Pat & Dann's 2 part TWAT on video editing & question

[Chess]

Hey guys,

I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed your 2 part twat episodes on video editing. You've inspired me to give it a shot. I have the same video camera that Pat has -- the Canon ZR60 and I have a firewire card in my box but I do not have a hauppauge card (do I need one?). Just to make sure I understand the process: I would capture the video with Kino, edit it with Kino, and then if I don't want a dvd menu or anything I can create the dvd file structure with Kino. If I want a dvd menu then I would export it from Kino in mpeg2 (?) and then import it into qdvdauthor to make the menus and the dvd file structure. Either way, once the dvd file structure is created, I can then burn it with k3b or something similar.

Is that more or less the right process? Thanks for the great TWAT's!

Chess

[Patrick]

You pretty much nailed it. You don't need a Hauppauge card unless you want to capture tv show. For basic video editing you just need a camera, firewire card, kino and a DVD burner. You don't even need a DVD burner if you just want to create a VCD or export out to ogg theora. For creating DVD menus Qdvdauthor and DVDstyler work well. If you don't care about menus then just use the kino export to DVD script. Play with it and less us know if you have any questions. Dan Dennedy (main developer of Kino) is a regular around here and will probably answer your questions as well. We also talk to Varol Okan (developer of Qdvdauthor) fairly often. Both are very down to earth and helpful.

[Chess]

Thanks, Pat. I've got some home movies of my kids that I want to burn onto a DVD so I'll try importing the video into Kino tonight. I'll report back any successes or problems.

[Jza]

Hi Pat I wish it could be a more informative podcast. For example dan talked about mencoder but even though is interesting that mencoder is a project from mplayer and is hosted in hungary is not very useful as knowing which flags and what range did he put for his video.

As you guy said, you mention sometimes is a lot of documentation, so snippets of commands to work out witht his programs are very appreciated.

So is good to know that DVDs are getting there, but a more HOW-TO approach would have made this TWAT much more useful.

[Chess]

Ok, so after editing my video - of my son's 4th birthday - down to about 20 minutes, I went to the "export" tab in Kino, and then selected the "mpeg" tab and in the "file format" drop down box, I was torn on whether to go wtih "3 - generic mpeg" or "8 - DVD." I went with 8 - DVD.

It took about 2 1/2 hours to encode those 20 minutes. This is on a 2.4gigahertz P4 with 1 gig ram. Should 20 minutes take that long rto encode on a machine with those specs? Anyway, I was left with a .mpeg file.

So I open up k3b and select "new project - video dvd". I drag the mpeg file to the blank dvd -r and then try to burn. It gives me these errors:

Code: Select all

/usr/bin/mkisofs: Warning: -follow-links does not always work correctly; be careful.
Warning: Disabling Joliet support for DVD-Video.
/usr/bin/mkisofs: No such file or directory. Faild to open /tmp/kde-chess/k3bVideoDvd4//VIDEO_TS/VIDEO_TS.IFO
/usr/bin/mkisofs: Can't open VMG info for '/tmp/kde-chess/k3bVideoDvd4/'.
/usr/bin/mkisofs: Unable to parse DVD-Video structures.
/usr/bin/mkisofs: Unable to make a DVD-Video image.

Where did I go wrong? It seems like kino did not make a dvd file structure. This is the very first time I've edited video like this so I'm sure I messed something up. Thanks for any help you can give.

[Patrick]

Where did I go wrong? It seems like kino did not make a dvd file structure. This is the very first time I've edited video like this so I'm sure I messed something up. Thanks for any help you can give.

You created an MPEG2 file. You need to import that MPEG2 file into either DVDStyler or Qdvdauthor and create a simple menu. Then you can burn directly out of those programs or have them create a DVD.iso file. You can then open K3B and select burn DVD .iso file.

