Video editing on Linux has long gotten a bad rap. A few years ago, the only real options for video editing were either deeply limited in features and polish, or incredibly complex to set up and use.
While Linux still lacks a direct competitor to tools like Apple's iMovie or Final Cut Pro, the current crop of video editing tools are much more capable and easy to use. Two tools in particular stand out: PiTiVi and Kdenlive. Both suites are under active development and look promising. In this article, we'll take a look at what both of these tools can and can't do.
What a video editor needs
You should be able to count on a base set of features from any video editor that's worth its salt. At a bare minimum, any video editor should be able to import a wide range of formats, edit video and audio in a non-linear fashion, provide transitions and titling, allow multiple sources for video and audio, and be intuitive enough that it doesn't require a week's worth of training to become productive.
Ideally, an application would go a bit farther than that and also provide effects to adjust color balance, enhance the image, or just improve the raw video.
The latest version of PiTiVi is 0.13.3. As the version number suggests, it's early on in development and not quite fully baked. The version number reflects features implemented, however, and not stability. In my time working with PiTiVi, it was stable and I did not encounter any serious bugs.
Import works fairly well with PiTiVi, though some formats may be problematic depending on which Gstreamer plugins you're using. For instance, I grabbed RiP: A Remix Manifesto in Ogg Theora and in Apple Quicktime format (H.264). PiTiVi happily imported both formats, but only recognized the video channel when importing from Quicktime. This also was the case when importing movies from an iPhone. Importing some of my Ogg tracks from Magnatune for audio worked just fine.
After doing a bit of detective work (which is to say actually reading through the manual) I found this was due to its use of the Fluendo Gstreamer codecs. Apparently, the Fluendo Gstreamer plugins work well for playback, but not editing. If you're using the "ugly" Gstreamer plugins instead, MP3 import seems to work just fine, but still no luck with Quicktime.
The actual act of importing materials is dead easy. Just drag a file into the PiTiVi Clip Library or use the dialog to snag them from your file system. That is, if you have them on your system.
Right now, PiTiVi only supports importing from files—it doesn't support importing video from a camcorder over Firewire (IEEE 1394) connection. This is rather unfortunate, as many users are going to expect and want to work with a comprehensive application to import and edit video. If you're using a flip cam that generates a usable file format, it's not a problem, but if you have a camcorder, it's a bit of a headache. Support for this is planned for future releases, but isn't yet in stable versions of PiViTi.
One small thing PiTiVi does that is particularly useful when adding clips to a project—it shows the video and audio channels separately by default, and allows you to edit them separately.
PiTiVi's performance gave me no complaints. The user interface is snappy at all times, and was never laggy or left me twiddling my thumbs while waiting for file imports or when moving around fairly large pieces of video and audio.
Working with source materials is straightforward. Just drag the video and/or audio clips into the bottom timeline. You can drag clips around to arrange them in any order you like.
The toolbar at the bottom of the PiTiVi interface allows you to cut clips, merge or link two or more clips, and group clips together (such as audio and video clips). It shouldn't take more than five to ten minutes to get the hang of PiTiVi's editing capabilities, especially since the feature set is so limited.
Most of PiTiVi's operations can be performed from the keyboard. For instance, the arrow keys allow you to step through frames one at a time, which makes it much easier to find exactly the right frame. The space bar starts playback, Ctrl-R calls the "Razor" tool to make a cut—though it seems you must use the mouse to actually perform the cut.
At the moment, PiTiVi lacks markers—the ability to set any markers throughout the project. Markers can be useful in providing visual cues when working on a project for key points in video clips that you might want to use while editing. Again, the documents indicate this is a planned feature, but it was not implemented in the stable release.
Basically, PiTiVi is missing the ability to do anything other than re-arrange source materials. There's no way to do even a simple wipe or overlay to transition between scenes in a project. Captioning the video or providing titles isn't possible within PiTiVi either. This means that PiTiVi is unsuitable for any sort of professional work, and probably isn't full-featured enough for many amateur video editors either.
It is possible to import static graphics into PiTiVi, such as PNGs. This can be used to provide credits and some very rudimentary wipes for projects, but isn't a real substitute for the actual features.
Rendering the final output with PiTiVi is straightforward. Once editing is finished, just click the "Render Project" button, tweak the settings if necessary, and give it a file name to save to. When Rendering, PiTiVi plays back the project and seems to render the final version in real time.
