Linux Movies Group

Linux Movies Group Meeting Highlights

Thursday, November 7, 2002, 7pm
Big Asterisk Studio
Berkeley, California

In a special presentation for the Linux Movies Group meeting for November, Drew Perttula made the first public demonstration of Cuisine, a new open source DV video editing suite based on non-monolithic tools and transparent data formats.

Frustrated by available Linux DV video editing tools, Drew began building his non-linear editor in September 2002. By late October he was transcribing and logging captured DV footage into XML format. Soon after that, the timeline-style editor was running, and he was dragging thumbnails from footage index pages displayed in Mozilla right into the timeline. The editor has the beginnings of an effects plug-in system that currently handles the mixing of audio tracks.

Drew is already using Cuisine in video production. “I won't stand for any segfaults or other data-losing behavior”, says Drew. “And most of all, I need it ready by yesterday for an industrial video I've been hired to do”.

What's visible in the full rez screenshot:

• The web page at the right has thumbnails with links to the source files. Dragging those onto the timeline instances new clips.
• On the left edge, you can see the logger/transcriber utility, with some transcript lines at the bottom. Those same lines appear in blue in the timeline view, wrapping and disappearing as space allows. Most colors in this screenshot have been posterized to cut the size of the png; everything's full-color when it runs.
• The top video view chases the timeline program (toss). Holding down alt key anytime makes the player chase the mouse cursor, so you can view
  video+audio that aren't in the show's output very easily. The bottommost 'scratch' track, for example, is never used in the show but I can view
  its contents with the alt key.
• The big blank-looking brick is an audiomixdown effect. It's set to mix anything in the next 3 tracks (called 'audiocut', 'a1', and 'a2'). If
  bricks have audioLevel envelopes, those will be used to scale the audio data.

Q&A

1. What is the software named?
   The system is 'Cuisine', as all the components are named for cooking verbs.
2. How does it compare to Kino and bc2000?
   More stable, more transparent (you can see how the code works), more focused in its goals (no effects, etc). My format-centric design is easier to extend, and it already has features for keeping track of bigger projects (storage of interview transcripts, for example). You can play at variable speed and type your logs at the same time. Pressing enter saves the log (or transcript) at the current time raw ntsc dv is supported. DV-in-avi is mostly supported, but there are giant load times due to the old avi code I have to use (newer code causes segv). No other format (not even pal dv) is supported yet, but the modularization will allow me to add support pretty easily (for the most part)
3. Can I use it now? How mature/stable is it really? What doesn't work?
   Cuisine is very very stable. There has been one gtk-related data-losing crash. Everything else that goes wrong is well-reported in the output logs. It's usable now -- i finished an 8min documentary with a 3-track sound mix last night.
4. How do I transcode with AVI, MPEG and Quicktime? How about import/export as series of individual frames?
   Cuisine reads/writes DV frames in raw or avi files. 1hr of DV is about 13GB. These can be easily broken into still frames, processed, and reencoded (although that's not always what you want); and there are tools to convert them to divx, etc.
5. What types of DV streams can I edit?
   Whatever the decoder (libdv) can read and the player (SDL) can play. Those components can be extended in the future to support more formats. I've been using the 4:1:1 DV format, which is the consumer standard.
6. What cameras are supported/tested? What PC hardware do I need? How much diskspace is an hour of DV?
   We don't know yet how the software behaves on anything less than a dual-Athlon-1600 with 1GB of RAM.
7. How does logging work?
   player with var speed. logs get written to xml
8. What help/support would you like? Where do we go from here?
   plenty of modules to rewrite; some are editor-specific, some aren't
9. Where do I get source material to play with if I don't have a camera?
   i'll post some
10. Where are the docs?
    Lots in the code; some class diagrams exist. The code is well-documented, although i'll write separate manuals too, especially once I nail down the apis.

Thanks to everyone who came and helped make the meeting a success! Headcount was 10: Robin R., Gabrielle P., Drew P., Paul M., Jason H., Ramona H., Bill M., Alvin O., Walter V., and Steve S.