You may have heard that the Linux Foundation launched its own video site last month. We're pretty excited about it, since it will afford the community a great opportunity to start sharing knowledge about Linux in yet another medium.
The site represents more than just a new video outlet for the Linux community. For the Foundation, it is the first site to showcase our new site theme using the Drupal content management system. Look for the rest of our existing sites (LF.org and here at LDN, which is already using Drupal) to be similarly themed soon.
I mention the Drupal system because the new Video site is taking advantage of Drupal's built in ability to connect to Google's open YouTube API. The upshot is, most anything you can do with video on YouTube, you can do on the LF video site. This is good, because if you can record your video in one of several formats, the Video site will be able to convert it to Flash format.
For those of you who haven't used YouTube or the like before, here's some useful info for making videos on Linux that I picked up while we were creating the site.
If you're recording a live-action video, your best option is to use a digital camera and then use Kino to grab the video off your camera and save it to DV format. You can also use Kino to perform edits on the video source files, but I have to tell you, for anything complicated, Kino really doesn't have the toolset.
Instead, I found Cinelerra to be a better video editing tool. It's got serious chops to handle audio and video tracks, transitions, and effects. If you want to learn more, you should check out this article on Linux.com; it's what I used to get started with Cinelerra.
Recording screencasts is just as easy. I used recordMyDesktop, which is available on most distros. The application itself is command-line based, but depending on your desktop environment, you can also install gtk-recordMyDesktop or recordmydesktop-qt, each of which gives a nice GUI to the base program.
Here's some step by step instructions on how to use the gtk interface. The qt interface is very similar.
- Start gtk-recordMyDesktop.
- To conserve file size, set Video Quality to 60%. Leave Sound Quality at 100%.
- Click Advanced. The Advanced dialog will open.
- Click the Performance tab and make sure Frames Per Second is set at 15, and all other options on the tab are not selected.
- Click the Sound tab and confirm the Device is set for your microphone.
- Close the Advanced dialog.
- Click Save As and choose a file name to save the video output. Files are saved in ogg format only.
- If you want to just record one window on the screen, click Select Window and click the + cursor on the window you want to record. For full-screen captures, skip this step.
- Click Record. The gtk-recordMyDesktop window will vanish and a white Stop button will appear in the system tray of your taskbar.
- To pause recording, right click the Stop control. To resume, right click the Pause control.
- To end recording, click the Stop control. The video will be encoded and saved as the file you specified earlier.
After you finish recording the screencast, you can open the .ogg output file in Cinelerra, edit it, and then save the finished file in Ogg format, and a copy in either AVI or MOV formats. AVI and MOV are two of the accepted formats the YouTube API will take and convert to Flash (Flv). We are also encouraging folks to provide an Ogg version of their video to upload as well.
Videos on the LF Video site can be any length, but there is a 100 Mb file size limit in place. If you want to upload something larger, contact me (bproffitt @T linuxfoundation.org) and we'll see what we can do.
This should help get you started on video production with your own Linux system. Feel free to add your own tips and tricks in the comments section of this article!
