As part of my album writing/recording, I am taking a video diary of the whole thing. I was originally planning on producing video diaries and putting them online regularly, but I don’t think I have the time – so I am videoing everything and I will produce a documentary for the DVD when it is done.
But we have a problem. Video editing is rubbish on Linux. We have been in this constant state of *nearly there* for a *long* time, and I just wish we were actually *there*. There are a number of options available to us:
* [Cinelerra](https://cinelerra.org/) – a very competent, albeit ugly, pro-level editing solution, but I find it (a) waaay too complex and (b) it never really works for me. It also requires something akin to the computer from Star Trek for it to run.
* [PiTiVi](https://www.pitivi.org/wiki/Main_Page) – my personal hope for a long time – GNOME/GTK based and using GStreamer, but Edward Hervey, who is a friend of mine has struggled to find the time to work on the project with his many other commitments. He is always looking for help, and it is an extremely worthy project, but still not there yet.
* [Kino](https://www.kinodv.org/) – too simple for what I want to do really, and I also find it pretty un-intuitive.
* [Open Movie Editor](https://openmovieeditor.sourceforge.net/) – another promising effort, but when I tested it, little worked for me.
Recently, we had an entry to the [Pimp My LugRadio](https://www.lugradio.org/pimpmylugradio/) competition (in which you can win a Asus EEEPC!) that was created in [Kdenlive](https://www.kdenlive.org). Aq had a fiddle with it and liked it, and mentioned it to me. I had a play with it, and it is looking pretty darn good.
My needs for video are pretty simple:
* Get video my camera onto my computer.
* Load it into a timeline.
* Chop it into bits and re-arrange them.
* Add background music.
* Add titles.
* A few simple effects – namely fades and black and white.
* Save the finished video as something that others can play, such as MPG and Ogg.
Kdenlive seems to have all of these features built in, and it uses an Adobe Peemiere-ish interface, which I like. From playing with it, it works pretty well, but its main enemy is stability – I think it needs some serious testing and bug-fixing.
It is currently being ported to KDE 4.0, and I look forward to seeing how that version works out. Once again, we are *nearly there*, but I hope we actually get there with it soon. I have *so much* video stuff I want to play with!
