[ovirt-devel] Screen casting and video editing on fc21 with Blender

[Eli Mesika]

Hi guys

As you already know, some of us need to do some video/screen cast for their 3.6 new features 
I spent my day today in recording and editing a video for one of my new 3.6 features and I want to share my experience to save you time (and hair..)

Well, I started with recordmydesktop (yum) to capture the video files , this worked smooth and enables you also to have a cup of coffee until the file is written to the disk.
Then, after having few videos, I wanted to edit them and make a whole smooth video, cutting some stuff out ... 
I had started with installing pitivi (yum), from its feature list it seems promising but after dozens of crashes on almost every mouse move, I really gave up...

Oved, sent me this post [1]: 
So, I installed Blender and tried to work with it but it seems to refuse adding my video files to the project time-line ...
Digging around [2], I found that the Blender package on fc21 does not work well and in order to get it working you have to download Blender latest version (2.75a) manually from [3],
extract it to a directory and run blender ....

Blender has many usages, but you can adjust it to do video editing, just follow [4] [5] and [6] tutorials (less than 15 min for all)
(all are important, especially the first one that includes proper configuration)

One major issue is to configure well the frames per second rate (fps) (can be shown on the file properties) of your videos if you don't want to get a gap between your video and the sound track  

I was able after that to edit my videos and export (render) video as MP4 and audio as MP3 (embedded in the video file) (other formats may have codec issues...)

Overall, I worked with Blender few hours, splitting videos, removing video strips , grabbing and dragging without a single error or crash 

Although that Blender learning curve seems to be longer than other applications, I recommend to use this application for video editing and screen casting 

If you have any question or need any assistance/advice , I will be happy to help.


[1] http://opensource.com/life/15/1/current-state-linux-video-editing
[2] http://www.spinics.net/linux/fedora/fedora-users/msg459024.html
[3] https://www.blender.org/
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSGIPmQdV6M&html5=1
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20VqQLpvctY
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxFGm_LQeZQ


Thanks
Eli Mesika