Nirvana Today

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wilcal

Active member
Two things happened. I joined this
discussion forum and the UPS guy
just delivered my new T3i from Amazon.
And this is my first, I'm sure of many,
posts.
 
One side note. I am a complete amateur to
still photography. But I probably bring
something unique to this forum. Mostly
I shoot video ( previous camera a Sanyo
hand-held ) and compile and edit everything
in Linux. Windows/MAC nowhere in sight.
All the video editing tools in Linux are
pretty weak but that's what makes it fun.
 
i run ubuntu at home and i tried to switch my editing over to Kino and it just made me want to die. At work i will always have tools like the CS5 suite but at home i cant afford that. Until kino or avidmux become more useable i may have to stick to Adobe sadly.

More power to you if you can work in those programs and get stuff done.
 
I also tried to set up a Linux editing box once for fun. I had stumbled upon a flavor that claimed to be centered around media-editing and content creation, I think it was called Knoppix.
It had some basic video editing tools, Blender3D, some sound editors, etc, all baked into the build, and could be distributed as a live-CD.
The live-CD idea intrigued me... the idea of going up to anyone's computer and suddenly turning it temporarily into my editing workstation for on the spot work was REALLY cool!

But sadly, I found the whole thing more work than it was worth for me. The tools were very difficult to use, it didn't run properly as a live-CD on many computers without some serious work with driver wrappers, and in the end of the day I was much happier relying on my Adobe Production Studio suite for any serious work.

Still- welcome to the forum! If your Linux background stems from a hack/tweak/mod background, (then you're my kind of people) get cracking on the Magic Lantern team! As soon as ML is ported to the T3i, I can justify giving up my amazingly hackable T2i!
 
I really wish the Linux community would create a really good editing program. They had done wonders with Blender as an alternative to Maya but have not done much at all in terms of the video editing world. I've tried Kino and Avidmux and they suuuuuuuuuck. I mean suuuuuuuck.

I've gone through my Linux phases and always keep coming back to the Mac because of Final Cut and the various things like DVD studio pro and such. I can't image as a film maker being able to use the tools Linux on a feature film.
 
Since I work exclusively in Linux I've learned a few
things ( tricks ). The MOV format found in the EOS
cameras is not Linux friendly. But, you can use FFMPEG

http://www.ffmpeg.org/

to transpose the MOV format directly into DV format.
Once converted to DV you can import that directly into:

http://www.kinodv.org/

Kino is a marginal at best video editor but at least
you can use it to do some editing. In Ubuntu ( Gnome )
you can drag the MOV files directly into Kino then Kino
can be used to transcode the MOV files into DV files.

I've started to kick around

http://www.openshotvideo.com/

which has some promise to be an entry level editor.
Today I threw together three ( T3i ) test videos and
put them up on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/user/wilcalint

I uploaded one of them in VOB format and the other
two in DV format. YouTube was happy with that and
posted the videos. Feel free to take a look. All and
all no compatibility issues running on Linux except
for the MOV thing.

A huge advantage of Linux over Windows. Extreme stability.
No crashes, ever.

FWIW running a USB cable from the T3i to the Linux box
worked right out of the box. No "drivers" or plugins needed.

The Linux OS I use is:

http://www.mandriva.com/en/

and I'm a volunteer developer for them.

Thanks all for your comments.
 
wilcal said:
A huge advantage of Linux over Windows. Extreme stability.
No crashes, ever.
Click to expand...

...you mean huge advantage over Windows Vista, right? Because Win7 is pretty damned hard to crash, even if you tried to.
Apple has become more popular in the consumer space, so Microsoft shaped up FAST. The whole "Windows is so unstable" thing has kind of run its course IMO.

And for the record, I've crashed Linux dozens of times. So... :P

FWIW running a USB cable from the T3i to the Linux box
worked right out of the box. No "drivers" or plugins needed.
Click to expand...

