Sigh - Why do people keep straying from the requirements of the poster?
He's assembling a budget-budget system. What Mac would you suggest that he
get for about $100 to do video editing?
I suggest, in keeping with the original hardware specs the 900MHz CPU, 256
megs ram, Win XP, one of the generic BT878 tv tuner/capture cards (about
$50.00). The 8 gig HD would be problematic, but could be done in small video
clips. For Windows there are a couple of great FREE video capture programs,
Virtual VCR and VirtualDub.
For editing you could get a pretty decent editor for about $50 and some of
the capture cards come bundled with one and other software.
I agree with one of the original responders that you don't want to give a
kid just getting into "serious" computing the negative experience of lame
software (and thereby also a bad experience of Linux).
It pays to be OS agnostic when it come to the applications you require.
Have Fun,
Mike Wafkowski
----- Original Message -----
From: "Riccardo Facchini"
--- Kevin Donnelly
wrote: On Thursday 18 March 2004 6:16 am, Steve Lett wrote:
How do I use the VCR to send the movies to the 'puter? I'm assuming there is some kind of video card that will let us connect the VCR and rip the video. Needs to be as cheap a solution as possible as he is cutting grass for the costs. Any ideas about what kind of video hardware I need? (using a donated Celeron 900 Mhz mainboard and probably have an 8Gb drive in the junk bin that I can start him off with)
To be honest, multimedia stuff like this is about the only area where Linux lags at the minute. Kino is not bad, and I've used it on 8.2, but it is not terrific either. There is also an app called Kdenlive which looks quite promising, but I haven't used that yet.
I think the above deal with digital video (eg from digicams). You will want an analogue solution, since you're working from videotapes. I think there is a demo version of MainActor on the 8.2 disks, which would do this, but the last time I used MA I thought it was very buggy, and the company seems more focussed on Windows stuff now.
Not to put too fine a point on it, it may be that at this stage you should bite the bullet and use Windows for this. There are many apps in development, but they haven't gone far enough along to be easy to use (just the same way as a couple of years ago there were very good CD burning apps, and then K3B came along as a really well-designed end-user package - we're not there yet on video-editing). If you're trying to introduce your lad to Linux, the worst thing you could do is put him off it early on by trying to get it to do something it's not quite ready for - he'd take that as a comment on the whole OS, and forget about all the other office, network, systems, graphics, programming, games etc that are better on Linux.
If he's interested in doing some creative video stuff, you might do worse than point him at Blender, which is a free 3D package which can be used to make animations. That works very well (although it's not something he'll pick up overnight!), and is under heavy development since it was made GPL last year (after a "community" buyout).
--
Best wishes
Kevin Donnelly
www.kyfieithu.co.uk - Meddalwedd Rhydd yn Gymraeg
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I know this will go against what you want to teach the lad, but what about going to a Mac OS X workstation? You would have both worlds...
The best of the best in image editing (Mac IS the tool for video editing, at least for now), and a Unix-Based OS... And also there are a lot of documents around there on how to install Linux side by side with Mac OS.
And, more important, you keep the boy far away from the dark side.
===== Riccardo G. Facchini
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