Dear Lazy Web,
Please advise me of decent video creation/editing tools for linux so i don’t have to use windows? I’m not really happy with kino, cinelerra etc al, must admin i’ve not tried blender!
thanks
Paul 
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Take a look at PiTiVi http://www.pitivi.org/wiki/Main_Page, but it has it’s issues too…
Er, so try blender?
It’s has a great video editor built in.
Those are about all the available options (maybe also including mencoder used from a command line) and they all suck. I am not happy about this either.
What about lives http://lives.sourceforge.net/
I can highly recommend kdenlive, super easy to use but still powerful whilst remaining nippy.
There aren’t a lot unless you’re in Hollywood.
PiTiVi is getting there, kdenlive is good but – notice the kde – interface is rather poor and you won’t get anywhere much without studying it & reading the manual for several hours.
Kino is what I use right now. You can sort of get by in it.
I can just confirm to Nick, kdenlive just rocks!
It’s quite easy to use, powerfull and as a quite active community. Just try it out!
I looked into this issue last week. A quick summary, other than PiTiVi, Blender and LiVES, all the other projects such as Cinelerra and Kdeliven appear to be moving forward at a snail’s pace.
PiTiVi looks like it is going to be great for low-end video production, however for professional production, it would be hard to pass over Blender.
The pace of development of Blender is phenomenal. For example, take a look at the many video-editing related enhancements that were introduced in version 2.46 in May 2008 >
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-246/sequencer-changes/
Info on the general updates for 2.48 in October 2008 >
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-248/
Wiki page on Blender’s Video Sequence Editor here> >
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Sequencer/Usage
Example for video editing workflow here >
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Tutorials/Sequencer/Examples_2
Cinelerra, Kdenliven, LiVES are not in the same league regarding ongoing development and improvements. Also to be noted is that Blender is now widely used for real-world 3D production animation and has a stability unmatched by the other potential options.
I would vote for Kdenlive also.
There are patent issues with video editing on Linux because most of the codecs “out there in the wild” has patents on them. Therefore many distributions deliver video editing software from the repositories without such codecs compiled in. For example If you download Kdenlive from the Ubuntu repository, you may find issues with opening or saving MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WMV, etc. files. This is because these video formats has patents attached to them.
There are a few options, most notably to save video in OGG Theora, and to purchase some codec packs (Fluendo and Canonical has such “for sale”) for opening media with patented codecs. You can also try get patent licenses yourself, but such corporations like MPEG.LA will not even talk to you as an “end-user”.
If you manage somehow to import/export your videos, Kdenlive is a really nice and useful tool.
Just a short note: many versions of Windows lacks the needed patent licenses. For example if you got an OEM version of Windows, it is quite probable that $0 patent fees were payed although the software may contain DVD playback code (MPEG-2) and various other patented codecs (Windows Movie Maker). Copies of such OEM Windows are sold from the shelf in the EU.
I agree with Mirlan, LiVES is great ! I use it all the time for video editing. There are people that VJ with it as well.
It has a ton of features and is really easy to use.