adventures in *

Using commercially available software is a headache. User interfaces are not user friendly, functionality is lacking, and the cost of the software itself isn’t worth the expense. I’ve tried demos of Sony Vegas, Premiere, Pinnacle. They have some features that are nice, but I would need to buy all 3 and learn the different interfaces to do what I need.

At work, we run a LAMP environment (linux, apache, mysql, php), all open source. I’ve started looking at open source alternatives to do my post processing work and I like what I see. Most of them use command line interfaces, faster and easier to accomplish my tasks. Runtime flags and options are fairly straight forward and are much easier to master compared to the commercial Windows based software.

Handbrake does video transcoding, I can downres my raw 5dm2 video footage from 1080p to 720p and change the bitrate at the same time.

ImageMagick converts image file formats, png->jpg is what I’m doing now.

ffmpeg is the swiss army knife of video editing tools. I’m using it to convert video into still images to reassemble into time lapse footage. It can do the reverse, transcode formats, resize and much more.

stripping audio
ffmpeg -i input.mpg -acodec copy output.mp3

stripping video
ffmpeg -i input.mpg -an -vcodec copy output.mpg

processing multiple videos into one
cat video*.* | ffmpeg -i –

Virtualdub is my favorite program, I’ve been using it for awhile now to convert images into time lapse videos. It includes plugin support to do image manipulation such as contrast/brightness, color balance, sharpness, etc. Very versatile.

I haven’t used yet, but have heard good things about Cinelerra. A linux based near line editor. I think it may replace my use of Sony Vegas.

A couple web pages that have been most helpful are

http://blog.kamens.brookline.ma.us/~jik/wordpress/2009/09/21/script-for-using-ffmpeg-to-crop-pan-and-scale-wmv-to-mov/

http://pr0gr4mm3r.com/linux/how-to-create-a-time-lapse-video-using-ffmpeg/