November 10, 2005
10 Nov 2005Ah, would you look at that date? Yes, indeed, this fabled “Other Side” is indeed real. Or maybe I’m now a figment of my own imagination and I still have exams to go. Whoa, recursive.
Business was good, but for one question, the details of which I don’t exactly recall (23 c), which was so poorly written only BS teachers could manage it. It depresses me to think there are people that can spend that much of their life professionally applying buzzwords and doing absolutely nothing. Your mother was a hampster and your father smelt of elderberries! Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time!
And they did. The wonders of Monty Python!
So, today, I plan to spend some time doing stuff with Tori because she’s about to fly away for… a long time… and then when I get home/before I go out play with Cinelerra, which, miraculously, I finally have working well. The secret is to ignore the stupid DEB and go straight for the RPMs with alien, which makes the experience remarkably painless. Err… in a totally non-abducted-by-aliens kind of way.
ANYWAY! My biggest qualm with it is its render/batch render thing, not because it’s slow (it is, kind of, but that’s mostly just the way I’ve got this computer setup), but because it seems impossible to export in a format that everything likes (aside from straight raw DV, which I haven’t tried because I need to put another hard disk in this computer. I would have, but I’m out of IDE channels and really need to think about how to store things properly.)
At the minute, I’m generally rendering in MPEG-4 (ffmpeg) and then effectively transcoding back to MPEG-4 using mplayer to make it more player-friendly. I take it the codec is exactly the same, it’s just that Cinelerra seems to have some quirk that means only mplayer can read the rendered file, whilst xine and VLC fall over and promptly die.
Shrug. I’ve just been editing video sequences, though, so at least I haven’t had to deal with audio as well. One would presume that would be rather less painless — it’s not, at least not in terms of setting up Cinelerra for audio playback/NLE stuff. Despite having both ALSA and esound output options, ALSA would just make it crash (this seems widely documented with no fix available), and esound wouldn’t work because… well… I don’t think my local esound server has a port open, and Cinelerra, being some broadcast-quality high-and-mighty piece of crap, decides that talking to a local sound server is beneath it. Ironically, the simplest of the lot, OSS, worked without any difficulties… but that of course means I can only have one sound stream going simultaneously. Which, admittedly, isn’t a huge problem when you’re trying to work in Cinelerra (it’s hardly as though you want other sounds going on whilst you’re trying to edit audio), but disabling the server, etc, can be a little bit of a pain.