PiTiVi picks some sane defaults and really only asks the user to choose the file name, which shouldn't be too taxing even for the most inexperienced user. If you want to change the defaults, no problem. PiTiVi offers eight default settings like NTSC at 29.97 FPS, 720p HD, 1080p Full HD, SVGA, XGA, etc. It does pay to check before rendering the first time. PiTiVi defaults to PAL on my system, which might be undesirable if burning to DVD for playback with NTSC equipment in North America.
PiTiVi does have a plugin framework that's meant to facilitate the creation of filters, effects, and transitions, but so far no dice. No plugins are available for PiTiVi yet, at least through the official site or distributed with the packages for PiTiVi for popular distributions.
Overall, PiTiVi is a promising application. It's a decent video editor with no frills, and intuitive to pick up. And in the tests I ran, PiTiVi was rock-solid. This isn't something to be taken for granted. Years ago I spent time editing video with Kino for various projects, and learned to save after nearly every edit or operation.
But without the ability to add transitions, titles, and effects, PiTiVi isn't suitable for much home use beyond very trivial work with home vids—much less professional use.
PiTiVi would almost be a good basic editor if it could capture video off of a camcorder and allow at least a few basic transitions.
The first time Kdenlive is launched, it steps through a dialog that sets the standard project time, shows what modules it uses that are or aren't present on your system (like DVgrab), shows the available codecs, and asks where you'd like to put your project files. It also asks if you want to activate crash recovery, which is never a good sign. Typically, an application that specifically has a crash recovery feature built in (with the possible exception of Vim) means that the developers know and expect that it will crash. Now the question is, how often will the application crash?
The answer? All too often—Kdenlive froze up or crashed a number of times during testing. The crash recovery feature didn't kick in to save the day, either. For example, just using the "split audio" feature caused Kdenlive to freeze completely in one case—but not every time the feature was used. In other instances, adding an effect or performing another operation would cause it to freeze or crash entirely.
The codec support with Kdenlive differs from PiTiVi, because Kdenlive uses FFMpeg instead of Gstreamer. I found fewer limitations in terms of importing materials than with PiTiVi. For instance, the Quicktime files that proved problematic with PiTiVi worked just fine in Kdenlive.
The keyboard controls for Kdenlive provide a bit more fine-grained control, and that's a good thing. The arrow keys step through frame-by-frame, but you can also trigger rewind by hitting J and fast forward with L. That should be familiar to Vim users. Hitting J or L again speeds up the forward/rewind process.
You can also control the tool with the keyboard, and switch between the Select, Razor, and Spacer tools from the keyboard. Kdenlive provides the ability to set guides/markers, and you can navigate those from the keyboard by using Alt+ the right and left arrow keys.
The tools provided for editing clips with Kdenlive are easy to pick up, though actual proficiency might take a little while.
The interface itself is also pretty flexible. The main window has five elements by default: the Project Tree that holds clips and the effects stack, the Project Monitor that displays the video being edited, the effects list to choose your effects from, the undo history display, and the actual timeline display where you edit video.
Most of these elements can be detached and re-arranged or popped out entirely. For users editing video on multiple screens this can be very useful. Pop out the Project Monitor and slide it to its own screen to see maximum detail while fiddling with the tools on the other monitor, or use a secondary monitor to hold the dialogs you use less frequently.
After spending a few days with PiTiVi, Kdenlive was like being a kid in a candy store. I found nearly 30 video effects, and a like number of audio effects that could be used to modify the source video out of the box. Kdenlive also has a feature to download additional filter and rendering add-ons.
Actually using the effects takes a little practice. It's not always immediately obvious how to apply some of the effects and transitions to best effect. It's not too difficult to get a handle on, but it usually takes a little bit of trial and error to get things right the first time.
Some of the effects are a little amateurish, though. For example, depending on how you tweak the options on the "Dust" effect, the result ranges from a few random pixels being added to the video to enormous chunks of "dust" and what seems to be an attempt at hair. But it doesn't produce a convincing "dust" effect to the video clip.
The Undo History feature in Kdenlive is particularly useful. It actually shows each step in an editing session in order, so you can step through your edits and even revert to the state of the project at each stage in its production. Simply choose one of the previous states of the project, click on it in the Undo History, and start again from there. There's no "undo undo," so if you return to a previous point in the history, changes past that are lost.
Though it's not technically video editing, one feature that many users will appreciate in Kdenlive is the ability to extract a frame from video and save it as a still image. This can also be very useful if you're creating titles and transitions.
Once the project is complete and it's time to render to final output, Kdenlive offers a dizzying array of options. Unfortunately, they come with little guidance.
