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Chris Harvey

Chris Harvey

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FOSS alternatives and video editors

It was a GNU Hurd developer that convinced me that its good to use FOSS on windows, some freedom is better none, even GNU Packages run on windows and most computer users run windows. So here’s a list of links. Some are equivalents to replace software on windows and some are the equivalent on GNU/Linux and some are cross platform so its stupid to call it the “Linux” equivalent. They also make the mistake of saying alternatives to commercial software. The opposite of FOSS is proprietary software.

My friend Archie Moore asked

“Can you recommend any Free (as in freedom) video editing software like premiere.”

I dont know premiere so if its obivous to anyone please leave a comment. All my videos are developed with free software.

The main one I use is kdenlive, Ive also used Avidemux a lot, basically you can take a video, chop it all up, apply some filters, resize, crop etc, maybe add some audio and then put it all back together and save it in the format you want. I also use Blender for some things.

I use ffmpeg, ffmpeg2theora and mencoder for converting to different formats. On windows you can use mediacoder.

Probably the most powerful one is Cinelerra but it only runs on GNU/Linux.

The others I look at every now and again are DIva and Pitivi.

Last I heard Archie was in the UK or Europe so I hope he’s having a good time.

There’s also a review of his Depth of Field exhibition, thats the one I checked out.

2 thoughts on “FOSS alternatives and video editors”

  1. Hey Chris, thanks for that… not in Europe yet.. few months away for that.

    I want to remove all the image (once I shoot it) but all the text (advertising, bumper stickers or whatever else that appears).
    I’m guessing I might have to do this frame by frame.
    Any suggestions?

    Is there such a thing as text-recognition?? Something that would isolate all the text in a video image???

    Cool page! Maintain the rage.

    Reply
  2. Hey Archie,

    I can’t think of an easy way to do that, most of the animation I’ve done is with Blender, its not all that easy to learn but if you want to hook up some time I could show you the basics, I imagine its very useful for digital artists.

    If you watch the video “Wanna work together” that should give you an idea of the kind of thing you can do with Blender.

    Reply

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