[gentoo-user] Re: Recommend a simple video editor?

[Grant Edwards]

On 2016-06-11, Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@×××××.com> wrote:

> I've got a handful of mp4 video clips (a minute or two each).  All I
> want to do is
>
>  1) Concatenate them with fade-in at beginning of each clip and fade-out
>     at the end of each clip.
>
>  2) Superimpose a title at the beginning for a few seconds.
>
> Can anybody recomment a simple video editor?
>
>
> So far I've tried Openshot and Cinelerra and niether is usable even
> for my trivial task.
[...]
> I may try Cinelerra 2014, but I'm not optimistic -- Cinelerra is known
> for it's slow rate of change.

I tried the 2014 (~amd64) version of Cinelerra, and it still doesn't
recognize the AAC audio in the MP4 files my Moto G phone produces.

I also tried the downloaded binary of Shotcut, but it it requires old
versions of libraries and wouldn't run. So, I tried building it using
the shotcut-9999 ebuild and the mlt-9999 ebuild from

  https://gpo.zugaina.org/media-video/shotcut
  https://gpo.zugaina.org/media-libs/mlt

The git version of MLT installed fine, but shotcut failed to compile:

 cd src/ && ( test -e Makefile || /usr/lib64/qt5/bin/qmake /var/tmp/portage/media-video/shotcut-9999/work/shotcut-9999/src/src.pro 'PREFIX={D}/usr/' -o Makefile ) && make -f Makefile 
 Project ERROR: Unknown module(s) in QT: websockets
 Makefile:95: recipe for target 'sub-src-make_first' failed

I could probably figure out what's wrong and fix it, but...

Meanwhile, I was experimenting with the "melt" command-line video
editor that's included in the MLT library.

https://mltframework.org/twiki/bin/view/MLT/MltMelt
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcUid3OP_4OWC-GJ6KfHK7dIK_yRKKn0e

It's pretty cool, if somewhat cryptic.  The documentation is a little
scarce, and what exists is somewhat hidden from Google by the use of a
common English word as the program name.

But, the developer was kind enough to offer a couple hints on the
mailing list, and it did a great job.

Using the x264 codec it produce an output file that was 1/3 the size
of that produce by Openshot and the improvement in video quality over
Openshot was Yuge(tm)!  I cranked up the x264 bitrate some (filesize
is now a little over half of that produced by Openshot), and the video
quality is great -- it's indiscernible from the input files which are
almost twice as large.

The interesting thing is that Openshot and melt both use the same MLT
backend, so Openshot _should_ be able to generate the exact same
output -- assuming it exposes all the required codec selections and
settings.

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! I have a TINY BOWL in
                                  at               my HEAD
                              gmail.com