Interesting. What do you do via USB without Canon's software suite?
The two reasons I think most people plug in the camera are as follows:
1) to use Canon's software to live preview the image on the desktop display (sort of a slow-refresh external monitor if you have a laptop around on a shoot)
2) to install picture styles, again using Canon's maintenance tools.

Since I assume you can't run Canon's software suite on Linux, what do you gain by plugging the camera in? Mass storage device for transferring files?
Doesn't that work without drivers on any modern OS?

I'm not knocking Linux, its great for certain things, but I'm quite aware of what it IS and what its NOT. The reason I don't run Linux full time as my main OS is because it got in the way of my workflow too often to be a useful alternative. Still, its fun to have around, and I admire your patience to deal with its shortcomings in media production!

The Linux OS I use is:

http://www.mandriva.com/en/

and I'm a volunteer developer for them.

Thanks all for your comments.
Click to expand...

Ah, yes, I'm familiar with Mandriva. That's hardcore. I was afraid you'd say Ubuntu, or some other "poser" Linux that is supposed to look as much like Windows as possible.
Good for you, man- you've got some 'nix street cred.
Now go make friends with A1ex in the Magic Lantern thread and start porting it over to your camera!
 
I've crashed Linux too. I love what I've seen and I like the philosophy behind the community. If it weren't for me having so many video needs I'd probably be all Linux.
 
I use Ubuntu for this stuff, but I'm only using the camera at an amateur level.

* Downloading pics: I use a gphoto2 script, which also does a quick sort of the files. Default Ubuntu photo downloader does not like 4GB movies.

* Photo editing: Gimp, Hugin (for defishing), Ufraw + enfuse (for tricky lighting), Gthumb (packed with scripts)...

* Video editing: ffmpeg (I use MJPEG/AVI for editing), VirtualDub + deshaker, avidemux, kdenlive (that's pretty difficult to install, as only the development versions are decent). I also use hugin for defishing videos, but it's pretty slow (1fps). The defishing filter from kdenlive is not good at math :D

Linux it's not (yet) a decent alternative for non-programmers. As for crashing, just try to use my Python tools for analyzing the firmware... it will crash instantly if you don't have enough RAM :D

Canon software runs well from XP in VirtualBox.

Gphoto2 can also do remote shooting via USB.
 
"Crashing Linux" - a quick note on that. The GUI like KDE or Gnome can
be "crashed" or frozen under certain conditions. Flash applications will
cause that on certain occasions. The Kernel and the OS I have never
seen crash. If the GUI crashes I can get to the system remotely or with
a CTRL/F2 log in as Admin and knock the frozen/crashed USER off
line and then restart that user. The Kernel in Linux is pretty bullet proof.
 
a1ex said:
Canon software runs well from XP in VirtualBox.
Click to expand...
I have run both XP and Windows 7 in VirtualBox and it runs extremely well.
I suggest Lots and Lots of DRAM when doing video editing in VirtualBox.
VirtualBox really fools Windows. You can crunch the whole OS and all it's apps
into a single ( huge ) file and move it over to another machine with VirtualBox and
run it there.
 
If the GUI crashes I can get to the system remotely or with
a CTRL/F2 log in as Admin and knock the frozen/crashed USER off
line and then restart that user.
Click to expand...
And how do you recover if a program allocates too much memory and the HDD starts swapping like crazy and the system doesn't respond any more to keypresses for half an hour or so?

My workarounds:

1) shake the laptop (this will park the HDD heads) and turn it off (hold power button for 4 seconds)
2) disable swapping (which forces the kernel to kill processes which allocate too much RAM)

XP seems to be immune to those situations (you can hit end task without much trouble).
 
a1ex said:
And how do you recover if a program allocates too much memory and the HDD starts swapping like crazy and the system doesn't respond any more to keypresses for half an hour or so?

