Perhaps the hardest part about moving to Linux from Apple will be losing iMovie for video editing. iMovie is incredibly simple to use and has a ton of good-looking, built-in themes, title scenes, and transitions.
I tried many, many Linux video editors (PiTiVi, KDEnlive, Kino, and OpenShot spring to mind) and they all have big or small problems. I have two video editing tasks that make up 90% of all of my video editing.
Most of the time I want to take DV off of my standard def video camera, crop out a few scenes, stick on a title and credits, and rip it to H264 for uploading to YouTube. Kino is actually quite good at this, though it sometimes has trouble with exporting to H264.
The rest of the time I am taking MP4 clips from YouTube or ripped from DVDs and editing them for playing on my HDTV. I have found Handbrake is nice for ripping DVDs to H264, and Cinelerra works for editing and exporting.
I ran into a bug in Cinelerra with the AAC or AC3 audio produced by Handbrake – in short, Cinelerra saw no audio. A little bit of Googling turned up an easy solution, and now I can rip and clip DVDs with ease.
At this time, I am satisfied with editing video on Linux, and I’ll be working on a nice presentation or two for the GRLUG and/or WMLUG this spring.
