2003 Posts: 587

Same here, I'm know looking for some suitable video editing tools. I'm using gtk-recordMyDesktop to create movie clips. I then want to create fade and other effects during certain sections and also place text during playback.

Any suggestions regarding which tool will allow text to be placed into the video stream?

cotcot · Posted: Mon Sep 03, 2007 8:34 pm Post subject:

Titlers in Kino (including fading, scrolling, banner but lower quality of rendering of fonts), Kdenlive(less possibilities of titler, but under development) and Cinelerra (well elaborated tool, good fonts) work well.

Another way is to make your text in Gimp on a transparent back ground and export as png. Import the png in a multi track video editor on the upper track.

I very nice tool for fading is the automatic keyframes in cinelerra. However, if it is only for a couple of titles learning cinelerra might be overshooting.

pdr · l33t Joined: 20 Mar 2004 Posts: 618

The only command-line editing I have done is for creating DVD menu screens, but of course that starts life as a video clip.

If this is of interest, definitely check out the huge thread on here about creating DVDs.

The most elaborate editing I have done so far was for a menu for 4 episodes of the TV show "Medium". What I wanted was to start with a static image (one frame extracted from the beginning of an episode that is the standard lead-in for the show) and for audio throughout the menu I had a loop from a Toad the Wet Sprocket song (yes, this was for private consumption). After one second in the top-left quadrant of the screen a shrunk down frame from the first episode would fade in over 1 second time; then in the lower-left quadrant a shrunken frame from the second episode would fade in over 1 second; and so on (third episode in top-right, fourth episode in bottom-right). That is 5 seconds total. Then for 1 second the episode title text would fade in on top of the shrunken frame images (all 4 titles fade in at the same time), and that was the end of the menu (well, it would now do a loop on the static ending frame from that clip).

Did all that with imagemagick and some other tools (mjpegtools for things like converting a png to a video clip, etc). Used audacity for creating the audio clip, used frame (29.97 frames per second) for timing - which was fine since the audio did not sync to the video, but I think it would have been do-able even if I did have some sync'd audio.

That was way fun, but was much too time consuming for making the menus for my TV show DVDs, so I ended up writing a script that automatically calculated compression sizes and created a menu for a bunch of episodes in a directory. These menus just have a static background image and static text labels for the episodes..

Edit:

I should mention that this is all "relatively" easy if you are working with progressive, because all the effects work is basically treating each frame as an image; I don't know if there are tools for interlaced.

Also you have to be a little careful of video degradation. That is, you can't just keep decompress-manipulate-compress the image data or it will degrade relatively rapidly (unless you are using some kind of lossless video compression, and I don't know if there is one). The ultimate would be to take all the video and (deinterlace if necessary and) convert to lossless (eg png) images. Now you could play with each frame as much as you want without degrading quality (assuming you keep the original on hand in case of an oopsy). Of course unless it is a small clip this would take a VAST amount of disc space. But in the age of affordable 1TB consumer hard drives, this is not unrealistic even if you are making a feature length film.