As usual, when on holidays, one must fill endless video tapes of friends and relatives doing funny stuffs (and boring stuff also). Next we have the task of putting them to DVD. It's not hard, but it took me more time than I expected.
First, we have to capture the raw movie from the camera. I already have a DV camera, so that part is plain easy. I could use command-line dvgrab, but I preferred Kino.
Kino allows for capture (with full control of your camera....you can pause, play, etc from the program) and saving to a variety of formats. For me, I was interested in the DVD format. Kino does this job pretty well, and it also has a few additional tools for some editing, like moving and deleting scenes. I haven't tried those though. Kino can, thus, do the entire job. Unless you really want to express your creativity and apply some fancy effects...or a more professional-like editing.
You guessed it, I wanted to express a little of creativity...and for that I used Cinelerra. Cinelerra has lots of advanced editing options (more than I will ever need) and some cool effects...like chroma key...you know...when those pretty girls tell the weather on TV ;)
Anyway, I didn't want to go that far....just add a few titles and images along with the movie. Cinelerra's manual is big, but it explains well all that you need to know. However, you can try this tutorial first, for a quick start.
So, in conclusion...I captured my DV movie with Kino, saved the movie as QuickTime (this is needed for Cinelerra) and made some editing in Cinelerra. After Cinelerra rendered the movie, I imported it again in Kino and converted to DVD format.
A few tips I learned the hard way:
- Select the option in Kino for splitting the captured movie in multiple files. This makes it easier for editing afterwards, because of Kino's smart auto-split: it detects when a scene ends and another starts. It's also lighter on the machine. I tried working with a 13Gb file in Cinelerra and it kept crashing.
- Don't forget to set your movie properties (video size, pal/ntsc, etc) in Cinelerra. It doesn't ask, and if you set it wrong, you won't get good results.
- When rendering the movie in Cinelerra you have a few choices for the output format. The only one I could make it work back in Kino again was Raw DV.
- And finally, remember that this takes a lot of disk space. 1 hour movie equals more or less 13GB...multiplied by two because of the cinelerra's rendered Raw DV format...and the DVD itself..:)
Have fun!
Posts
