The HVX200 dumps down DVC100 to disk.

Which is why I mentioned Nuke, Shake and Houdini in my previous post. I think Avid is crap at effects, but for editing, it’s one of the best out there: excellent media management, simple mark in/mark out approach, robust and nice trimming. I suspect the robustness and trimming responsiveness has a lot to do with the codec all avid video gets converted to. There is simply too much cruft in video codecs and container formats, not only in the FOSS world, but also on Windows. Like or dislike quicktime, but at least it feels like os x is consistent in media production formats. My hope is that mxf will rise as a cross platform professional container format, that can hold DV, but also h264,mpegHD, and so on.

P2 is just a medium, it has nothing to do with container format nor codec.

Not sure about Panasonic, but Sony Broadcast camera’s already record directly to .mxf files.

@Dries Desmet: “if you wanted the overlay text to be animated over a cut, you have to be able to put it on top of both clips at once. An effect is something that is done to a single clip.”

Which is why no professional house does effects work on an Avid or any other cutting tool. The work flow doesn’t expect a single tool to do it all. There are editors and visual effects supervisors with their respective houses / teams.

Generally, all effects work is done in a compositor, and the best of the best are all available for Linux. And yes, they are proprietary. Nuke, Shake, Houdini, etc. Don’t expect to find a layer in Nuke. It’s all nodes all the time.

That said, shock, Blender too has a nodal compositor. Cut your work in the NLE then apply your effects in the Nodal compositor. Don’t try and do too much in the editor. Lord knows we have all seen enough of that rubbish on YouTube with the wonderful text overlays as someone shoots someone in Halo. Woo.

If we are serious about pushing FOSS, we really need the final patches to get into ffmpeg’s SVN for DVC100, and other details as they happen. ( See http://lists.mplayerhq.hu/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2008-January/039966.html )

That helps plenty on the P2 front, which has made a serious dent into professional television production — the P2 is a standard tool for quickie shots that don’t require visual effecting.

The proprietary war to be fought on the Panavision Genesis and Arri’s 35mm feature film replacement products is yet to be seen, and I don’t know much about the format being laid to tape / disk, but I suspect that with Sony involved in the Genesis at one point (and now with their own camera — the one which shot Speed Racer) that it is proprietary. I would need to do a little more chit chat with the folks that are in the know on that sort of thing.

Sincerely, TJS

Something I always liked in avid as well is collapsing of layers. Double clicking and you can go in, add as many layers as you want.

why do you have to create text as a seperate video when you want to overlay, rather than an effect?

It is more correct to have it as separate video because this way it allows for more modifications and customization and animation. It might require from you to learn to use it a bit more, but in the long run, it is the right decision.

That said, there are bits of kdenlive that I find annoying – for instance, why do you have to create text as a seperate video when you want to overlay, rather than an effect? It makes it very confusing when you’re trying to crossfade to other video having overlaid. For a relatively simple video (just still images with overlaid text) I ended up using 4 video tracks.

Still – kdenlive seems to be the current best, but I am hopeful that things are moving forward, albeit slowly, because we are in a better state than 3 years ago….

And my oh’ my was I ever impressed. I can actually be used for video editing; I made a cut of a DV-tape I had lying around – and it was rather painless once I understood that you don’t have tools in Cinelerra, you must use RMB, MMB and LMB for different trimming-options.

I can’t switch to Cinelerra as my work platform (but I never expected that), however I’ll use it for all my personal stuff in the future. Because it actually works, and works well.

BTW: My laptop has 512MiB RAM and 1.5Ghz processor, so the «requirements» are just bull – use the CV-version. I tried kdenlive, but too unstable and crashy. lwn.net has a article series on video editing now soon; you should really read that when it is published.

Cheers -Richard