Big Buck Bunny is the second open film project headed up by the Blender Foundation, an open film being one created entirely with open source software and with all production materials being made freely available to the public upon completion. The first project, “Orange,” produced Elephant’s Dream, a dark, trippy short, heavy on dialogue and featuring human characters. For the second project, codenamed “Peach,” the emphasis was on cute and fluffy. The result is Big Buck Bunny, a large rabbit who has to deal with some small, and very cruel, rodents. In my opinion, this second project is more successful in almost every way. The final video is available for free on their homepage, and you have the option to buy the DVD if you want to support these open movie projects and the blender foundation.

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I’m lazy, so I scripted the moving parts from the howto that I wrote which described how to build a dvd from youtube videos.

The script is easy as pie to use.

Ingredients

• youtube2dvd
• tovid
• youtube-dl.py (mirror; rename to youtube-dl.py)

Recipe

Initial setup

• Make the script executable (chmod +x youtube2dvd)
• Edit the script, and change the first line to point to the location at which you saved youtube-dl.py, i.e.

  
  YOUTUBE=~/scripts/youtube-dl.py
  

Using the script

• Create a text file which lists, one per line, the youtube videos that you want to be on your DVD, e.g.

  
  http://youtube.com/watch?v=m2W5MjMGa14
  http://youtube.com/watch?v=IznjjbPtNiA
  
  

  If you want, you can supply titles that’ll be used in the dvd menu, e.g.

  
  http://youtube.com/watch?v=m2W5MjMGa14 Witching Hour
  http://youtube.com/watch?v=IznjjbPtNiA
  

  Note that you do not have to supply a title for every video. Punctuation may screw things up.

• Save the text file, and run the script, e.g.

  youtube2dvd mylist

• You’re done. The DVD structure is now awaiting you.

Please post problems, suggestions & improvements to the script to the comments section.

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Ingredients

• tovid
• youtube-dl.py (mirror; rename to youtube-dl.py)

Recipe

• First, create a script that’ll download all the videos you want, e.g.

  
  mkdir youtubevids
  cd youtubevids
  ../youtube-dl.py http://youtube.com/watch?v=m2W5MjMGa14
  ../youtube-dl.py http://youtube.com/watch?v=TN6KYhIfSqw
  ../youtube-dl.py http://youtube.com/watch?v=DuMmSYSKuwA
  ../youtube-dl.py http://youtube.com/watch?v=HTdZzkb8n7E
  

  Make it executable (chmod +x getvids) and run it (./getvids). It’ll do its thing, and when it’s done, you’ll have a folder full of flv files. Flv is the Flash Video format; we need to convert these to MPGs before we can make a dvd out of them.

• To convert them, use this handy script; as above, save it in a text file, make it executable, and run it. Note that it resizes the videos to 352×240, which is more or less the size they are on youtube (but more importantly is the resolution of “VCD on DVD”). There is really not much point in scaling them up, as the resolution sucks. Instead, let your DVD player do the scaling when you come to play your disc; that’s what it’s good at.

  
  
  !/bin/bash
  mkdir mpg
  for file in *.flv
  do
          output=`ls $file -1|cut -f1 -d”.”`
          ffmpeg -i $file -ab 56 -r 25 -ar 22050 -b 500 -s 352×240 $output.mpg
  done
  mv *.mpg mpg
  cd mpg
  

  Let it do it’s thing; once it’s done, you’ll have a folder named mpg which contains the mpg versions of the videos.

• Now we need to build the DVD structure. For this, we’re going to use tovidgui, which is one of the applications bundled with tovid. Run it, and follow these steps:
  • Click “Add Menu”
  • Click “Add Video(s)”
  • Browse to, and select all, your newly created MPGs
  • Click on one of the videos on the left pane
  • Under video options, choose “352×240 VCD on DVD”
  • Click “Use these settings for all videos”
  • Click the big “Encode” button at the top
  • Click Start encoding

  Let it do it’s thing. Once it’s done, it’ll give you a makedvd command to run, which in turn invokes dvdauthor. Run it. Dvdauthor will create the dvd structure, which you can then run (using kaffeine or gxine) or burn to dvd (using k3b, gnomebaker, etc, etc).

And that’s it. Of course, the titles on the dvd are going to suck, since you didn’t change them to anything. If you want to spend some time making your dvd look pretty, play around with the options in tovidgui, and you’ll be able to customize it to your heart’s desire.

