In Search of a Video Editor
But not just any video editor, oh no. I’m looking for one that can import video clips. One that can do more than five operations in a row without crashing. One that can take a clip with sound in it and render it with the video and audio still synchronized. Crazy, I know.
I realize that maybe one of you will be half-interested in the content of this post. Maybe. But this is what I’ve been working on for most of the last two days, so this is what I’m writing about.
A few months ago I tried Kino, and I hated it. It worked okay for what it was, but it was some sort of beta version and many of the features just didn’t exist. They still don’t, as far as I know.
I heard good things about Jahshaka, but there was a bug in the installer I couldn’t get around. Neither could John, so there went that idea.
A couple days ago, after reformatting my computer, John installed Kdenlive for me. It looked great and seemed to work fine, so I dove in and spent an hour or two editing my post-op video. When I finally rendered the finished video, though, the audio popped and was dramatically out of sync. What’s worse, the edits didn’t match the ones I’d originally made, so half of the video was throwaway footage of me staring into space or adjusting the camera. Completely unusable.
We tried to find fixes in the ample documentation and support there is out there on the interwebs, but there was a lot a crummy working-around to do, so I abandoned it in hopes of getting MainActor to work.
I figured hey, this is a real product made by a real company. It HAS to work out of the box, right? Ha. It will import my .avi and .mpeg files, but it won’t play them. I thought I was on to something when I found a forum post from a guy with the same problem, but his next post was something like “Oh, I found the answer in the manual. Never mind.” Thanks, poophead. The only manual I could find was in German.
I was on the verge of gritting my teeth and installing the notoriously-unstable Cinelerra when I (we) gave up and got Movie Maker running again (one of my sound drivers had gotten lost in the reformatting shuffle), then remade the video from scratch.
I had such high hopes that ONE of these editors would work without too much wizardry, but no. For now I must resign myself to rebooting into Windows every time I want to work on a video. Le sigh.