When you start to look at editing video and getting all the the different formats to work you are entering a world of pain.
This was the helpful advice we started with when introducing video editing as part of the Artists do I.T. course.
We wanted to come up with a good solution for teaching video editing.
The problems is, there isn’t one. Especially if we compare it to the other software we have been teaching which has been
- Cross platform – ie available on Windows, Mac and Linux
- Free Software – free to download, to alter and to share.
I ended up doing the demonstration in Kdenlive. This was because we had some great footage of interviews shot on a mobile phone (Samsung Note) – and we wanted to use this relevant content as part of the example. We made this decision after trying many different ways and software to transcode the mp4s to a format that Window Movie Maker would use. We failed. But Kdenlive is a good solution of you can get hold of computer that are using Ubuntu or Linux.
The situation has now turned around. It used to be that not having a stable video editor was a barrier to switching to Linux. Now having a stable editor that works with many formats is a great reason to use Linux as a training operating system if you are doing media work (especially with mobile phones).
In any case the demo went smoothly with Kdenlive. There is a manual that Me and Anna Morris wrote on Kdenlive which is a good resource to get you started. A Guide to Open Source Video Editing using Kdenlive. Thanks go out to the V4C network and Internews (eu) for commissioning this work.
Editing in Action
After putting in the work making the manual it is really heartening to see the software working really well in the training and lab environment. One of the course participants, Bhean, was able to pick up editing very quickly and put together two short showreels of her work in just over an hour.
The full process also involved another Free Software called Handbrake. With this combination Bhean was able to extract her performances in various plays from archived DVDs and to put them together to create a show reel of her work.
Kdenlive Manual
Check out the FLOSS Manual on Kdenlive – Click on the image to see it.