I find that I’ve been making a few videos recently, what with
cool stuff happening. Since I shun Windows like the plague (mostly
from frustration with the slowness of virtual machines and annoyance at
boot times for dual boot) video editing can be tricky. The following:
http://www.openshotvideo.com/
can be pretty helpful for smaller, simpler projects, but I find that all
the really cool things seem to require avisynth. Fortunately, it can
be (relatively) easily used through wine. What follows is largely for
my own benefit, but should be pretty helpful to noobs out there
installing from scratch.
- Get wine.
The package available in the standard ubuntu repo for 10.04 is fine. - Download and install the avisynth installer
The Sourceforge page for avisynth will default to offering you the not-so-helpful zipfile of source. Ignore that and click ‘View all files’ and navigate to the latest version (I chose 2.58) and select the .exe file. (Here is the direct link for the executable download page.)
When the download popup comes up, you should have the option of running the executable with wine. Do that, and just click through the install with the default values. - Download and install some codecs
A great package that I got is ffdshow. It appears as though the development forked and the original name fork died, so it is called ffdshow_tryout now…
Get the .exe file from the sourceforge page
Same deal as before, run the wine installer. When checking what to install, be sure to click the avisynth plugins. - Download and install Avs2YUV
To oversimplify, Avs2YUV lets you pipe video out of wine and into linux. Neat!
download avs2yuv.exe from the avs2yuv page
Put avs2yuv.exe in the folder: ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/
You’re all set!
I installed the fully functional version of ffmpeg for more video editing goodness. I recommend it – go here for instructions.
Now to use it:
wine avs2yuv myclip.avs - | ffmpeg -f yuv4mpegpipe -i - -sameq output.avi
check out avisynth’s page for more info on this awesome editor.
Update 12/15/2010:
Since you may be iterating a lot while you edit, it is much easier to view the AviSynth files directly through the power of MAGIC! Well, that and Windows’ permissive file association structure…
- Download VirtualDub, this time just unpack the directory somewhere (in your wine folder if you so desire)
- Start VirtualDub.exe by calling wine VirtualDub.exe (ubuntu also let’s you just double click on the icon, or call the executable directly if you change its permissions to allow execution)
- Just open the .avs file in VirtualDub, and VirtualDub will load the video through AviSynth! Truly amazing.
- You can encode the video out to avi through VirtualDub by just selecting File->Save As Avi…
I was impressed when I saw this in windows, and I’m still impressed. AviSynth has to be, hands down the best video editor I’ve seen.