Flutterby™! : DV camcorder

Ages ago I had a Hi-8 video camera, used it for a little while, then the novelty wore off. But I've been hanging out with the Digital Verité guys, giving me an incentive to use it, the new laptop has an IEEE 1394 (FireWire^tm) port, and after helping Anne set up her Avid system I've been thinking it'd be fun to play with video.

On a lark last week I downloaded Cinelerra, a video editor for Linux. I finally got around to playing with it on the ferry, edited a couple of porn MPEGs because I didn't have anything else on the laptop to work with. After some false starts getting used to its workflow, and a few crashes, I figured out that I had to start thinking like an Avid user. And it works pretty damned well in that role, only a few cut styles (and the world will be better for it), and a reasonable package of effects and filters.

On the way home I stopped at CompUSA, just to check, and they had a DV camcorder on close-out, cheap, with the basic features I wanted.

I started by using dvgrab for input and making an MPEG with lav2yuv, but sound into Cinelerra is still a second step that way. Kino gets the sound too, but only has simple cuts. But at this point tieingh things together should be easy. And maybe, after life settles down, my contribution to Cinelerra could be getting it to read dv files directly.

Of course audio as a second step isn't too bad, because the best thing you can do for your editing is use a continuous sound track.

Digital video editing, on my laptop, on Linux. Charlene's machine has been Windows because we've been concerned about some driver issues, but after some printer problems late last week I'll be moving her to Linux shortly.

The only reason I have for a Windows box any more is to develop for it.