--- 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

MWafkowski wrote:

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.

Problem is that the original poster doesn't have enough experience himself with video under Linux to be able to teach the kid. I bet that _I_ could do perfectly the job he describes only with existing Linux tools. Even if I didn't practically do any of that stuff, I know that there is Linux software that can do it.

So there's nothing like Adobe Premiére or even Apple Quicktime, is there? I just want to apply more colors, adjust contrast and brightness in some of my *.avi and *.mpg movies. abraços a. Kevin Donnelly escreveu:

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).

-- Adagilson Batista Bispo da Silva Bibliotecário FIOCRUZ-Centro de Pesquisa Aggeu Magalhães