The format options are fairly straightforward, you can choose from HDV, Raw DV, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, Flash, Theora, etc. What's confusing is the right-hand side of the dialog, which offers a range of options like "Flash 200k," "Flash 200k 2 pass," through "Flash 12000k 2 pass." That might be meaningful to users well-versed in video production, but it's going to be gibberish to many users.
One thing that doesn't make sense is that Kdenlive has a "Project Settings" dialog that's actually pretty usable, but it doesn't seem to use those settings by default when you render a project.
A few attempts to render projects resulted in "Rendering Crashed" errors, which didn't provide any guidance as to the problem. Was it because Kdenlive couldn't convert from the source materials to the selected format? Was it because the project was too large, or some other reason? It'd be useful to know what caused the error, but Kdenlive only told me that the rendering had crashed.
Assuming the stars align and there are no problems with rendering, Kdenlive shows a progress dialog of the rendering job while you wait. If waiting isn't your style, you can generate a script to render the job in the background or to be run later.
One thing that is nice with Kdenlive is the DVD wizard. You can take one or more MPEG files, create a menu, and output an ISO to be burned to DVD.
For die-hard Linux users, Kdenlive is probably the best option available right now for producing video. But if you compare Kdenlive to video editing tools on other platforms—rather than the competition on Linux—it doesn't fare so well. Tools like iMovie are almost as flexible as Kdenlive, and much easier to use. Tools like Final Cut Pro have more features and are going to be far more suitable for professional users, especially if you factor in the stability issues.
But Kdenlive is almost there. It has the raw features that many users need, and it's fairly usable. It's certainly flexible in terms of formats it can consume and render final output for.
PiViTi and Kdenlive show promise, but neither application is fully "there" just yet. PiTiVi is stable and intuitive, but lacks features. Kdenlive is very feature-rich, but needs to be stabilized just a bit; and some work could be done to make it more user-friendly. My first recommendation for doing video editing on Linux is definitely Kdenlive at this stage, though. It may not be as capable as a tool like, say, Final Cut Pro, but it does have most if not all of what many users need from a video editing application.
Progress is being made, but some work is needed to take these applications the "last mile" to be entirely suitable for mainstream use.
Source By : http://arstechnica.com
While Linux still lacks a direct competitor to tools like Apple's iMovie or Final Cut Pro, the current crop of video editing tools are much more capable and easy to use. Two tools in particular stand out: PiTiVi and Kdenlive. Both suites are under active development and look promising. In this article, we'll take a look at what both of these tools can and can't do.
What a video editor needs
You should be able to count on a base set of features from any video editor that's worth its salt. At a bare minimum, any video editor should be able to import a wide range of formats, edit video and audio in a non-linear fashion, provide transitions and titling, allow multiple sources for video and audio, and be intuitive enough that it doesn't require a week's worth of training to become productive.
Ideally, an application would go a bit farther than that and also provide effects to adjust color balance, enhance the image, or just improve the raw video.
PiTiVi
PiTiVi is Gtk-based and uses the Gstreamer Multimedia Framework. The goal for PiTiVi is to be intuitive for newcomers and suitable for professionals. Intuitive it is, but suitable for professionals? Not just yet.The latest version of PiTiVi is 0.13.3. As the version number suggests, it's early on in development and not quite fully baked. The version number reflects features implemented, however, and not stability. In my time working with PiTiVi, it was stable and I did not encounter any serious bugs.
PiTiVi Interface. Click for full size
After doing a bit of detective work (which is to say actually reading through the manual) I found this was due to its use of the Fluendo Gstreamer codecs. Apparently, the Fluendo Gstreamer plugins work well for playback, but not editing. If you're using the "ugly" Gstreamer plugins instead, MP3 import seems to work just fine, but still no luck with Quicktime.
PiTiVi Project Settings
Right now, PiTiVi only supports importing from files—it doesn't support importing video from a camcorder over Firewire (IEEE 1394) connection. This is rather unfortunate, as many users are going to expect and want to work with a comprehensive application to import and edit video. If you're using a flip cam that generates a usable file format, it's not a problem, but if you have a camcorder, it's a bit of a headache. Support for this is planned for future releases, but isn't yet in stable versions of PiViTi.
One small thing PiTiVi does that is particularly useful when adding clips to a project—it shows the video and audio channels separately by default, and allows you to edit them separately.
