worth reading, if you want to read about my “rants and solutions” that I had at that time

Sincerely,
Peter

Reply from Eugenia: Sorry Peter, this application is not designed for home video editing. It’s a specialized 3D app with some video support on the side. This is not what Joe User needs. It’s impossible to get your head around this app. I don’t have 6 months just to figure it out. Sorry.

That was my point about presets. One can customize those
screen area and build presets for different usages of the
program. (This is also sensible for video editing. The default preset is fine for simply usage, but can be configured to present several input-monitors and one large output monitor. That is the screen, I use most of the day…)

Blender is an orthogonal application. That is one of the greatest things that you can build. It simply offers the whole design pipeline from 3D-modelling over animating through compositing down to video sequence editing and does
this consistently.

You can use some parts of the pipeline or everything at once (which is what VFX guys do all day).

Probably a look into the Manual will make things a lot more clearly.

To answer your usage question: just put the video on the timeline (Spacebar - Movie - Select the movie you captured,
hit N-key and click on Filter-Y).

If you want to generate interlaced output, click on “fields” in render dialog and use “odd” to toggle field order.

Sincerely,
Peter

You see, I am not interested in editing pirated xvid files, I am interested in DV/HDV/AVCHD support, I am a videographer, not a video remixer. Besides, I just don’t see the point of using a tool that it was designed for something different.

So you are wrong about the “have to understand the rest of Blender”, but are probably right, that most people won’t use it for “family videos”, because there are simply too many buttons on the screen (and you can’t see the video editor at first startup…)

But nevertheless: in contrast to other video editing apps (like e.g. Avid), it is _really_ straight forward in it’s usage…

And considering the fact, that the really interesting people maybe want to do “killer action movies” or good looking commercials instead of “videos of their dog”, I personally like an application, into which you can grow, when your projects get more demanding (especially when we get into visual effects) a lot more like those “Windows Movie Maker” wannabees.

Besides: I still can’t get why you need HD editing for movies about your dog

Sincerely,
Peter

P.S.: It isn’t probably too hard, to make a Blender startup file, that hides a lot of the 3D modeller and makes only the video editor accessible. So with a little bit of tweaking, probably even “family video guys” might start to like it…

did you try Blender ?

Yes, it is a 3D-modeller, but it has a nice little video
sequencing application integrated, that does your short list
pretty well.

It even let you do pro stuff with it’s integrated
node compositor.

Let alone the complete 3D-suite that makes complex
3D transitions (and also simple good titling, for which
I use it a charme.

Sincerely,
Peter

P.S.: I once searched a working application to edit 2 hours of live footage and had the same problem as you, that there were no serious little editing application, that simply does it’s job. Well, now I’m a blender developer and now there is one

To use iMovie you need a Mac. On windows machine you have Movie Maker for little video editing. Even if Cinelerra has lot of problems, I bet it’s better than Movie Maker.
Are you speaking about “little video editing features”; I don’t know iMovie but can you tell me a thing that Movie Maker can do and a combination of mencoder, ffmpeg, cinelerra and gimp can’t?

install the firewire sdk (downloadable off apple’s website) then run virtualdvhs

simple capture app that dumps to disk the mpeg2 transport stream your firewire cam has on tape

Mmmkay. Yeesh.