Video Edition for Linux

You have some nice vacation video in your Camcorder and want to edit it on your Linux system.
It seems, that Windows user are more luckily, lots of video edition software exists (for example ULead), but Linux users also can edit their videos with free software.

In this post, I'll comment about three applications, which are powerful and easy to use.

Kino

Kino is a non-linear digital video editor which supports many basic video editing and assembling tasks.
But its main feature is the import from raw AVI and DV files, as well as capture footage from digital camcorders using the raw1394 and dv1394 libraries, and export to camcorders using the ieee1394 or video1394 libraries.
During import, it detects scene changes (when you stopped grabbing) and can split the scenes into separate files.

For me, its the application which works best when passing my videos from the digital camera onto the hard drive, without frame dropping.

Install instructions

sudo aptitude install kino

or click here to install it from the browser.

Troubleshooting

A normal user doesn't have privileges to the RAW 1394 device, which is used to transfer data from the camcorder to the computer. You would have to launch Kino as superuser or execute the following commands:

sudo modprobe raw1394
sudo chmod a+rw /dev/raw1394

To make these changes permanent:

sudo echo "install raw1394 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install raw1394 $CMDLINE_OPTS ; \
                sleep 0.5 ; \
                /bin/chmod a+rw /dev/raw1394" > /etc/modprobe.d/raw1394.modprobe

OpenShot

OpenShot is a video editor for GNU/Linux, being simple but yet powerful. It has all functionality one would need for day-to-day video cutting and assemblage.

Its interface supports themes, is very eye-candy and integrates well with Gnome.
You can see a list of features on its website.

Install instructions

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonoomph/openshot-edge
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openshot openshot-docs

or see instructions here if you don't use Ubuntu Karmic.

Kdenlive

Kdenlive is an intuitive and powerful multi-track video editor, including most recent video technologies.
It has tons of video and audio effects and video snippets can be arranged visually on the several tracks.
The resulting video can also be exported to DV devices, or written to a DVD with chapters and a simple menu.

Where Kino's importing feature is more powerful, Kdenlive is so much better when editing and creating the "final cut".

Install instructions

sudo aptitude -y install kdenlive

or click here to install it from the browser.

DVD Authoring

You should install the following additional programs, so you can export the video from Kdenlive to a DVD folder which can be burned to DVD directly.

sudo aptitude install ffmpeg lame mjpegtools dvdauthor