Saturday, May 26, 2007

Cinelerra on FC6 working well and more YouTube-ness

I spent all day yesterday editing and rendering video using the Cinelerra install on my Fedora Core 6 box. I am happy to report that after about 10 hours, 15 projects and two or three times as many renders, Cinelerra did not crash once! Now, the types of activities I performed did not vary that much:
- open hour long DVD resolution video
- select five or ten minute long sections of video
- compensate for audio sync problems using nudge
- render out to YouTube compatible format (ala my previous post)

My previous Cinelerra install on Core 4 had crash problems as well as strange audio synchronization problems. One major difference between the systems is that my FC4 Cinelerra system had OpenGL enabled. My new FC6 system does not have OpenGL enabled. On FC4, I noticed that enabling OpenGL seemed to cause the instabilities mentioned above, though I was never able to prove it. Also, the more unstable projects tended to be projects that I had previously created. So as a test, I am recompiling Cinelerra on FC6 using OpenGL and will perform some edits on both old and newly created projects to see if the OpenGL version of Cinelerra is as stable as the non-OpenGL, X11 XV version on FC6. I am hoping that the latest NVidia drivers for my 7600GS 512MB card in combination with various bug fixes in FC6 will allow me to run Cinelerra on FC6 without crashes.

I have uploaded the results of yesterday's rendering session to my new YouTube account here:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=snufflerstormpig

I'm learning more about YouTube. It is a really rich environment for social interaction. Everybody has seen a YouTube video and peoples comments beneath it. But depending on how the content producer has configured the video, people can comment upon it by using a video response. Pretty cool. Also, most people know that you can embed a YouTube video into any web page simply by selecting the Embed code that appears on every page that displays a YouTube video and integrate that code into your web site. It looks like this:
<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/cW8EL2RgAEg"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/cW8EL2RgAEg" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>

Some of the more interesting stuff is not as evident. For example, if you are a content producer, you can create a "Channel", basically a home page of your profile like in the above link so that people can see your accumulated work. As a member (content producer or regular viewer), you can create playlists of your favorite videos and share them with your friends. When someone gets one of your playlists, they can play all the videos in that playlist simply by clicking once. Here is a playlist I created from the videos I rendered yesterday:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=021BB1E61A3BFD19

Also, people can subscribe to your Channel (Subscribers) or you can make Friends who also like your videos. The difference between the two seems to be that Subscribers are more passive viewers of your content and Friends are content producers themselves, or at least have a more well defined profile created on YouTube. YouTube can automatically alert both of these two different types of people when you've uploaded new videos.

Anyway, granted I am a little late to the YouTube game, but I think a lot of other content producers are too. They should take advantage of this great experiment in social networking and get their hard work up on YouTube to show the rest of the world.

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