"We live in the YouTube ages" I read on a forum recently. True. Nothing without videos today. Tutorials, presentations, music, sports, gaming, everything has been videotized. Photos were yesterday. We like to watch moving pictures.
Using Action Cameras
So I started with one of these matchbox-sized action cameras.
One switch on front left, for turning on and off,
one switch on top left, for immediate filming (without preceding switching on),
one switch on left side, for activating the setup, in particular the
Wi-Fi network.
On back a touch-screen for maintaining camera and clips.
Micro-USB plug for loading the battery, a microphone, or connecting to the computer. A Micro-HDMI port.
A rechargeable battery and 64 GB Micro-SD card should give 1 1/2 hours of filming.
Produces h.264 MP4 files.
Lots of accessory available to attach it to all kinds of helmets, bicycles, tripods, sticks.
Expensive, of course. Never seen a camera stick for 46 Euros.
If you have a smartphone, you can download an app to remotely control the camera. This is necessary when the camera is on the helmet and you can not verify what the camera is filming. If you activate the camera's Wi-Fi, configure it to contact the app, and then run the app on the phone, it should find the camera, and you can connect after inputting the camera's password and some number proposed by the camera. After that you can fully control the camera on the phone, you see what it is filming, you can switch it on and off, you can configure it, you can watch and delete its videos.
First thing that struck me is the big amount of data that little thing produces.
A Gigabyte for 5 minutes!
Second thing was the bad quality of my hiking video. Shaky shaky!
Third thing was the fact that I filmed too much and wanted to cut that thing down.
When I shoot photos, I always dismiss 50 % of them. Why should it be different with video?
Thus the whole thing is not worth much without editing software.
Video on LINUX
Plugged the camera to my Ubuntu LINUX via USB, turned it on (it seems to be important to first plug the USB and then turn on the camera). The LINUX USB auto-detection showed me a file system. Had to copy the files to my hard-disk to be able to play the videos.
Playing videos on LINUX seemed to be no problem, double click brought up a video player that did what was expected.
Editing videos seemed to be another story. If you know Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program), you know what graphical complexity means. Big big menus full of strange commands.
I looked for video software and came across this Blog article (link), written by a video professional. Was my guide to the following. I did not yet try out Natron, but I tried out Avidemux, Blender and OpenShot. To anticipate my result, I work with OpenShot. Blender is for professionals who know all the terms and acronyms of the video effect world. Avidemux seems to be a little out-of-date, and, like Blender, is more for experts than for normal people like me. By the way, OpenShot uses Blender executables to do the video work :-)
Popular Use Cases
What we want to do with our video is
- create a title, preferably at start, with a transition into the video
- create a trailer, preferably at end, with a transition from the video into the trailer
- concatenate several videos to a big one
- remove parts of a video that are not needed, have been done twice, were not intended, ...
- use music (an audio clip) instead of the original sound
- insert photos to be shown between clips
- fade clips (and audio pieces) into each other
- rotate sloped clips, it is hard to always keep the camera horizontal
- remove that "shaky shaky" from out hiking- or cycling-video (this software is called stabilizer, it is not standard, and it is related to a workflow where you need to mark the region that should be stable)
- .... (lots of things I do not know yet)
Editing Workflow
Generally, with any video cutter, you load video-, image- and audio-files. Then you drag them onto the timeline, which in fact is the video (movie). We could regard it to be the "movie maker workbench".
You can have several tracks on the timeline, arranged below each other. Normally only the topmost clip is shown. Thus you can show additional pictures while the original video and audio is running. You also can arrange clips on different tracks to overlap each other, using transitions, that means one clip fades out while the next one fades in.
To remove the unwanted pieces from a video clip, you need to cut it into pieces. Then you can remove the unwanted pieces.
To combine several clips to a movie, you can concatenate them on the timeline. Hopefully the software supports automatic adjustment of the concatenated clips, else you will be confronted with inputting frame numbers.
Finally you generate a video from your timeline. This is a long running task which might take one hour for a video of 30 minutes. In Blender this is called "Animate", in Avidemux "Create Job", in OpenShot "Export".
General Video Editor Weaknesses
All applications I looked at had the same usability problems.
