Simple video editing with PiTiVi - Linux
Easy to use applciations to do video editing are hard to find. Full function packages are hard to learn. And many video editors I’ve used are very slow to load (in Windows). There are four alternatives in the software repository of Ubuntu. I wanted to see how quickly I could edit a short video created with my Canon G9. The .avi created by the G9 would not play in my media player in Windows. But two of the editors I looked at opened the file. One was very simple, but I struggled getting to to do what I wanted.
Then I opened PiTiVi and saw a screen that said “drag clip here”. Once I did that it said “drag clips to timeline”. I did, and quickly was able to edit and “render” a compressed video. There are plugins to expand functionality. But trimming a video in a matter of minutes was quite impressive. That’s not to say that the editors did not hang or sometimes did unexpected things, but I hadn’t paid $100 for the them either! Overall, Linux ran snappier than editors in Windows and when it did hang up cntl-alt-backspace rebooted the system and returned to the desktop in about 10 seconds. Cool.