If you don't care about menus then select DVPipe from the Kino export menu. Then select DVD-Video Dual Pass(FFMPEG). Walk away and come back in a couple hours. You should see 2 directories (VIDEO_TS & AUDIO_TS) in the location you specified. Fire up K3B select File, New Project, New Video DVD Project. Now browse the VIDEO_TS directory Kino created, select all the files in that directory and drop them into the VIDEO_TS directory K3B lists at the bottom of the screen. Click burn. You now have a DVD you can watch in your DVD player.

Let me know if you have any questions.

[Patrick]

So is good to know that DVDs are getting there, but a more HOW-TO approach would have made this TWAT much more useful.

It's tough to get in fine detail in a 10 to 20 minute podcast. We tried to give an intro to video players, codec, editors and utilities. I think we suceeded in that regard. If you guys really want it I could go into really fine detail in the next episode and just concentrate on Kino. Maybe me and Dan could coordinate and cover different facets of the same topic.

Thanks to the hard work of Dan Dennedy, Varol Okan and other people video editing and DVD creation is a reality in linux. It's been a long time coming.

[Chess]

You created an MPEG2 file. You need to import that MPEG2 file into either DVDStyler or Qdvdauthor and create a simple menu. Then you can burn directly out of those programs or have them create a DVD.iso file. You can then open K3B and select burn DVD .iso file.

Pat - thanks so much for your help. I am going to work on it today and I'll post my results.

[Chess]

Pat - I followed your directions but all I ended up with was a single file called "birthday.vob." I do not have the VIDEO_TS & AUDIO_TS directories. Is there another seting I may have missed? Thanks!

[Jza]

So is good to know that DVDs are getting there, but a more HOW-TO approach would have made this TWAT much more useful.

It's tough to get in fine detail in a 10 to 20 minute podcast. We tried to give an intro to video players, codec, editors and utilities. I think we suceeded in that regard. If you guys really want it I could go into really fine detail in the next episode and just concentrate on Kino. Maybe me and Dan could coordinate and cover different facets of the same topic.

Thanks to the hard work of Dan Dennedy, Varol Okan and other people video editing and DVD creation is a reality in linux. It's been a long time coming.

I see at least putting the syntax on the show notes might be a good idea something like:

Code: Select all

converting files with mplayer:
$ mencoder -X 320 -Y 640 -b 22 blah.avi -o blah.mp4

[Chess]

Ok, I'm a dummy. *slaps head*

I could not figure out why it was not working. So, I took a look through the ffmpeg dvd scripts that kino calls and I saw that the script was using dvdauthor, which I did not have installed. I've just installed dvdauthor so I'm going to give it another go.

[ddennedy]

Chess, when you have dvdauthor installed you should see the option to create a DVD-Video Directory in Export/DV Pipe/.... Make sure to select that. Next version (already in CVS) has even better DVD authoring integration from the Export/MPEG screen. See my post at http://www.dennedy.org/ for more info.

[Chess]

Dan-

Thanks for your post! I was successful in my export -- not having dvdauthor was the problem. Once I had that, I did see the DVD-Video Directory under "Profile" (it was not there before). The export worked fine and the resulting burn onto a DVD also worked great.

I like the looks of those changes in CVS -- it looks like doing this export will be even easier, and having the qdvdauthor integration is very cool indeed.

I must say, when I tried editing home movies in Linux in 2002, it was impossible. I did not have a firewire card at the time so I couldn't try Kino, but I did have a tv capture card with a video in. I had to use mjpegtools and xawtv to get the video into my box, and then Broadcast 2000 (the precursor to Cinelerra) to edit. Or, I should say, try to edit. Nothing really worked that well.

Now, things are so much easier thanks to the hard work of folks like Dan Dennedy and Varol. It's amazing how far things have come in the last 3-4 years. Thanks, guys!

[Patrick]

Glad to hear you were successful. I've done a bunch of home videos of my 2 year old son. I have a few more to go and don't mind it as much as I've gotten pretty decent at video editing and understand the tools a little better.

[Jza]

I wonder if anyone want to do an animation of doing this with wink, since wink is so easy to use and it can be bootstrap so the files are small.