Video importing and editing on Linux

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Jul 19, 2005 at 10:34:31PM -0400, Alex Beamish wrote:
> I'd like to build a Linux system for importing and editting video, and
> I'd like to get some suggestions for a hardware platform, for video/TV
> import cards and video editing and sequencing software.
> 
> My goal is to build a system that will produce decent quality videos
> from an analog camera -- no money for DV yet, unfortunately. I'm going
> to be importing 20-30 minutes of raw footage (video with audio), cut
> that into a bunch of strips, view each strip and then sequence the
> strips with either straight cuts or a fairly quick fade, and finally
> create a movie file that I'll upload and burn onto a DVD.
> 
> For hardware, I don't have an endless budget, but neither do I want to
> skimp .. if I can get a decent system for $750 or so, great. If
> spending $1000 is going to make a huge difference to the system
> performance, then I'll do that.
> 
> I currently have an ATI RAGE PRO TURBO 128, which was used in my
> wife's Windows machine to capture video in real time (cable TV). I
> believe that will work under Linux, although I've heard both yes and
> no to that. I also have an 80G drive available, so really the hardware
> question is down to processor and RAM, and I'm guessing the answer
> will be, don't worry about processing speed, get as much RAM as you
> can afford.

The gatos drivers work very well with some ati capture cards.  I don't
believe they implement video4linux though, so many video applications
won't work with it directly, although you can always capture the video
and then work with the resulting file in whatever you want.  Some ati
capture cards use bt848/878 chips on the other hand which do work with
v4l (and v4l2) which makes them more flexible.  Other common cards for
getting video into a linux system are pvr cards like the ones from
hauppauge (sp?) which use the ivtv drivers (which I believe are v4l
drivers as well).

Well 80G can handle quite a lot of video at a time, and of course you
can always just limit how much you work on at a time.

CPU speed really just affects how quickly things happen.  If you have
lots of time and little money, then you can trade time for spending less
money on the cpu speed.  As long as you are not swapping, things will
get done as fast as the cpu can do it.  If you are swapping, then it
doesn't matter how fast the cpu is, since it isn't being used at its
full potential.

A few months ago I put together a build server using an athlon64 3500,
asus a8v deluxe board, 2*512M kingston ram, 2*250G WD SATA drives, a
cheapo FX5200 video card, and a small case with a 350W enermax power
supply.  Runs very fast at everything we throw at it.  I think we spent
about $1500 with taxes on the whole pile (including a PX716A dvd
burner).  Leave out those large drives and keep your current video card
and you should be looking at a very fast system with lots of ram for
somewhere near your intended budget I would think.

I don't work with video myself so I am not quite sure which applications
exist under linux for it, but I know there are some rather decent ones
available open source.

Of course it is much simper with dv, where you just connect the camera
to the firewire port and ask one of the ieee1394 applications to capture
the video from the camera and you get the raw mpeg2 dv data from the
camera, complete with cut points for where the camera started and
stopped recording and such.

Lennart Sorensen
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