[NCLUG] December 10th, 2019 NCLUG Meeting

Wed Dec 11 09:08:26 MST 2019

I've dabbled a bit with video editors, I could swear I wrote up a short
comparison last year when I was trying out a bunch of them but I can't seem
to find it.

There are a lot of open source editors out there: PiTiVi (abandoned?),
kdenlive, Cinelerra, Flowblade, Shotcut, and I think Blender can also do
video editing though it is largely known for the 3D capabilities.  There
are a couple not open source as well: Lightworks (free to use, but requires
a subscription to output 4K), and Davinci Resolve.

I liked Lightworks but couldn't bring myself to pay $25/mo for 4K,
considering infrequent use.  Shotcut worked ok, I have a note that there
were some repeated frames at scene transitions that I had to clean up after
I made the video.

I know I tried 3-4 of them seriously, but again I lost my notes.

What I can tell you is that I ended up using Davinci Resolve.  It is
professional level and pretty easy to use with a ton of tutorials online.
Its pricing model is interesting: Free, unless you need pro level features
(6K+ video, clustering, multiple GPUs) where it's $300.  It does require a
pretty beefy GPU, I had to upgrade the video card in my 5+ year old system
to something with 3GB.  Also, I spent 4-6 hours over a couple attempts and
was never able to get it working under Linux.  I ended up installing
Windows on a drive that I use for video editing.  Worth it considering how
powerful it is: Multi-cam editing, image stabilization, object tracking,
fancy transitions and titles.

I got this "4x 2.5" bays in a 5.25" slot" drive adapter, it just uses the
bare drive, and I use it like an Iomega Jaz drive.  So I can pop in a drive
for video editing, pop in a couple other drives for archiving footage, pop
in another drive to boot Linux...

Also, I spent a long time trying to track down weirdness related to
MP4/H.264 issues.  It really isn't "editing friendly".  I ended up
resolving the issues by always converting my video into ProRes format using
ffmpeg before editing it.  I had that issue mostly on Resolve, but I wonder
if my Shotcut duplicated frames issue was also related to that.

If you just need to do simple editing, one of the open source ones should
work just fine.  But if you want to do anything fancy, you probably want
Resolve.

For example, this video includes multiple camera angles (an action cam and
a screen recorder) and was pretty easy to edit in Resolve:
https://youtu.be/pxt23H-mYyc

Speaking of screen recorder, I ended up using Open Broadcaster.

On Tue, Dec 10, 2019 at 7:36 PM Bob Proulx <bob at proulx.com> wrote:

> jdewitt at frii.com wrote:
> > What: Tuesday December 10th, 2019 NCLUG Meeting
> > When: Tuesday December 10th, 2019, 6pm
> > Where: Fort Collins Creator Hub,
> >   1304 Duff Dr Unit 15, Fort Collins, CO; map:
>
> Stephen started the first set of demos by describing that he started
> out looking for a tool that could record his desktop.  Found Kazam.
> Demo'd Kazam and it truly was a straight forward screen video
> capture.  It is packaged and readily available.
>
>   https://sourceforge.net/projects/kazam/
>
> But then of course you want to be able to edit the video so that you
> can spiff it up and improve on the presentation by chopping the
> beginning and ending off and things like that.
>
> But first let's talk about AppImage.  "Linux apps that run anywhere."
> The version of the kdenlive that was desired was not packaged.  But it
> was distributed as an AppImage.
>
>   https://appimage.org/
>
> Since kdenlive was distributed as an AppImage that's the way it ran.
> Just download it.  Drop it on the desktop.  Make it executable.  Then
> run it.  Bam!  It's running.  Pretty slick!
>
>   https://kdenlive.org/en/
>
> Running this as an AppImage was pretty slick.  It encapsulates
> everything that is needed to run in a temporary file system which gets
> mounted in /tmp/.mount_foo/ .  So apps need to be able to access files
> by paths that work when running in other directories.  But that isn't
> generally a problem.
>
> There are scripts that can be used to create your own AppImage.  This
> is definitely something I will need to check out for me in the future.
>
> Then a demo of kdenlive video editing.  Introduction to features.  It
> looked quite full featured.  Can add screen titles.  All of the
> expected features such as fades and dissolves are available.  Color
> adjustments.  Other effects.  In addition to the mouse there are
> keyboard shortcuts.
>
> Bob then gave a quick run-through of some DDoS attacks previously
> experienced and the seat-of-the-pants mitigation that was applied to
> mitigate against the attacks.  Starting with a typical Wordpress
> linkback spam attack and using fail2ban to mitigate it.  Then some
> review and show-n-tell of the currently active DDoS attack against the
> GNU Savannah software forge systems.  Basically with some bubblegum
> and bailing wire generated a list of 50,000 IP addresses that were
> abusing the system.  Reduced that to a list of 1,200 /24 subnets.
> Then blocked those subnets.  At that point the systems became quite
> functional to the valid users of the system.
>
> The room was opened for discussion.  Talk of 3D printers.  Cyber
> Monday electronics deals.  Chromebooks.  How Android is almost the
> universal operating system, with just a few exceptions.
>
> We discussed the use of Signal.  We had disagreements as to whether
> one could or could not get Signal to work on multiple devices.  And
> whether it was an Apple iOS specific problem not not.  There was a lot
> of finger pointing.  All good though.
>
> Bill brought up a demo of asciiflow.  This is a web site drawing
> editor for plain text ascii graphics.  Useful for diagrams and other
> similar uses.  (Think artist mode in Emacs!)  asciiflow is pretty
> cool!  Check it out!
>
>   http://asciiflow.com/
>
> Then Bill demo'd a fun little python REPL thing where he replaced the
> various prompts with Unicode Emoji.  Fun!
>
> And then someone mentioned 'Dia' a useful simple free software drawing
> tool useful for doing diagrams.
>
>   https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Dia/
>
> And then we adjourned to dinner.
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