Linux Editors Unite!...and give me advice ;p

Rosie-chan · Post by **Rosie-chan** » Tue Aug 10, 2004 12:07 pm

Ok, so I have a more or less working Linux system on my box. I have Cinelera installed. I have my raw .vob footage and ripped .wav music sitting on my hard drive (alibet the NTFS half of it). I'm anxious to start editing my first AMV.

...what do I do next?

I'd like to propose a bit of a deal to all you Linux people out there...

-- You guys help me out with the technical side of my first editing project...
-- I spearhead a real, honest to goodness effort to get a functional, if basic, Linux AMV guide written for the .org.

Having written some technical documentation before for other websites, I know my way well enough about writing instructions for programs I previously knew nothing about. ~_~

shumira_chan · Post by **shumira_chan** » Wed Aug 11, 2004 10:41 am

Cinelerra can do neat things, such as this:

http://www.animemusicvideos.org/phpBB/v ... p?p=556073

If you can make a Cinelerra-based AMV guide I would definately
be interested in reading it. I know at least one person started
writing a very thorough guide but got sidetracked with kernel
compilation details (!)

http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~yipdw/amvli ... linux.html

I use a different program which isn't as powerful, but have
written a fairly comprehensive guide about it. It also includes
tips on how to use various auxiliary programs under Linux to,
say, make a DVD-compatible disc:

http://www.reimeika.ca/amv/lives/lives_guide.html

That said, if you're really going to be serious about this you've
got a lot of work ahead of you...

Rosie-chan · Post by **Rosie-chan** » Wed Aug 11, 2004 10:25 pm

I'm kinda dissappoined that the person who started writing said docs hasn't responded to this...if there is anything already written, I'd be willing to see it.

I suppose I should narrow my question down a bit: what should I do with my .vob files to get them into Cinelerra? How well does AVISynth, the techniques discussed in Read <a href=http://www.a-m-v.org/guides/avtech31/>ErMaC & AbsoluteDestiny's Friendly AMV Guides</a>, etc, work with Cinelerra?

Kalium · Post by **Kalium** » Wed Aug 11, 2004 10:40 pm

AVS is limited to Windows. You have to preprocess.

shumira_chan · Post by **shumira_chan** » Thu Aug 12, 2004 12:12 am

Rosie-chan wrote:I'm kinda dissappoined that the person who started writing said docs hasn't responded to this

That would be:

http://www.animemusicvideos.org/members ... r_id=38674

...if there is anything already written, I'd be willing to see it.

Well, I posted the links. Those are the only guides
for making AMVs under Linux that I know of.

I suppose I should narrow my question down a bit: what should I do with my .vob files to get them into Cinelerra?

To quote trythil:

cinelerra all the way, yo

so presumably he'd know.

How well does AVISynth, the techniques discussed in Read <a href=http://www.a-m-v.org/guides/avtech31/>ErMaC & AbsoluteDestiny's Friendly AMV Guides</a>, etc, work with Cinelerra?

Oh boy. This ain't Kansas anymore, so forget Windows (but
the guides are still useful, though).
You should start familiarizing yourself with stuff such as
transcode, mplayer and of course cinelerra:

http://zebra.fh-weingarten.de/~transcod ... ode.1.html
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/man/en/mplayer.1.html
http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra/cinelerra.html

trythil · Post by **trythil** » Thu Aug 12, 2004 11:30 pm

Oh wow -- it's amazing what you miss in four days. Sorry about not reading this post 'til now; I was in the mountains. :)

Right now, I'm working on compiling Cinelerra and associated tools for my Gentoo AMD64 setup. It's a scary world, but Cinelerra supposedly can run as a native AMD64 application, so we'll see...

--

Anyway. Cinelerra can handle MPEG-2 video streams natively. All you need to do is rip the VOBs (I like to use transcode's tccat for this) and index them with mpeg3toc. You can do it all in a single command line:

Code: Select all

tccat -i [DVD device] -T [title],-1 | tcdemux -a 0 | split - -b 1024m [file prefix]; for i in [file prefix]*; do mpeg3toc `pwd`/$i.vob $i.toc; done

If you're not using bash or a shell that uses Bourne shell language, adjust as necessary.

The tcdemux command isn't strictly necessary, but it saves a few dozen megabytes by demuxing the audio. split is included because Cinelerra pukes on large files on 32-bit architectures, despite there being no good reason to do so, with GNU/Linux easily supporting frikkin' huge files these days.

--

The theory section and AVISynth section of the guides are very good, regardless of what tools you use. I suggest reading and understanding them thoroughly.

If you have a Windows machine, you can transport data back and forth between Windows tools and GNU/Linux tools. I do this for preparing online distros and so forth -- I enjoy using AVISynth, VirtualDubMod, and the filters available for those tools; and until AVISynth is ported to the GNU/Linux system it's all I can do. For RGB data in Cinelerra this is easily accomplished by exporting as an uncompressed RGB Quicktime file and transcoding that to AVI; for YUV, I've written a small program ( http://www.rose-hulman.edu/~yipdw/passthrough.c ) which takes the output of the mjpegtools LAV2YUV program (which reads uncompressed YV12 Quicktime files) and spits out the raw YV12 data, which can be read into AVISynth using the Rawsource plugin ( http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s ... genumber=2 ).

--

I hope something in there was coherent -- I know I tend to ramble when it comes to this subject. :) If you need any more help, let me know.

trythil · Post by **trythil** » Thu Aug 12, 2004 11:39 pm

Just remembered this re: video data:

Except in some (unfortunately) still rare cases*, the MPEG-2 video data you will get in the ripped VOBs will be telecined or interlaced.

With Cinelerra 1.2.0+ this can be fixed in real-time. (I don't know about other tools; you're better off asking shumira_chan about that.) You can use the Inverse Telecine and Decimate effects for telecined footage, which works in a similar manner to the Decomb AVISynth package, and you can use the Deinterlace effect for interlaced footage.

Of course, you can do all the cleanup in postprocessing too, but pre-processing is easier, and often looks better.

* I only know of a few cases in NTSC-land anime where progressive encoding with the 3:2 pulldown flag was enabled. (PAL telecine usually doesn't present much of a problem.) These include the recent Buena Vista releases of Ghibli films and the Miramax release of Millennium Actress.

Rosie-chan · Post by **Rosie-chan** » Fri Aug 20, 2004 2:30 am

trythil wrote:

Code: Select all

tccat -i [DVD device] -T [title],-1 | tcdemux -a 0 | split - -b 1024m [file prefix]; for i in [file prefix]*; do mpeg3toc `pwd`/$i.vob $i.toc; done

I should point out, for the reference of any others who find this thread, [title] in the above means the title number of the movie on the DVD. As I found out the hard way.