I've got a handful of mp4 video clips (a minute or two each). All I
want to do is
1) Concatenate them with fade-in at beginning of each clip and fade-out
at the end of each clip.
2) Superimpose a title at the beginning for a few seconds.
Can anybody recomment a simple video editor?
So far I've tried Openshot and Cinelerra and niether is usable even
for my trivial task.
Openshot 2.07
The native amd64 build segfault a _lot_. Any time you try to move
the "playback head" or whatever it's called it segfaults. Various
other GUI operations also cause a segfault. Sometimes it gets the
project file into some broken state and then can't even start up and
load the project file without segfaulting.
Oh, and it "auto saves" periodically, so you can't even rely on it
not borking a working project file even though you never clicked
"save".
The AppImage binary at least allows the GUI to work, but it can't
render a 5 minute video. It either aborts part-way through or just
locks up burning 100% CPU until you send it a SIGKILL.
I was finally able to set up the edits using the AppImage binary,
then open the project using the native Gentoo binary and render the
video. The resulting video quality was terrible. The video
stuttered, pixellated, and in some spots even appeared to jump
forward/backward repeatedly. That was with the highest quality
setting (the output file size was acually significantly larger than
the sum of the input file sizes). Even though the video quality was
severly degraded.
Cinelerra 2012 (stable).
I used Cinelerra for a small project once before, and though it
_worked_ I hated every second of it. The GUI is a nightmare. It
uses some home-made widget set that I find incomprehensible.
I could probably grit my teeth long enough for this simple task,
except Cinelerra seems unable to deal with AAC audio. It
misidentifies as some other PCM format, and all of the imported
files just have a short burst of noise at the beginning followed by
silence. Cinelerra also doesn't seem to be able to play the
imported.mp4 video files at the proper framerate it's bog-standard
Android phone video: H264 1280x720 30fps, but Cinelerra insists on
playing at a some higher frame-rate.
I may try Cinelerra 2014, but I'm not optimistic -- Cinelerra is known
for it's slow rate of change.