- They do not report whether they are working, or they are ready to take the next input. When you set a cut, this takes up to ten seconds. During that time you could do other inputs, but the UI would not respond to them. This raises the impression that the software is crashed / frozen. I would like to call this "responsiveness", but this term currently has been occupied by web development (designating flexible layouts).
- We would like to do our computer work, in any application, by using ADD, DELETE, SELECT, CUT, COPY, PASTE (DRAG and DROP, or MOVE, is just another style to do CUT, COPY, PASTE). None of the tools I've been looking at had something like CUT, COPY, PASTE. Moreover in some, ADD and DELETE were buried under tons of other menu items at places where you would not expect them. We expect these actions to be in the "Edit" menu. SELECT is done by mouse click or mouse drag, the selected region or item must be visually marked, and subsequent actions must refer to that selection.
- ESCAPE has no effect. They do not act upon ESCAPE key to abort the current action, instead they finish it. ESCAPE is often pressed while dragging the mouse. It is a common user convenience to cancel anything when ESCAPE was pressed.
- Expert addiction. We would like to have menus that support our use cases. Instead we are confronted with terms we never heard of, big lists of formats we need half a day to understand, techniques are offered but it is hard to find out how they can play our use cases.
- Crashes. Memory must be observed and managed. These are not Java applications, they contain explicitly implemented memory logic. At least shut down softly to save the state of work.
Oh my, this looks like a general computer user petition.
The video editor area exposes the gap between users and expert technicians in an exemplary way.
OpenShot
Now this is my hope for the future. I configured it to auto-save every minute (unfortunately NOT default) to not lose my work by crashes. Within a short time I could cut my videos and the result was lossless and nice. Added titles, generated transitions between clips, set cuts with 'c' or toolbar button, all without crashes. Only when I rotated a clip and then dared to do several clicks (without response) it said Goodbye.
Caution: You need patience when working with OpenShot (or any video software that does not report long lasting background work). Such a tool has to read Gigabytes of data to provide a video clip for cutting. As soon as you load a video with OpenShot you will have to wait, when setting a cut you will have to wait, when you want to preview your work you will have to wait, even when skipping backward the built-in video player it is slow. But OpenShot rarely dies.
Here are some screenshots to get an impression.
User Interface
This is the UI, top left the files in use, right the video preview, on bottom the timeline with clips. When you create a title, it manifests as image file.
Fading
This shows how to fade clips. You right-click the mouse on the clip you want to fade, choose "Properties" from the popup menu, a dialog opens, change to the "Video" tab and click the checkboxes for fading in and/or out.
Rotation
One of my clips was sloped, the horizon was not horizontal. I applied an effect which is called "Fixed Rotation". After testing around with these values it did what I expected. The preview to the left seems to not work.
Of course the edges of the video were also sloped then, so I added a "Mask" effect.
This is the "Mask" effect configuration for my slight rotation. To find the correct values you need to experiment.
Don't forget to choose your target format when generating (exporting) the final video.
Blender
Written in Python. To get near to video cutting with Blender, you first need to configure it to be a video editor (basically it is a 3D animation software). So I watched some tutorials and tried to learn quickly.
The menus (there are lots of menus) are so big and confusing that it is even hard to find out how to remove a clip from a timeline (it is called "Erase").
The user interface is far from being intuitive. To select a clip you must use the right mouse button. Before you can drag a clip to another location you must press 'g' and then click into the clip. When you then release the mouse button, it is still dragging. Blender calls clips "strips".
All in all I managed to cut down my video, and replace the audio track by some nice music, but when I generated the result video I was confronted with a merciless big list of output formats and options I could not understand. I tried the defaults and out came (after a long time) a video that had lost its quality (sharpness). Did not want to publish such.
Don't use the 'c' key for cutting, in Blender it is 'k', or Shift 'K' (soft or hard cut).
Once, I was happily cutting, suddenly the thing did not set cuts any more.
Just showed me frame numbers. Was this because I pressed ESCAPE before?
Had lots of such pitfalls and strange occurrences, which surely all could be easily explained by one of the experts.
That was my impression: it is for experts only.
So, let's send all our videos to the experts for cutting. How poor an expert world would be!
But it's open source, so why do I complain !-(
Avidemux
Got the following error when loading my h.264 MP4 video:
Spent some time with Avidemux to find out how to generate the result video: you must create a "job" to do such. The output seemed to have no quality loss, but maybe this was just because I did not configure it :-)
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