video

This is my lame-o jabber video.

Video editing on Linux sucks. I used Cinerella to make this. Issues encountered:

• The slides had to be individually exported to PNG from OpenOffice.
• Each slide then had to be individually resized in gimp to match the size in the video. Cinerella just couldn’t do that for me.
• Cinerella crashes once in a while, so I learned to save my work every 5 seconds.
• Cinerella’s UI is awful, but you get used to it.
• The biggest problem is its importing and rendering. I had to try out 10-15 different combinations of audio/video formats to make it render the video properly. It couldn’t import any avis or movs that I generated from recordmydesktop’s ogvs (via mencoder). The only format it liked was mp4.
• Then it couldn’t get the sound right. It was recorded with Audacity in mono with 16kbps bitrate. Cinerella kept producing either no sound or sound in only one channel. I had to manually drop the bitrate in the rendered result to 16kbps and tinker with output settings (neither mp3 nor mpeg audio worked). I had to manually duplicate the contents of the audio track into another, which resulted in 2-channel output (even though the project was already set to 2-chan).

To give it credit though, the docs are pretty decent.

I spent way too much time making it all work. Next time, I’ll just find a Mac that I can use to do this.