[ILUG] Recommendation

[Lisa Muir]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 1:33 PM, Michael Watterson <watty at eircom.net> wrote:
> Darragh Bailey wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 02:13:24PM +0000, Brian O'Mahony wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> A friend of mine is in the market for buying a new laptop and she wants
>>> it mainly for video editing. He is contemplating a macbook, and asked my
>>> opinion on them and I in no uncertain terms told her how much I hate them
>>> and suggested using linux with something like avidemux etc, and also told
>>> her that I would have to terminate our friendship if she purchased an Apple.

"He is contemplating a macbook, and as...... told her that I would have to"

He or she has enough going on getting to grips with their identity and
sexuality without imposing religious fanatism on them, be it positive
or negative or both in this case.

>> My limited experience has been that anything you can get for linux will
>> be compariable to what manufacturers give away free with camcorders. In
>> fact I found Microsoft's Movie Maker 2 better at most things than what
>> some manufacturer's provide.

I thought this a very fair assesment.

> I still use a version of Adobe Premiere I bought for Windows 3.1 on Windows
> XP.  Works with many XP VFW plugins. I usually import in Huffy or DV to PC
> depending on if Digital Or Analogue source. I bought an old Sony Digital 8
> as it works better as an Analogue to DV format via Firewire better than any
> capture card, so don't use Huffy now. Back in Win 3.11 days I used MJPEG and
> an MJPEG capture card.

What you use isn't as important as much as what you use it to do. If
you are subtitling etc, or editing clips to put up on youtube, thats a
whole lot different from doing "photoshop" type professional edits on
video streams.

> Any of the free Linux or Windows Editors are MUCH better  than MS Movimaker
> which is  video Postcard maker or Video vesion of MS Paint.
>
> After editing I use various mostly  free & Open source tools to make MPEG2,
> DivX, MPEG 4 H.264AVC etc

So linux solutions have codec support. Have you tried anonymising a
person in a video say with a blur box which follows their head as they
walk? or a black strip over their eyes which follows them as they
move?

> You haven't needed an Apple for decent video editing for over 10 years
> unless you are making video out of the box without buying any other tools.

Or unless you'd actually like to do a course in video editing,
everybody I bump into who has done one have been trained on Final Cut
on mac.

> I'd be surprised if Linux isn't better than "out of the box" Apple or
> Windows. I'd also be very pleasantly surprised if Linux can exceed the
> CURRENT version of Adobe Premiere.

"out of the box" apple isn't the video editing standard though.

> I use simple free tools for cut/paste blocks of video (e.g. MPEG from
> Satellite TS recording) and Premiere to make a "production" either from
> video source or stills (video via stop motion animation) or both.

My 9 year old niece does that on an "out of the box" mac.

> Depends on what kind of Video Editing she wants:
>   * Home movie snaps (free tools)
>   * Promotional or advertising material (Adobe probably)
>   * Web Site Clip (different free tools)
>   * Full Feature  (Adobe)

And you could substitute Final Cut everywhere you have written Adobe.

Also got to consider training, if he/she would like to do a course,
from my experience, they are all training in Final Cut.

>> So unless she's happy paying for one of the commerical products such as
>> Adobe Premier, it probably isn't going to matter a great deal which OS she
>> ends up using.

Unless he/she goes for training, or unless he/she ultimately goes for
a job in the area in which case they're going to be looking for
trained talent, and if the training is all done in final cut, well
then he/she could be bang out of luck.

>> I was only trying to add captions and make a DVD from a series of video
>> clips at the time, think it was kino that I tried using, but I also
>> remember running across a few other products that might be useful.

Thats where "video editing" gets very loosely defined and wrongly
comparied. Could you take two video streams, eg of someone walking on
a train platform, and superimpose it on a stream of a train leaving
the same platform but sped up x 1000. "out of the box" apple won't do
that either.

> Windows, rather than Mac. OS X and extra SW not in box costs more than XP +
> extra SW. The HW is near x2 price for same spec. Also Windows HW more easily
> runs Linux. either soley, via multiple boot (Using 3rd party or NT's
> Boot.ini and DD the Linux boot sector to a file pointed to by boot.ini) or
> VMware etc.

Time is the most costly commodity, and wasted time learning a limited
platform which you may grow out of is very expensive.

> How well does a VM with Linux run on OSX?  How easily does a Mac Multiboot
> to any arbitrary  Linux Distro?

Very well apparently! I see a lot of the software development
community moving to macs for that very reason. Winxp, winvista, and
ubuntu all running in parallel on a single OSX instance. Impressive
stuff. They love it for cross platform testing.

Lisa.