Video editing with avidemux and audacity

Best free software audio editing tool: Audacity

This was an easy one: just use Audacity. It's an excellent piece of open source software with a rich feature set that was pretty easy learn how to use - even for an audio novice like me.

If you're just doing basic voice narration and don't want to invest in a good microphone, the next best thing would be to use the noise removal and normalization plugins to clean up voice capture from a simple microphone.

Best free software video editing: Avidemux

For video editing I recommend Avidemux: again, I explored lots of programs to do this on Linux but discovered that the state of video editing on Linux to be somewhat dismal currently. Avidemux sucked the least. It won't win any usability awards but it is a simple, no-frills video editor that gets the job done.

Features:

• playback

• very basic video editing (delete, copy, paste)

  Salient points:

  • There are two markers A and B and all operations work on what's in between (including save!)
  • Watch out: cut doesn't actually work like you would expect. It's equivalent to delete (you need to remember to copy first)
  • When you paste a video segment it is inserted at the current cursor position.
  • You can't copy paste between different video files, but you can simulate this by appending a video and then copy/cut/pasting it into the desired position.

• encoding (easier to use and configure than ffmpeg)

  • You can save the existing audio track to a separate file
  • You can remove or add an audio track from an external file

• Video filters: written as modules and sort of Unixish in how they are used. You add one filter after the other in a pipeline and configure how each will transform the video.

A source of frustration for me when I started exploring Avidemux was that it is a low level program that assumes you know exactly what you are doing and does exactly what you say, not necessarily what you mean. It doesn't coddle you.

If you're not a video/audio expert many things don't work as you would expect. For example, if you've loaded a video compressed with an infra-frame codec (I.e., a codec that saves space by calculates each frame in reference to a preceding key frame) the video cursor will move between key frames rather than between frames. Converting to a codec more suited for editing (HuffYuv) solves this problem.

By working within the limitations of this simple tool and combining the available primitives cleverly you can get pretty far though.

It's not easy as it could be but you still have it pretty good when you consider that in the old days video cutting used to be done by manually cutting and stitching together 35mm film. Or worse - magnetic tape (where you can't even see the frames). If you're interested in this bit of technological history read the Wikipedia article on "linear video editing".

I recommend experimenting extensively on short 30 second clips until you understand how to perform the operations you want.

Video streaming sites

Of the major video sites I took a look at (e.g., YouTube, Vimeo) blip.tv seems to be the only one that allows you to bypass their transcoders and upload an FLV you encoded directly, with no loss of quality.

This allows you to encode at much higher quality if you know what you're doing and bypass lengthy waiting times waiting for your video to pass through the waiting queue for the transcoders (which can take hours on other sites - cough, Vimeo, cough).

Blip.tv also provides full control over your content, so you can delete it, edit it, monetize with advertisements (50/50 split with blip.tv), etc. They're even generous enough to let you opt your videos out of their advertisement program if you want.