A Video Editor that Just Works

After my troubles this morning and the subsequent helpful comments from readers, I'm pleased to say I've worked around the pausing issue with recordmydesktop. Here's the command line I used to record a Window hard up against the top left of my display. recordmydesktop --width 1024 --height 768 --full-shots --fps 15 --channels 1 --device hw:2,0 ...

After my troubles this morning and the subsequent helpful comments from readers, I’m pleased to say I’ve worked around the pausing issue with recordmydesktop. Here’s the command line I used to record a Window hard up against the top left of my display.

recordmydesktop --width 1024 --height 768 --full-shots --fps 15 --channels 1 --device hw:2,0 -v_quality 63 -s_quality 10 -v_bitrate 2000000 --no-frame --no-cursor --delay 10 --no-wm-check

As usual I had a VirtualBox window up, which had been booted off of an Ubuntu ISO image, with the first hard disk image being a Windows XP install I use sometimes for work. The aim was to show the Ubuntu install process, and how easy it is to use in no more than 10 minutes. Of course it’s not possible to go into detail about encryption, mirroring, partitioning and so on in 10 mins, so I didn’t. I stick to clicking the defaults basically, which under normal circumstances most users should expect to work. I will make further screencasts later about all the other subtleties of installing, but for now the basics.

Once the 20 mins of video was created – with long pauses in between – I opened up various video editors (see the update on my last post for more on that) and attempted to do something very simple – cut a chunk out of the ogv created by recordmydesktop. Most editors either failed to load the file or crashed in one way or another. I’m not complaining about those editors because I know for certain scenarios they probably all work fine, but not for what I specifically wanted. For example I know avidemux is great at chopping up an MPEG2 video, Kino is great for managing DV from a video camera, and Kdenlive and Blender are great for editing video from a camera.

However the only editor (of those that I tried) that would load the video and even play it sensibly – with me scrubbing back and forth without it crashing out, was Pitivi. Using version 0.13.2.2 from the Ubuntu Karmic (9.10 to be) repository I was able to cut small pieces of silence from my video in a fairly sensible way. It goes something like this:-

Watch the video or scrub forward to a point where I need to cut. Note the time and scrub back and forth until I get to the point I want to cut. Click the cut icon on the toolbar, then move the mouse to where the red line is and click. Thats the first cut point. Repeat for the second cut point, then highlight the bit between and press the trash icon. Simple. I then moved the various bits down the video to bunch it all up and get rid of the gaps and finally exported out to a new fresh ogv file. Job done.

A couple of things though. I could probably RTFM a bit and find out how to en-masse drag all the video down the timeline to get rid of the gaps. I could also do with figuring out how to make my defaults in the output renderer stick (I had to keep changing from stereo to mono and 44K to 22K audio), or find some way to make my own export profile. I’m sure this is probably documented somewhere, however the point I’m making is that to do the basics I didn’t need to read any manuals. Pitivi just worked.

This is quite a departure from my previous experience of video editors. I appreciate that all applications have some learning curve and video editors are especially complex beasts. However part of my motivation for doing this series of screencasts was to develop a fast efficient workflow, and be able to pass that on to others. If I can tell a new potential screencaster that they can install two apps – one for recording, one for editing – and know confidently that they can churn out a good quality screencast to short order then that has got to be a great way to get more people in.

So, thanks to Pitivi I now have a new screencast up on the site called Ubuntu Dual Boot Install.

Also note we’re now distributing the video both from YouTube as well as Blip.tv and of course the main site too. You can also get them via iTunes if that’s your bag. Also a big thank you to Michael from UbuntuClips who originally registered the YouTube account for me 2 years ago!