Editing and rendering with PiTiVi
All of my tests of PiTiVi and Kdenlive were run on a system with dual Xeon 3.2GHz CPUs, 8GB of RAM, with an Nvidia Quadro FX 1400. While not a top-of-the-line system, it's beefy enough that it should be able to handle video editing and rendering without any grief.PiTiVi's performance gave me no complaints. The user interface is snappy at all times, and was never laggy or left me twiddling my thumbs while waiting for file imports or when moving around fairly large pieces of video and audio.
Working with source materials is straightforward. Just drag the video and/or audio clips into the bottom timeline. You can drag clips around to arrange them in any order you like.
The toolbar at the bottom of the PiTiVi interface allows you to cut clips, merge or link two or more clips, and group clips together (such as audio and video clips). It shouldn't take more than five to ten minutes to get the hang of PiTiVi's editing capabilities, especially since the feature set is so limited.
Most of PiTiVi's operations can be performed from the keyboard. For instance, the arrow keys allow you to step through frames one at a time, which makes it much easier to find exactly the right frame. The space bar starts playback, Ctrl-R calls the "Razor" tool to make a cut—though it seems you must use the mouse to actually perform the cut.
At the moment, PiTiVi lacks markers—the ability to set any markers throughout the project. Markers can be useful in providing visual cues when working on a project for key points in video clips that you might want to use while editing. Again, the documents indicate this is a planned feature, but it was not implemented in the stable release.
PiTiVi Full Screen. Click for larger version
It is possible to import static graphics into PiTiVi, such as PNGs. This can be used to provide credits and some very rudimentary wipes for projects, but isn't a real substitute for the actual features.
Rendering the final output with PiTiVi is straightforward. Once editing is finished, just click the "Render Project" button, tweak the settings if necessary, and give it a file name to save to. When Rendering, PiTiVi plays back the project and seems to render the final version in real time.
PiTiVi picks some sane defaults and really only asks the user to choose the file name, which shouldn't be too taxing even for the most inexperienced user. If you want to change the defaults, no problem. PiTiVi offers eight default settings like NTSC at 29.97 FPS, 720p HD, 1080p Full HD, SVGA, XGA, etc. It does pay to check before rendering the first time. PiTiVi defaults to PAL on my system, which might be undesirable if burning to DVD for playback with NTSC equipment in North America.
Final ruling on PiTiVi
Unfortunately, with the current release, PiTiVi lacks too many features to satisfy any but the most basic use cases. It's possible to edit video and render projects for distribution—but it doesn't provide any effects, transitions, or the ability to create titles or captions. Even simple things, like rotating a frame or anything more than basic management of audio levels, aren't possible right now.PiTiVi does have a plugin framework that's meant to facilitate the creation of filters, effects, and transitions, but so far no dice. No plugins are available for PiTiVi yet, at least through the official site or distributed with the packages for PiTiVi for popular distributions.
Overall, PiTiVi is a promising application. It's a decent video editor with no frills, and intuitive to pick up. And in the tests I ran, PiTiVi was rock-solid. This isn't something to be taken for granted. Years ago I spent time editing video with Kino for various projects, and learned to save after nearly every edit or operation.
But without the ability to add transitions, titles, and effects, PiTiVi isn't suitable for much home use beyond very trivial work with home vids—much less professional use.
PiTiVi would almost be a good basic editor if it could capture video off of a camcorder and allow at least a few basic transitions.
Exploring Kdenlive
Where PiTiVi is intuitive but a bit light on features, Kdenlive is very full-featured but somewhat counter-intuitive at times. Kdenlive also suffers a bit in the stability department, and the application crashed a few times while I was testing it.
The Kdenlive Interface. Click for full size
The answer? All too often—Kdenlive froze up or crashed a number of times during testing. The crash recovery feature didn't kick in to save the day, either. For example, just using the "split audio" feature caused Kdenlive to freeze completely in one case—but not every time the feature was used. In other instances, adding an effect or performing another operation would cause it to freeze or crash entirely.
Editing with Kdenlive
Kdenlive offers a few more choices for acquiring video than PiTiVi. If you have a camcorder with a firewire connection, you can bring in video that way. It also works with clips off your hard drive, static images, and audio files, and it's even possible to record your desktop session if you happen to have recordMyDesktop installed.The codec support with Kdenlive differs from PiTiVi, because Kdenlive uses FFMpeg instead of Gstreamer. I found fewer limitations in terms of importing materials than with PiTiVi. For instance, the Quicktime files that proved problematic with PiTiVi worked just fine in Kdenlive.
