Pushing Mageia to the video limits

[wilcal]

One of my purposes for all of this is the capture,
and edit, of HDTV videos. Asking a Linux Distro
to do such a thing is pretty hard to do. Blu-Ray
video is the arena of High End Macs and Final Cut
Pro. I've invested the time and $$$ into a hardware
platform. Intel i7 2600k 8GB DRAM and a Nvidia GT 440
can get you there but finding a Linux Distro and
NLE ( Non Linear ( video ) Editor ) to handle this
is pretty hard to do. My choices have been both
Mandriva and Mageia running OpenShot. Just in the
last few days have I been able to demonstrate that
I'm getting there. Here's a short video on YouTube
that can be viewed from 260p -> 1080p:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i2IJmiQosM

Capture device is a Cannon T3i with a Canon 50mm 1.8f
prime lens. Files are MOV and are HUGE. Just this
short video involves about 2.6GB of working files.
All running on Mageia.

Enjoy the ( short ) show.

[ThePonola]

That's pretty cool! :0

The Lil' Digger actually caught me by surprise. X3

Anyway, it's always nice to see praise on something that people have worked hard on. =3
Judging from your post, it sounds like you tried other distros to do HD video editing on, but without success. I'm happy that this seems to be working out for you anyway. <3

[dubigrasu]

What about Cinelerra that people keep talking about? Or Kdenlive...
Have you tried those?

[doktor5000]

AFAIK for cinelerra you need one of the development releases. But as you say, one of our mandrivauser.de members
already packaged one of the more recent CV (community versions) of cinelerra. I'll ask him about it, if he doesn't import
it for Mageia, i'll do it, now that i have enough spare time. I've also got HandBrake in the pipeline, ready for import into Mageia

FWIW kdenlive seems really unstable, or so people told me that tried it with AVCHD content, but also with SD video content.
And development stagnated for quite some time, and there are really few releases ...

Nice fact: Cinelerra was used by WETA Digital, which were responsible for the effects for movies like:
Lord of the Rings, King Kong or Avatar. They used it because it was the only program with a x86_64 base.
If you want to read further, here's a link to the german thread: http://www.mandrivauser.de/forum/viewto ... 51&t=29478

[wilcal]

Many thanks to all for the comments.

I've tried Cinelerra a couple times and it's overly complex
and very poorly documented. You can run Adobe Final Cut Pro
in Wine on many of the Distros. Some key points are a 64-bit
OS that can handle very BIG files without falling on it's
face. And, a BIG fast drive(s). For simple stuff I've shared
OpenShot does quite nicely.

One point I want to make here relates to:

https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=207

"can't mount nfs servers"

Most/all professional video editing creation services use
a centralized rendering/storage system ie Samba/nfs. So if
nfs does not work on a Linux OS, especially 64-bit, then
it's a non-candidate for that function. FWIW The rendering
farms that Pixar and ILM ( Industrial Light & Magic ) both
use centralized, Linux based, rendering farms.

RAID arrays in this field go into the many many terrabytes.
Data rates are in the Gig's per second.

[wilcal]

FWIW kdenlive seems really unstable, or so people told me that tried it with AVCHD content, but also with SD video content.

The answer to that is VERY YES. The 1920x1080 MOV files
captured by my Canon T3i are BIG and very difficult to
deal with. Many/Most OS's including most flavors of Linux,
most of the basic MAC systems and for sure WinBlows systems
can't deal with them. You get stutter and hangs even when
simply viewing, let alone editing, those files. After
watching Mageia, Mandriva and Ubuntu cook their latest
releases that gave me confidence enough that an investment
into a powerful Intel platform ( i7, 2600k, 8GB DRAM ) may
very well be able to handle them cleanly. Using this platform
and Mageia 1 ( 64-bit ) I can edit and compile a short video
using the raw MOV files from the T3i. I can view the dissolve
transitions in OpenShot directly without having to transcode
the MOV file into something easier to handle. Mandriva Cooker,
64-bit, is not capable of this. Ubuntu has some problems.
So far only Mageia, 64-bit, has been able to handle this
for me.

[wilcal]

Oh, a couple more points. A key to this is
Linux Kernel 2.6.38.x or higher.

MoBo is: GIGABYTE GA-Z68X-UD3-B3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 SATA 6Gb/s
Video Board ( frame buffer ): GIGABYTE GV-N440D3-1GI GeForce GT 440 (Fermi) 1GB 128-bit

So dealing with the latest Nvidia driver is vital.