DV and Linux
 

For those of you looking for alternatives to Windows for PC editing things are on the up an up. These guys http://www.linux1394.org/ are working on Firewire support for Linux. they have already got a lot of stuff together and have a good compatabiltiy list. All that is needed now is a good Linux based NLE app and you can close Windows for good.

There are a number of DV capture apps (http://www.linux.org/apps/all/Multimedia/Video.html) and even a limited NLE (Kino http://kino.schirmacher.de/) available free or next to nothing. I can't ever see Avid for Linux or even Premeire but who knows anything is possible.

The Open Source movement is rapidly gaining steam, and if there isn't a world class collection of programmers banding together to work on an open source version of one app or another, there will be soon. OpenOffice.org has already to a large extent deprecated Microsoft's suite. Some of the last apps to be cracked will be the specialty programs and programs which require heavy design research or specialized hardware support. For example, I think it will be fruitless in the near term to mimic a good 3D modeling/rendering package like Maya or 3ds max for an open source OS. However, my guess is an open source clone of After Effects is less than five years away.

Last time I checked, the main thing Linux DV was missing was a DV codec. Kino just does cut only edits, and the libdv codec that it uses is for decode only (so you can see what you're doing). Unless there's a bit of the puzzle I'm missing, I'd say not being able to re-encode with effects and transitions is a bit of a showstopper for any real Linux DV work.

Brian, Kino is still really in it's early stages of development. Now that IEEE1394 support is getting better we will hopefully see more development in the video/editing field.

You are going to see DV on Linux. In the US Linux may be big, but overseas, Linux development is rapidly gaining strength. I believe the main reason for this is that a number corporations want to avoid threats from MS competition or license restrictions.

There are a number of big players with Linux. IBM, Cisco, HP to name a few.

I would not be very surprised to see some powerful DV packages in the near future. However, I would be surprised if Adobe was one of them.

I spoke to the Macromedia guys a couple of years ago about support for Linux and their response was "When people start paying for Linux and we don't have to make the code of our products open source, then we will support the OS". I could almost garantee that Adobe and Avid and Sonic Foundry would say the exact same thing. Not to worry, as Nathan said Linux is bigger than big in Europe and it won't be long before we see some serious NLE advancements in the Linux world.

You are right Adrian. However, I THINK manufacturers do not have to make their code open source to run it Linux.

Things could have changed but as far as I know that is the whole concept behind GNU/Linux development. If it has changed then maybe we will see some of the big boys take a stab at it. It wouldn&t take much to get AVID ready for linux as they already support UNIX/OSX and linux is based on the same UNIX kernels.

I used to follow LINUX. But I finally gave up. You got to deal with rude, techno Linux-heads---and all those great promises, well, they're usually just that: promises. On the other side of the coin, stained windows and sour apple ain't no big whoop either. That's why I haven't yet upgraded from DOS & WIN 3.11 +_+