Please post comments below if you have problems with the above recipe, and I will make adjustments as necessary.

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This is part of my ongoing series comparing Main Actor with Cinelerra. In this article, I will run through the same exercise with Cinelerra that I did using Main Actor last week: I will produce a movie consisting of two clips and a fade transition. For background, installation instructions, etc, please refer to earlier articles in the series.

Cinelerra

To load clips into Cinelerra, click File / Load Files, and select some to load. Unlike Main Actor, Cinelerra does not provide thumbnails when browsing for clips, so your filenames will hopefully be good enough for you to recognize the clips you’re after. Note that in order to load the clips for use, you should change the “insertion strategy” to “create new resources only”. I have not played in depth with the other options, but by name they seem to allow you to autogenerate timelines from the clips that you select. If so, then it is a pretty arcane feature, perhaps one that should be hidden in advanced options. Certainly the way to load clips should be more obvious. On the plus side, Cinelerra seems to be able to cope with a wider array of file formats than Main Actor.

Once you click the green check icon, your clips will be loaded. The next trick is to find them! The “resources” window has a bizarre two-pane interface, with too-big icons on both sides; this generally means a lot of horizontal scrolling. Why the default is not smaller icons and vertical scrolling is beyond me. (You can right click and ask it to display as text; this is fine, but again better defaults would make a real difference.)

In any case, if you scroll to the right in the left pane, you’ll find “media” and “clips”. The former refers to the raw files; the latter to the edited segments that you have made from these. Like Main Actor, your raw files are not actually edited when you add or remove cut points; the application instead stores metadata about your clips. This means that in both cases project files are not self contained, but rely on your library of video clips remaining in the same places, at least for the interim of the project that you are working on.

So, let’s make clips from your media (we’ll adopt Cinelerra’s parlance from hereon in.) Click on the “media” icon in the “resources” window; click on one of your videos, and drag it to the “viewer” window.

The viewer behaves very similarly to the media player in Main Actor, so much so that it’s a safe bet that either one copied the other, or they both copied another program. The left and right arrow keys on your keyboard advance back and forward through the video; the [ and ] keys set the in and out cut points. There are also icons to fast forward, rewind, play, etc. Unfortunately on my setup, sound does not work in the viewer; also the play feature is pretty spasmodic (these afflictions also affect the “compositor”, which is the equivalent to Main Actor’s preview window.)

So, to make a clip, set in and out cut points ([ and ]), and then press “i” (there’s also an icon to do this that you’ll find if you move your cursor around and read the tooltips.) A dialog pops up and asks you to name your clip. This particular set of functionality is a major score over Main Actor, in that it is a great organizational tool. Or it would be, if not for one flaw: unfortunately, once you click the green check mark, the clip is displayed in the clips folder of the resources window without a thumbnail, unlike in the media folder, so your name really has to be descriptive.

For this exercise, rinse, lather, and repeat, so that you have two clips ready to sequence. Make sure that the mouse cursor icon is selected in the timeline window, and then simply drag your clip from resources and drop it where you want it to appear. You’ll notice that by default cinelerra’s track thumbnails are much better than Main Actor’s. Also, the undo feature is much more responsive. If you want to change the zoom setting, click on the “time” menu on the bottom left; it essentially lets you choose how long the visible timeline should be. Add the second clip by dragging it to the right of the first one, in the same track.

A brief tangent: there is some pretty bizarre behaviour associated with drag and drop editing. If I drag a clip to the second video track from the resources window, the first track is cut at the point that I drop the clip in at. If, however, I drag the clip to the same track, after the the end of the first clip, and then to the second track, everything works as expected. There may be some circuitous reasoning behind this, but, like a lot of other UI features in Cinelerra, I don’t find it to be obviously intuitive.

Timeline, second clip dragged from resources:

Timeline, second clip dragged from same track:

Anyway, back to the movie; we now have two clips in one video track, one after the other. All that remains is to apply a transition. To do this, go back to the resources window, and click on “video transitions”. (Incidentally, just like Main Actor, Cinelerra puts both media files and effects in the same window; as I already complained about in the last article, this adds more clicking around to the editing process than is theoretically necessary.) Cinelerra does not have as many effects or transitions as Main Actor, and they are represented by kindergarten level icons, unlike Main Actor’s animation previews. Nevertheless, the essentials are present, so it is workable. Select the “dissolve” transition, and drag it to the join of the two clips on the timeline.

