Hi all.  I'm new here and relatively unfamiliar with video manipulation systems and software.  I'm thinking about converting a Windows box I have at home to Ubuntu Linux and putting free video and audio software on it.  Kdenlive is one of the open video software packages I'm aware of at this point and I'm trying to compare the features of each (see the free 'nix ones here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_editing_software).  My aspirations as a movie-maker are not great--mostly I'll be trying to archive family and/or event performance clips onto disk media.  But it's going to be all high-def.  I have a Canon HG10 high-def camcorder.  I want to add a blu-ray burner to this Linux box and get a blu-ray player for my hdtv, now that the blu-ray "won out" and costs appear to be coming down.  I have questions about hardware needs and the software features comparison and would really appreciate your opinions if you have any time.

Hardware:  I drive a fairly powerful Red Hat Linux machine at my office: HP xw8600 with quad processor and 16 GB ram.  The box I'm talking about converting won't be nearly as strong (unfortunately), but if the addition of minor expense items would help I might beef it up some.  I have two machines at home that could be the one I choose--and at this writing I don't have the specs for either!  I will get those tonight and ask you again tomorrow if I have enough beef to even think about this.

Software features:  I know you are biased to Kdenlive--and it looks very intuitive to me as well.  This weekend I used Windows software that came packaged with my camcorder to make and burn a DVD using AVCHD source clips (Ulead MovieFactory I think).  I didn't think it had very much functionality.  The clips (of a dark music club scene) were not shot on a "nighttime" setting and needed to be lightened (balanced?)--and I did not see the ability to do that at all on this Ulead software.  Also, this admittedly abbreviated video software only allows you to burn the resulting movie--I saw no options to save the video out to a .avi file, for example (but maybe I just don't know enough yet!).  Anyway, things like color and lightness balancing, ability to write to disks at a native high-def resolution (like blu-ray), and maybe just write them back out to hard disk storage would be good.  I have a list of things here that one of the others claim to do.  It's a long list, but even if you would glance through it and tell me if Kdenlive does or doesn't do this or that would be a great help to me.  Thank you.

Anyone?

Well I think KDEnlive is fit to your needs but you better check out the theatre section in the forum for some examples. Also check out the live-DVD to try KDEnlive without installing anything on your computer.

http://kdenlive.org/user-manual/downloading-and-installing-kdenlive/live-demonstration-dvd-or-usb-storage

And see the user manual/video section for some more answers and comparisons to those forty-or-so assorted features, audio effects and video effects...

Skip Blu-Ray. Well, get a player if you want to play Blu-Ray discs, but for your personal works, I see little value in Blu-Ray burner and playback. Just use a network, a little media PC or bridge device, and a file server. I don't even know about the state of blu-ray authoring and burning in Linux/Free Software.

Looking over your list, things we do not have:

• vu meters


• 16bit and floating point compositing (8bit)


• background rendering on clusters


• batch capture


• headroom monitoring


• bezier masks


• track routing


• reverse


• 
  

  Heroine College Concert Hall (gee, I wonder where you got this list)

  
  


• 
  

  linearize raw images

  
  


• 
  

  scopes

  
  

there might be others image processing filters that I did not take the time to look into