Cinelerra compile problem solved, more or less..

To follow up on this thread from a few weeks back, through a fair bit of reading and educated(?) guessing, I was able to get around this problem that stymied me.

One of the guys on the Cinelerra boards did clue me into the fact that the aclocal.m4 file was much too short, as it should be a superset of /usr/share/aclocal/libtool.m4. So that gave me a start. After reading a bit of doc and problem postings in Google regarding aclocal.m4, I saw that the file listing of hvirtual/m4 was about half as long as the list of *.m4 files in /usr/share/aclocal. So, I edited autogen.sh to point aclocal to build aclocal.m4 from the files in /usr/share/aclocal, rather than using the m4 directory under hvirtual. After running autogen, I then had a complete aclocal.m4 file with a libtool section. I did not have the libtool section in the file before building from /usr/share/aclocal.

I don't know what side effects this has, but the CVS compiled and I can playback and render video from my saved projects, so I assume this is a valid solution. The only side effect I've noticed so far is that I get a few more ALSA underruns like this:
AudioALSA::write_buffer underrun

ps - here's some doc I found that may help someone in a similar predicament:
re automake:
http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/automake/automake.html#SEC_Top
re libtool:
http://people.debian.org/~keybuk/libtool-updating.html

created iTunes-ready movie from MPG!

Very happy to say that I was able to create an iTunes/iPod-ready movie from an ffmpeg produced mpeg1video! Hoohah! On my second FC4 box that has all the codec libraries, I was able to use the following ffmpeg string to get the iTunes file to work:
ffmpeg -i sourceMpeg -b videobitrate -ab audiobitrate -f mov -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec aac output.mov

So, now my workflow is looking like this:
1) bring in HDV footage
2) run mpeg3toc (or rename files to .MPG)
3) edit video (make sure no hanging or truncated video tracks are there!)
4) render audio file as WAV
5) render video file as MPG and add a -i for the audio
6) outside of Cinelerra, convert to iTunes with the above command
7) convert to DVD with script

Not bad. I'm pooped. Goodnight.

audio/video sync problems..first complete editing job completed

After struggling with video/audio synchronization issues, I've finally got 56 minutes of passable video. Due to my own stupidity (the fact that my Audio-Technica AT822 stereo mic was attached to, but not plugged in to the video cam) and that the audio coming from the cam is pretty lousy, I needed to use my backup recording device. So I had to sync the audio from my Creative Labs Nomad. Cinelerra is good with audio, but I had to resample to 48000hz to match the audio sampling rate of the original video.

I first tried to match the Nomad audio with the video, but that became an exercise in frustration. I still had the camera audio, so matching the Nomad audio to the cam's audio was MUCH easier than matching up to the video. As well, this method allowed me to play all four audio tracks (2 stereo from Nomad/2 stereo from cam) back at the same time. Monitoring this, if I heard bouncback echo, I knew my synchronization was off. So rule to remember, if you have a couple sources of audio, match to the audio, not what's on the screen, cause you'll be pulling out all your hair trying to match to the vid.

Glad this one is in the bag. It is truly my first complete video created in Cinelerra. Nothing special within, just fades/titles and a little time clock at the end. It was reduced from the original HDV to 320x180, 160kbps sound (247MB). Also, the video quality pretty much sucks because I didn't whitebalance or even focus for that matter. It was inevitable, as I was rushing to get setup for the three measly hours we had in the rehearsal space. Ah well.
http://content.serveftp.net/video/20060406.mpg

Update 2/25/08
Here is a helpful article for anyone needing to troubleshoot audio/video sync problems in Cinelerra:
/2007/05/nudge-avidemux2-and-reminder-about.html

Unsuccessful compile from CVS source

Today was a frustrating one. Tried to get the latest CVS build of Cinelerra (cvs.cinelerra.org) compiled on my Dell 400SC running Fedora Core 4. No go. I'm not the best at compiling beyond "configure, make, make install", so the process of autogen, aclocal and autoreconf were new to me.

A couple things learned:
- running aclocal creates an aclocal.m4 file. In order to make sure you are pointing to the correct macros within the build files, you need to make sure to point to m4 using:
aclocal -I m4

- the aclocal.m4 file should be larger than /usr/share/aclocal/libtool.m4, because aclocal.m4 is a superset of /usr/share/aclocal/libtool.m4.

If you have trouble compiling Cinelerra, try running autoreconf -i --force.

That's about it for tonight. I'm off to see if my 48Khz audio will match to my 48Khz video! Yeehoo!

talk to you later!