The current frame is indicated by the vertical white line; you can drag this forward and back on the timeline bar using your mouse, and the preview will be displayed in the compositor window. Frame forward and back, strangely, are mapped to the “1″ and “4″ keys on the numpad (but not on the main number row!), respectively. This allows you to preview the transition, or effect, frame by frame.

You can somewhat adjust an effect’s parameters by right clicking on it, and selecting “show” from the menu (perhaps “effect properties” would be a more appropriate description); unfortunately, on the dissolve transition, the only thing editable appears to be the length that it lasts. I couldn’t even find a way to begin the transition earlier in the first clip; instead, the effect seems to just ignore the first clip’s out point and fade in the second for the duration that you set.

Finally all that remains is to export your movie. Select file / render to see the render dialog. Cinelerra appears to support many more codecs than Main Actor; however, it also appears to support them much less well. E.g., select MPG Video, and then try to change the audio settings; it’ll tell you that “this format does not support audio”. Huh?? For another fun time, try selecting “Quicktime for Linux” — this crashes Cinelerra completely (I guess I needed to have something else installed, but it would have been nice if the application had caught that.) In fact, the only codec I found that didn’t completely hose the application was Ogg Theora / Vorbis.

Rendering starts at the current frame selected in the timeline, which I didn’t realize until the render had started (while rendering, it displays the frame being output in the compositor). Rendering seems to take longer than in Main Actor, but to be fair it using was a different codec, so the comparison is not valid.

I managed to lock the application up by attempting to overwrite an existing file, after which the backup of my project would no longer load. So, I gave up. I was basically unsuccessful at producing an exported video. I could RTFM on this and find the right codecs, install them, and then try again, but the way this particular part of the application behaved was enough of a let-down that I have lost the inclination to do so.

Stability, Overall Ease of Use

In terms of stability, Cinelerra has come a long way. When I first used it, a couple years back, it would crash regularly, and seemingly randomly. The only crashes I encountered while writing this article were during the rendering phase, which I found frustrating; no doubt, if I had all of the required codecs installed, this would be smoother sailing, but it should be the application’s job to detect that rather than mine. Just like Main Actor, it keeps a backup of what you were doing, which you can always revert to; however, too many times when I tried this, the application would lock up with a busy icon, meaning that I had to kill it and try again. And, as mentioned above, loading the backup will sometimes cause the same crash. Cinelerra, in short, is not production quality.

As for ease of use, it again plays second fiddle to Main Actor. A quirky interface is fine, as long as it is intuitive, and there are many good things about the way the application works. However, there are an equally large number of frankly puzzling defaults. If the development team were to put some effort into just the defaults, the usability of the application would increase dramatically. Once you have struggled through the initial learning curve, it is potentially a very productive environment. I can do the described simple editing exercise a lot faster in Cinelerra that in Main Actor; and the application as a whole is more responsive. I expect that if quality continues to increase at the same rate that it has been that it will be a very viable platform in the next couple of years. Equally, the MainConcept developers have a lot to learn from Cinelerra.

Next time…

The match is unfortunately already complete; Cinelerra is currently unconscious and bleeding on the floor, while Main Actor is smirking to the crowd. However, Cinelerra does offer a wealth of features, and I will do at least some more side-by-side comparisons to explore some of these.

All In Series

1. MainActor vs Cinelerra -- Background
2. MainActor vs Cinelerra -- Installing
3. MainActor vs Cinelerra -- UI, First Impressions
4. MainActor vs Cinelerra -- Simple Editing, Part 1
5. MainActor vs Cinelerra -- Simple Editing, Part 2

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I’ve been writing a series of articles comparing the two strongest non linear video editors on the Linux platform. Cinelerra is free and Open Source; MainActor is a commercial product. So far I’ve covered generalities, installation, and first impressions. Now I’m going to move into more useful territory: editing. Part 1 of this article will cover MainActor; part 2 will deal with Cinelerra. To start with, I set the bar pretty low; I will use two short MPG clips, and run them back to back with a fade transition in between. Here are some MPGs if you need some to play along with.

MainActor

Let’s start with MainActor. To load clips, right click in the browser window, and choose “Add Media clip(s)”.

The file browser allows you to preview clips with thumbnails, and generally works pretty well. Once added, clips can be organized into folders, renamed, joined, converted to MPG, and probed for scenes (how well all of this works is subject to a later article.)

