Video and Open Source Software
Firstly, when I talk about Digital Video, I am talking about full Brief overview. uality video, filmed using a digital video camera. This means unadulterated digital source. For more info please look at the Types of Digital Moving Image page.
Brief overview
Digital Video... what is it?
It is an image recoded via digital code that relates to the visual make up of the image. Raw digital video is the best quality and has the biggest file sizes because it has the most information stored about the image. All other digital video is basically a paired down version of this information, that relies on various codes and methods of reading the information relating to the moving visual image. See Video Codecs for more information.
Why Digital Video?
The advantage of digital video is that it records visual images as digital code. This means it is easily manageable on computers and becomes a mathematical problem to change the make up of the video. In lay mans terms... it means we can play with the video and construct new video from what we have recorded. ie. Make movies.
The Process
First we have to get our digital video off our Mini DV tape and onto our computer where we can then mess about with it. We can add clips together, cut bits out, put titles on etc. Then, so that we can use this again we must output our 'movie' as a self contained file.
How video editing software works
Due to the large file sizes of video, Digital Video editing software uses a method of creating links to files rather than actually using the video. This means that when you view your video in the editing program, the video file is not actually present but the editor has only made a link to that file. Any changes etc will again not be made to the video files. What the editor does is create a separate file that contains the changes. So to make all of this come together, we must output this at the other end as a self contained movie. Various softwares have various means of doing this and I will explain later what and how Cinelerra on Linux does this.
Programs
How to get your video onto the computer.
First of all we need to get the digital information onto the computer and encoded in a particular way. For more information on this please see the video and codecs page. To do this use a program called Kino which is found on the Dynebolic bootable disc.
What you need:
-A firewire port (1EEE13394)- there is currently only one computer with this at Access Space.
-A DV camera with a DV in/out port.
-A Firewire cable.
Kino