The keyboard controls for Kdenlive provide a bit more fine-grained control, and that's a good thing. The arrow keys step through frame-by-frame, but you can also trigger rewind by hitting J and fast forward with L. That should be familiar to Vim users. Hitting J or L again speeds up the forward/rewind process.
You can also control the tool with the keyboard, and switch between the Select, Razor, and Spacer tools from the keyboard. Kdenlive provides the ability to set guides/markers, and you can navigate those from the keyboard by using Alt+ the right and left arrow keys.
The tools provided for editing clips with Kdenlive are easy to pick up, though actual proficiency might take a little while.
The interface itself is also pretty flexible. The main window has five elements by default: the Project Tree that holds clips and the effects stack, the Project Monitor that displays the video being edited, the effects list to choose your effects from, the undo history display, and the actual timeline display where you edit video.
Kdenlive Effects Stack
Everything and the kitchen sink
Undo History Dialog
Actually using the effects takes a little practice. It's not always immediately obvious how to apply some of the effects and transitions to best effect. It's not too difficult to get a handle on, but it usually takes a little bit of trial and error to get things right the first time.
Some of the effects are a little amateurish, though. For example, depending on how you tweak the options on the "Dust" effect, the result ranges from a few random pixels being added to the video to enormous chunks of "dust" and what seems to be an attempt at hair. But it doesn't produce a convincing "dust" effect to the video clip.
The Undo History feature in Kdenlive is particularly useful. It actually shows each step in an editing session in order, so you can step through your edits and even revert to the state of the project at each stage in its production. Simply choose one of the previous states of the project, click on it in the Undo History, and start again from there. There's no "undo undo," so if you return to a previous point in the history, changes past that are lost.
Though it's not technically video editing, one feature that many users will appreciate in Kdenlive is the ability to extract a frame from video and save it as a still image. This can also be very useful if you're creating titles and transitions.
Kdenlive Effects Stack. Click for full size
Rendering and finalizing projects with Kdenlive
Kdenlive Rendering
The format options are fairly straightforward, you can choose from HDV, Raw DV, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, Flash, Theora, etc. What's confusing is the right-hand side of the dialog, which offers a range of options like "Flash 200k," "Flash 200k 2 pass," through "Flash 12000k 2 pass." That might be meaningful to users well-versed in video production, but it's going to be gibberish to many users.
One thing that doesn't make sense is that Kdenlive has a "Project Settings" dialog that's actually pretty usable, but it doesn't seem to use those settings by default when you render a project.
A few attempts to render projects resulted in "Rendering Crashed" errors, which didn't provide any guidance as to the problem. Was it because Kdenlive couldn't convert from the source materials to the selected format? Was it because the project was too large, or some other reason? It'd be useful to know what caused the error, but Kdenlive only told me that the rendering had crashed.
Assuming the stars align and there are no problems with rendering, Kdenlive shows a progress dialog of the rendering job while you wait. If waiting isn't your style, you can generate a script to render the job in the background or to be run later.
One thing that is nice with Kdenlive is the DVD wizard. You can take one or more MPEG files, create a menu, and output an ISO to be burned to DVD.
Kdenlive verdict
Getting up to speed with Kdenlive can take a while, but it's worth the time investment. It's an impressive suite and has a lot of potential. Kdenlive has a few rough edges that need to be smoothed out, and, more importantly, the stability problems need to be taken care of before it's ready for mainstream users.For die-hard Linux users, Kdenlive is probably the best option available right now for producing video. But if you compare Kdenlive to video editing tools on other platforms—rather than the competition on Linux—it doesn't fare so well. Tools like iMovie are almost as flexible as Kdenlive, and much easier to use. Tools like Final Cut Pro have more features and are going to be far more suitable for professional users, especially if you factor in the stability issues.
But Kdenlive is almost there. It has the raw features that many users need, and it's fairly usable. It's certainly flexible in terms of formats it can consume and render final output for.
Conclusion
Demand for video editing tools is only going to increase. This is an area where Linux desperately needs to be competitive if there's hope for the Linux desktop going mainstream anytime soon.PiViTi and Kdenlive show promise, but neither application is fully "there" just yet. PiTiVi is stable and intuitive, but lacks features. Kdenlive is very feature-rich, but needs to be stabilized just a bit; and some work could be done to make it more user-friendly. My first recommendation for doing video editing on Linux is definitely Kdenlive at this stage, though. It may not be as capable as a tool like, say, Final Cut Pro, but it does have most if not all of what many users need from a video editing application.
Progress is being made, but some work is needed to take these applications the "last mile" to be entirely suitable for mainstream use.
Source By : http://arstechnica.com
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