Next step is to edit the clip. To do this, drag it from the browser to the media player. When the media player has focus, you can advance forward and back using the left and right arrow keys (pressing shift in combination will fast forward or rewind). Set your cut points using [ to punch in, and ] to punch out. The portion that will be used is marked in a brighter color the player’s timeline. (The green line marks the current frame.)

Now, to add the edited clip to your movie, you click-and-hold with the mouse cursor on the media player image, and drag to the timeline. Once you drop it, the video tracks will be rendered with thumbnail previews, and the audio track with a waveform.

While this is straightforward, there are some definite quirks, mostly associated with adding additional clips. There are three editing modes in the timeline, as indicated by these icons:

Left to right they are labeled “insert”, “overwrite”, “fill”. To illustrate their behaviour, watch what happens when I drop a second clip into the second video track, with some overlap.

Insert (default):

Overwrite:

Fill:

I think it is unfortunate that Insert is the default mode, as it is the least useful and the most error-prone. Fill is by far the safest mode to work in, as it won’t destroy the layout of anything you’ve previously put together on the timeline. I can see Overwrite being potentially useful, although personally I never use it.

Now to apply the transition. First, you need to choose the transition from the browser. (This is another poor UI decision on the design team’s part: the browser has tabs for both clips and effects. Since you are working primarily with clips and effects, it would be nice if these were in their own windows so that you didn’t constantly have to click back and forth between the views when browsing. Better still would be the ability to spawn as many browser windows as you liked.)

In thumbnail mode, the effects are presented as little animations which give a preview of what the effect does. This is helpful, as the names aren’t always fully evocative (try to define “Random Dissolve” vs “Chaotic Dissolve” without actually trying them out).

To apply a transition effect, you have two choices; in the timeline you can either a) have your clips back to back in the same video track, and drag and drop the transition to the join, or b) you can have them overlapping on seperate video tracks, and drag and drop the transition to the beginning of the second clip. The latter method is far more precise; in the former, MainActor will pop up a confusing dialog asking whether you wish to “trim widen clip” or “move second clip”, which basically means do you wish to let it adjust your punch out point from the first clip, or move the second clip forward so that it overlaps by the necessary amount.

Transition, same track:

Transition, seperate tracks:

By clicking on the time-bar at the top of the timeline window, you set the position of the “current frame”, which is synchronized between the timeline, the preview window (where a snapshot is shown) and the effects window. By pressing the left and right cursor keys in any of these windows, you can step forward and back, frame by frame, and thus fine tune your transitions.

If you want to deviate from the defaults of an effect or transition, double click it in the timeline window; that’ll open up controls in the effects window, which you can adjust either for the entire duration of the effect, or over time:

The adjustment graph represents the value of that particular parameter at that point in time in your movie, over the duration of the effect on the timeline. To change the value, drag the slider left or right (you may need to right click and “add key” first, if only one key is defined.) The graph is definitely a little quirky (perhaps even buggy), but you will soon learn how to manipulate it consistently.

Finally, all that remains is to export your movie. You may have noticed the yellow bar at the top of the timeline window; this is used to control the region that background rendering works on, if background rendering is enabled; the amount that has been rendered is indicated by the green bar above the yellow. (Background rendering does decrease overall performance, and I have seen it decrease stability in a previous version of MainActor, so you may decide to switch it off at some point.) Once you click the export icon (or ctrl E), the export dialog pops up, which allows you to choose the (output) format in quite some detail (you have a choice betwen DV AVI types 1 or 2, DV DIF, or MPG of various flavors; of course you can also choose output resolution, sampling rate, encoding, etc.) My 8 second clip, consisting of two source clips and one transition, took 17 seconds to render at DVD quality.

Stability, Overall Ease of Use

Simple editing in MainActor is not without its quirks, but it is quite workable. If you only ever are going to use one or two video tracks, you can easily get away with using the software with one monitor, although 19″ or higher would be preferable. I did manage to crash MainActor once while writing this article, and that was by dragging a clip to the timeline (this seems to be to do with the audio encoding rate of the clip; the files it has most trouble with are AVIs from my digital camera with 11Khz audio tracks.)

Onwards…

Next I’m going to write about the same exercise using Cinelerra. After we’re done with simple editing, I’ll move onto more complicated projects.

All In Series

1. MainActor vs Cinelerra -- Background
2. MainActor vs Cinelerra -- Installing
3. MainActor vs Cinelerra -- UI, First Impressions
4. MainActor vs Cinelerra -- Simple Editing, Part 1
5. MainActor vs Cinelerra -- Simple Editing, Part 2

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