Video editing on Linux

I haven’t done or tried it since a while, but “Today’s Big Story” on LXer with its headline “The current state of video editing on Linux” grabbed my attention. And the article on opensource.com gives some nice links to learn Blender – I should watch a couple of these, since I was a bit overwhelmed by that program in the past.

The best thing about Linux, again and again? That this is all just an ‘apt-get install‘ away, at least on Debian (and/or on Ubuntu)… 🙂

4 Replies to “Video editing on Linux”

  1. Unfortunately video editing on Linux platform is a pain. Blender in general is a software for 3D modelling, not really NLE and some simple tasks are really complicated when compared to for example Kdenlive. The most user friendly and advanced NLE is still Kdenlive. Unfortunately for me it was terribly unstable and slow. I ended (unfortunately) with VirtualBox Windows virtual machine and Sony Vegas software. It is much much more stable and reliable. And ironically much faster (especially with VFX and videoscopes enabled) than natively running Kdenlive.
    BTW. Greetings from IBM. 🙂 I don’t see you online on SameTime. 🙂

  2. Rafal,

    thanks for your comment. Regarding video editing on Linux, I can imagine that it’s a pain as you write (haven’t tried it since a while). Even for basic photo editing with programs like Lightroom, the recommendation is always a Mac Pro with at least (!) 6 cores and 32GB RAM. I have an older quad core with 8GB or RAM, and Linux – that’s why I never tried anything like Lightroom. I guess that for Final Cut Pro you’d need even more, and for me this is only a hobby.

    Kdenlive doesn’t run that good on Debian stable (or it wasn’t even available due to some library dependencies), so I also didn’t try that since a while.

    Oh, about Sametime: I have a whitelist, and added you to it yesterday. So now you should be able to “see” me at work.

    Cheers colleague,
    Wolfgang

    1. As for video/photo editing I have i7 processor and 32GB of RAM. My virtual machine with Windows 8.1 has two cores assigned and about 10GB of RAM. On this configuration i run Lightroom, Photoshop and Sony Vegas with quite reasonable performance. Previously I had Core 2 Quad and the performance was also acceptable, although Sony Vegas playback was more choppy. But in fact Lightroom doesn’t require very high end hardware and tons of RAM if you are not very demanding about fluid and smooth workflow. On my Core2Quad I had 10GB of RAM total and VM has 4GB of the memory assigned and there was no problem with Lightroom use.
      Being honest, I use Linux for a quite long time on every computer I have. I’m intrested in photography (also m43 and also Olympus e-pl5 🙂 ) and tried a lot of opensource software for photo and video editing. In case of photography I have to admit that Lightroom is simply brilliant. It has two main features that make it great piece of software: local adjustmens (with brush, gradient filter etc.) and local database storing all these changes (even locally made with brush). You can go back to every single photo you made and revert or change every single correction. The closest opensource project is I think “darktable”. But I’ve never managed to get the correct colours and other adjustments with this ease.
      From the other side I love Linux overall, I love MPD (music player daemon) and I love Freeplane (mindmap software). 🙂

      Thanks for adding me to the whitelist. 🙂

      PS Yesterday I received used Olympus 60mm 2.8 macro. What a great piece of glass!

      Regards,
      Rafal G.

  3. Hmmm I have a Core2Q with 8GB, 3GB of which I have dedicated to a virtual Win7 image when that runs. I might give it a try, thanks for the tip.

    And yes, that Oly 60mm Macro seems to be good. Ming Thein loved it, a former colleague of mine (from Bremen) even prefers it to the 75mm (maybe he had a bad one, dunno how he couldn’t be happy with it).

    Post some pictures – on Flickr you get 1TB for free…

    And thanks again for commenting, colleague 🙂

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