My workarounds:

1) shake the laptop (this will park the HDD heads) and turn it off (hold power button for 4 seconds)
2) disable swapping (which forces the kernel to kill processes which allocate too much RAM)

XP seems to be immune to those situations (you can hit end task without much trouble).
Click to expand...


I use Ubuntu every day as my daily dev box. Back when I was using KDE or Gnome, lock ups were routine. I could not switch to console in these circumstances (Alt+f1, f2, etc). I used to jump on a colleague's box, and SSH in. From there I could always kill the X process and go again.

Since I have gone over to XFCE 4, it is a different world of stability. I now see KDE / Gnome as the modern antithesis of the spirit of Linux.

I don't find Windows 7 unstable at all, in fact it's very nice. I use it at home. I do encounter situations where a process cannot be killed (I mean CANNOT) where only a restart will do.
 
I use ubuntu as my every-day OS, once I get to the point where I'll be seriously editing videos/images, I'll be getting on board with the Win7 crowd.
I've never really understood why their aren't any 'pro' software packages for compositing etc. for linux distros. I know you have your kdenlive, lives, kino, etc, and cinelerra isn't polished enough, IMO, but if people can develop a solid 3D suite (blender), why can't someone do it for video?
I understand that their is a lot of programming that would have to go into it, but if it can be done for the third dimension, why not the second?
 
shyguyfilms said:
I use ubuntu as my every-day OS, once I get to the point where I'll be seriously editing videos/images, I'll be getting on board with the Win7 crowd.
I've never really understood why their aren't any 'pro' software packages for compositing etc. for linux distros. I know you have your kdenlive, lives, kino, etc, and cinelerra isn't polished enough, IMO, but if people can develop a solid 3D suite (blender), why can't someone do it for video?
I understand that their is a lot of programming that would have to go into it, but if it can be done for the third dimension, why not the second?
Click to expand...

Video is a very different monster. In the 3D world, there are dozens of open 3D libraries already available, ranging from OpenGL and the like to rendering ray tracers. The blender team basically just needed to create a UI that could incorporate all the libraries and well documented 3D and animation routines into a fully featured package, and it sort of evolved from there. Remember, early editions of Blender were AWFUL to use, if I recall correctly. It got good much later, only because people were interested in the potential of this project once it had launched. But it wouldn't have happened if it weren't relatively easy to launch the preliminary version.

Video editing is much more complicated- having to keep sound and video in sync across multiple codec formats and hardware acceleration so that you can preview in real time may not seem like it is more complicated than a 3D model. But, if you consider the resources already available to game developers to work in 3D, you might notice its actually a lot harder to start somewhere with a video application.

My .02
 
shyguyfilms said:
I've never really understood why their aren't any 'pro' software packages for compositing etc. for linux distros.
Click to expand...
I'm a yearly attendee at the LA Edition of:

http://www.dvexpo.com/

And every year I make my obligatory visit to
the AVID booth and ask the question when are
they going to port AVID to Linux ( Red Hat ).
And every year I get the same answer.

"Absolutely Not"

So they have obviously have been asked this
before by others. I think there's more going
on here other then the effort to port it over.
I don't think it would be much of a task to
take the Debian version of AVID ( MAC OS )
and get it working on the Linux platform.
Red Hat being the most obvious.
 
wilcal said:
...ask the question when are
they going to port AVID to Linux ( Red Hat ).
And every year I get the same answer.

"Absolutely Not"
Click to expand...
I wonder why that is?
Maybe they have some idea baked into their brains that since its an open source platform that their software can be 'copied' easier, or that their products have to be open source as well.
Personally, if one of the big names in video editing ported some of their software to linux, I think they could potentially see a spike in sales due to the die hard linux fans who refuse to own a win/mac OS.
I find, more often than not, people dont understand linux/open source because they don't want to.
IDK
Sorry for potentially hijacking the thread.
Congrats on the new stuff, and I know you'll find a wealth of knowledge here at dvxuser!
 
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