Media
Video Editing:
One of the things I've learnt about Linux, is that it's a little sparse where it comes to video editing. There are a few packages, such as Cinelerra, which is great but a little clunky. Personally, I'm eagerly awaiting the new version which has just started development. Anyway, currently I'm using a combination of Cinelerra, OpenMovieEditor, AviDemux and the Mencoder / FFMPEG command line tools. Also I've discovered Magnatune, where you can buy music from relatively unknown artists for cheap. Plus due to the way it's licensed, you can use the music in your own personal projects (under Creative Commons).
Setting up FFMPEG under Ubuntu 8.04 is a bit of a dog - it's a constantly changing project, so you have to either get a frighteningly old and cut down version from the repositories, or build it yourself... guess which I did... go on, guess! ;)
Below you'll find my guide to setting up Cinelerra in Ubuntu. Equally useful, it contains a section on how to get FFMPEG installed from source:
Cinelerra on Ubuntu with AVI Output (and FFMPEG) - PDF
Cinelerra on Ubuntu with AVI Output (and FFMPEG) - ODT
Screen Recording:
I've been testing recordmydesktop with Linux. Below are some early tests (of Half-Life 2).
The process involved setting WINE to use ALSA rather than OSS which is my usual preference, tweaking the settings a little of recordmydesktop (especially 'full shots at every frame'), running HL2 in windowed mode, then converting the theora ogg file to XViD AVI:
mencoder input.ogg -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=1 -o /dev/null
mencoder input.ogg -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=2:bitrate=8000 -o output.avi
The above does two pass encoding and allows you to import the video into AVIdemux which doesn't support theora ogg files yet. In AVIdemux, unrequired footage can be removed and effects / resizing can be done.
The test files:
