Now that you have a shiny new dv8000 and you have been following this site for a while, you have installed Fedora Core 5 on it. Now, it is time to do some useful stuff with the laptop. Note that it comes with a dvdwriter that can write and format all the common available variations of R & RW. So, why not take advantage of this capability and do fancy video editing?
So, to do this, I set out to learn all I could about video editing. Needless to say, it is not as simple as it sounds! There are a number of items to collect and number of issues to resolve. So, let me tell you about how I went about doing this.
Presumably you have some video source to work with. You can start with some old VHS video tapes you may have lying around. Or, you may have recorded some TV shows that you have always wanted to treasure. So, I am going to assume that you already have material available to you. One unfortunate drawback with VHS tapes is the low resolution of the tapes compared to DVD. However, if these tapes are not available in DVD, then you do not have much of a choice anyway.
I started with some old tapes that I downloaded onto my laptop. These tapes were mpeg videos. Now, I needed some software to convert them, clean them up reasonably well. So, i went hunting to see what is out there. To put it mildly, not much unless you happen to have a Linux farm capable of creating Toy Story. But since this was going to be a couple of afternoon project, I had to settle for less.
I started with trying to find some video editing software, and believe me, there really is not much. I found Cinelerra (see resources) to be too complicated and not at all intuitive. However, it is very sexy and looks very dramatic with 4 video windows and all that (see the screen shots in resources). I also looked at kino. again, I really could not get it work for me. Your mileage may vary. So, after searching far and wide, I found the best editor for my purpose - Avidemux2! This is truly a multipurpose editor. it has all sorts of plugins for cleaning up the video so that at least you can have a reasonable chance of watching the final product on a large screen. The tape will look quite good on a small screen TV. You can easily delete dead zones from the video. You can clean up commercials if your tape contains them. A full description of all the features is beyond this article. One day, I will write up all about the capabilities if there is a lot of interest.
One caveat about Avidemux2 is that you may have to compile from source (See Linux & DVD Recorders in the resources) for some pointers to compiling. Basically, you will need to make sure that you download and install Spidermonkey (you do not really need to install it - Avidemux2 needed to know where the header files are).
Once you have created your masterpiece, you now need to burn this onto a DVD. Here you need some other software. Again, there is not much out there. Your best bet is DVDStyler. I found this to be highly intuitive (my criteria for selecting any software) and easy to use. Note that DVDStyler is a frontend to the command line DVDAuthor. It really makes creating a DVD a breeze and fun. This is also very important to me. Software also has to be fun to use, not frustrating that you end up spending hours on relatively minor stuff.
I found that for x86_64, DVDStyler was difficult to compile. I did spend a couple of frustrating days trying to compile it. It depends on WxSVG library that you can find on its homepage. However, even if WxSVG compiles fine, DVDStyler complained that it was not available on the computer. Finally, I gave up compiling, relying on the RPMs from Livna.
DVDStyler provides you with a simple screen where you drag and drop backgrounds, videos you want to use for the final product, buttons to select chapters etc. Again, it is very easy to use and you should not have any trouble in using it. After you select everything, DVDStyler, creates an XML structured file and uses DVDAuthor to create the final DVD. This file can be saved onto your hard drive. You can also use this file as a template for future projects if you want to keep the same layout and just change the content. Then you can use the command line DVDAuthor to directly create the DVD structure for you. However, I think it is a lot of fun to design the DVD the way you like it. Since this is by definition a visual exercise, my recommendation is to use DVDStyler to do the designing.
DVDStyler can also burn the DVD for you or create is ISO image. I preferred to create the ISO image which I then proceeded to use Nautilus to burn onto a DVD. This is as simple as sticking a blank DVD into the drive, right click on the ISO file in the file-browser, and select "Write to disk". That's it - now simply burn and use your Home theater to watch your masterpiece on a large screen TV..... or not.
There are other software for authoring, most notably Tovid. Tovid is a collection of tools to create and author DVDs. Tovid also has a graphical frontend. However, I was not too impressed by it. It does has a lot of potential though. One of these days, I might go back to look into it. Who knows, it may rival DVDAuthor yet.
