This post is in English cause it speaks about technical stuffs, not interesting for my friends but useful for unusual visitor who are searching for solutions to their problems. I want to make a short guide to video editing under Ubuntu, in my case Kubuntu, a flavour based on KDE. For any Windows user, I just want to say that currently Ubuntu is as simple as Windows in settings, has quite everything in terms of software and so it is a valid alternative to the Microsoft empire. Just for closing this topic, you can try Ubuntu in any flavour without installing it to your machine but simply running it from an USB pendrive, this is not the topic of this post, so i give you the starting point for doing so, that is obviously the official website or the italian version.

I am not a guru of Ubuntu, neither a fan, I simply use it because it is faster (I have a very ancient computer), more reliable (uhhhh, this sounds complicated to be explained… this is not the place) and has plenty of software free. For the video editing, I tried many solution. I am not a guru of video editing, too, I have just started to learn about it for handling with my new video camera, that makes video in FullHD encoding in AVCHD.
At the beginning I started with Kdenlive. There is no reason to choose a linear video editing way, when the non linear video editing softwares works better and leave intact the source material. Kdenlive worked fine with the videos I made with my old camera (that mades video in HD with mov encoding)… until it worked. One day it raised an error. I never got a way to solve it, neither reinstalling the system from scratch.
Cinelerra is the professional solution I chose for replacing kdenlive. It lets you do whatever you need, if you know how to do that. I often have problems with Cinelerra, but the community of users is wide, and so I usually find solutions in a fast way.

Step 1. Installing the software
Ok, the simple way is to get Cinelerra and all the libraries it depends on, install them and use them. I had lot of problems doing that. Mainly this is a matter of codec, I am trying to convert AVCHD that is a strange video format: videos are stored in high quality, but they are BIG and COMPRESSED. Forget about editing them directly, unless you have a new, fast pc (and anyway I am not sure that video editors handle AVCHD files directly). But the problem of codec comes out also in rendering phase (the phase in which Cinelerra takes all your changes, and creates a video from them): the best codec for FullHD seems to be X264, and the best free encoders is available here.

I used the tutorial “Cinelerra for Grandma“, but with some changes. For example I had problem with the X264 lib for encoding High Quality Videos, so I replace the codec with a compilation of the latest version, following this thread. Please note that I had problems and THEN I installed the new version of the libraries. In any case Cinelerra for Grandma is a very good guide, go back to it for any problem or for learning some tricks of this software.
The step to do for installing ffmpeg and X264 and Cinelerra should be done on a terminal and are very simple. You have to follow FIRST this guide and then the guide for Grandma, at this page.

Step 2. Different version of your original videos
Cinelerra is not a destructive software, meaning that you have your videos as resourses and you edit starting from them, but your original videos are never touched, cut, edited or modified in any way. But for the editing part is better to handle with small sized videos, loaded fast and fast to be renderized. In any case, at the end of the editing phase, it is suggested to have a FULL QUALITY copy of your final result. So the idea is, starting from AVCHD (M2T) files, the hardest to be managed by Cinelerra, to make two version of the video: one in a very compressed format, like Quicktime, for editing (usually other guides refer to them as Proxy videos), the other is a very high quality video, like MPEG2, for rendering.

Following this guide you have all the informations for making this step correctly. For the editing phase in Cinelerra remember to import as resources only the Quicktime videos. Cinelerra saves every editing you do in an XML file, so at the end, just before rendering the final video, you can make changes BY HAND to have the low-res files be replaced by hi-res videos.

I won’t cover the editing phase in Cinelerra, I will give you in the next posts some suggestions for having everything work in a proper way. Remember that I am not an expert, anyway whe I had Cinelerra installed, in few hours I had the following epic video ready, encoded in Hi-Res and ready to be encoded again for different purpose (like distribution on youtube, for example).

Stay tuned!