Boston Linux Meeting Wednesday, March 17, 2004 (room 4-370):Movie Production with Linux & Cinelerra

[invalid at pizzashack.org (Derek Martin)]

On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 09:45:55PM -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> When: Wednesday, March 17, 2004 7:00 PM (6:30 for general Q&A)
> Topic: LinuxSoup VII:Movie Production with Linux & Cinelerra
> Location:  MIT Building 4-370
> Presented by: Christoph Doerbeck

This is an interesting topic.  I wish I could come.  Since I can't, I
have a few questions which might serve as an introduction to the
meeting...

I tried to use Cinelerra on Red Hat 9 a few months ago, and IIRC I
found that it would crash extremely easily.  What distribution(s) do
you run it on, and how reliable do you find it?

When producing my own videos, I've found that the only CODEC supported
by Adobe Premiere or Windows Movie Maker which produces good quality
at reasonable file sizes is Windows Media 9.  Unfortunately, this
pretty much means that the resulting movie can't be played on Linux...
So two related questions to this one:

1. What CODECs does Cinelerra support, and how is the quality vs.
   file size tradeoff?
 
2. Does anyone know what CODECs/settings to use in Premiere to produce
   reasonably sized movies with good quality, which can also be played
   on Linux?  The best I've been able to manage is MPEG II at about
   24MB/m.  Even at that size, there are noticable artifacts in both
   the MPEG video and JPEG stills.  They're not bad, but they're
   noticable.  AFAIAC, stills should be perfect quality (as good as
   the original JPEG image)...

FWIW, I use VideoLan Client for playback.  It plays most MPEG movies
without problems, and I've even managed to play some quicktime and WMV
files with it.  But only some of the CODECs are supported...

If people know that there are other players with better CODEC support, 
I'll certainly be interested to look at them.  I keep meaning to check
out mplayer...  But I had heard that mplayer was difficult to install.
Is that (still) true?

-- 
Derek D. Martin
http://www.pizzashack.org/
GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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