Movie recording & editing problem.

[x]

The project: I'm going to record old films (super-8) to my computer.I'm using an analog video camera and a tv-card. Output via graphicscard's tv-out. The goal is to save these 20 - 40 years old films, keep them for the future, edit them, put them on videotapes today, in a few years time I'll want to create dvd's.
Computer: AMD Athlon XP1700, 512 RAM. Jetway's nVidia GeForce FX5500, hauppage tv-card (bttv module), lots of diskspace.
After lots of experimenting I finally chose the recording program & format:
streamer in text-mode, .AVI-format with mjpg, 768x576, 96 - 100% quality.
It all started out well, I have a few recorded movies to test editing with. Now the fun begins...
Using Mandrake 9.1 I could edit them with MainActor and Broadcast2000. I removed Mandrake, have installed several other distro's - but no editing program can read my films! Using several distro's, default installation with all multimedia they have,
* cinelerra can't read - needs Quicktime??? These are not quicktime movies?
* kino, kdenlive, lives - "unrecognized file"
* MainActor v5 - might recognize, but immediate segfault. MainActor 3.7 doesn't run at all.
* broadcast2000 - no output, silent crash.
(Don't remember all distro's tried, but some are Suse9.1 Pro, Mandrake10.1, DeMuDi, WhiteBox, Ubuntu...)
There is no problem playing the movies (using mplayer).

What is the problem, what am I to do?
* Is the format I have chosen a bad choice, if so what should I use? It has taken me almost a year to be able to make a choice (I'm not a multimedia-person, I'm supposed to be in the machine-room!). Maybe it's too old? I can't afford to buy a digital camera, have to use my old analog.
* Is 768x576 a bad choice? It seems as one film, recorded at 384x288 at least gives me a preview in MainActor and Lives before crashing? But that's what TV uses, right? (PAL system)
(Maybe I need a better CPU, seems some frames are dropped.)
Any suggestions, please before I go completely crazy (the kids objects against this, they say "you can't become what you already are... hmmmz).

[mrBen]

Cinelerra only works with .MOV files, as far as I know.

Kino is mainly for digital video editing - I'm not sure how good its file support is.

You could maybe look at Avidemux (http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/) which may help.

[x]

Ahaa!
That explains some things! I thought cinerella was a continuation of Broadcast, which handles several formats.
Now does that mean - considering the fact that cinerella is aimed at professionals - that quicktime is a better format to use? Or is my choice ok for my purpose?
(I'm a bit qurious, though, when it comes to Kino - and kdenlive, which I think also is for digital video. All video is digital once it's stored in my computer! Maybe that is just another expression for what file's are supported?)

But I found something interesting! Running Dynebolic 1.3 Lives can handle these movies! Unfortunately that's a live-CD, and the keyboard doesn't work...

Oh, and about Avidemux:
This is Linux, remember that, and I have a modem connection only. There is no way I can install any programs outside the distro, and I haven't found any distro that has it.
(I do have the avidemux rpm + tgz, but as usual that is just a small part of the program. This often makes me so sad.)

[mrBen]

I'm not sure what the preferred format is. I've generally stuck with MPEG files when I've outputted, mainly because they have good cross-platform support.

I think Cinelerra was a follow-on from Broadcast 2000, but I really struggled to get it to do anything useful when I was editing - I ended up using Kino, even though I didn't find it as intuitive.

What type of keyboard is not working in Dyne:bolic? USB?

Which program in DB was working?


Digital Video cameras record in the .dv format - Kino has been set up to deal mainly with this type of camera, and this type of file.

[x]

Cinelerra sure is diificult, it's not what I want to start with.
I have a standard ps2 keyboard. It happened with WhiteBox too that it didn't work, no big problem just some wrong setting in XF86config-4 file. Problem with Dynebolic is that I can't edit that file from some other distro, nor change runlevel to boot into. Maybe I'll try to put it on my harddisk, but first I'm trying some other distro's.
The program that worked is named Lives,not very good but usable for now.