Some experiences editing video in Linux

For a conference in an International Congress, my brother and I planned a talk on gender (masculinities) in the Japanese 1996 film Shall We DANSU?. Since we want to illustrate the arguments with video clips, we decided to rip the video from an original DVD with Spanish subtitles for the audience and, then, to cut the most meaningful clips.

I had undertaken the process successfully in Windows before using programs like Virtual Dub but, because of the metrics of my system (not to blame XP solely for eating up the memory), the encoding of the video took a long time.

Anyway, my first problem was the ripping of the DVD video because I had never done that before. I stumbled because K3B would refuse to read the DVD. I learned that it was because it was locked, so I downloaded the repository to unlock it and then K3B read it. The ripping took like an hour. However, I could not paste the desired subtitles (I don't know how to do it), so I had to use a .srt file downloaded from the Web.

Here, I had to face the question of what video editor to resort to for pasting the subtitles and clipping. I decided to use Avidemux because I found it similar to Virtual Dub. To my surprise, Avidemux read the subtitles and created the segments in a matter of minutes without any hassle.

One advantage of Avidemux over Virtual Dub is that the filter for adding subtitles is included in the program. I remember I had to activate it the latter software following a process that a beginner could not guess: I could do it because I got the instructions from a tutorial.

Avidemux, on the other hand, has a pretty intuitive interface. Even when I had never used the program before, the process of loading the video, inserting the filter, and clipping the video was very clear even without any previous training. Of course, I understand that using other software in Windows for producing video has a positive impact on my learning curve, but it's also good to edit videos using an OS that actually helps you in the process. In the end, the computer I used was the same, the results were the same, but the time to achieve the objective was significantly shorter under Linux than it was in Windows.

The presentation of these clips and the talk will be on Wednesday 15. We will use my Mandriva netbook for this activity, so I'll report on how the computer performed then.