[firefly]

Hello again.

I'm a long-time linux user and have to do a fair bit of searching for my photo editing tools. I've found that picasa is great for my jpeg, and I use lightzone (free as in beer) for RAW captures. This has worked well in the last couple of years... but now since I have video I found that I need to compress these motion JPEGs to something more manageable.

Enter Avidemux.

What a great tool. I'm able to compress and convert the mjpeg avis from the camera to anything I choose. At the moment I'm liking h.264, 4000 bitrate with vorbis sound in a matroska container. I also added a chroma noise reduction plugin to the video encoding, since the k-x does not seem to apply any noise reduction at high isos for video.

The results are excellent, 1/3 the size and portable.

Anyone else have any good tips?

[firefly]

I think this should be moved to Post Processing, Printing, Software, and Darkroom. My bad.

[tux]

I wrote a script to convert mine. I find it quicker & easier than using avidemux and it can do multiple move files with a single command :

"movieconvert"

#!/bin/bash
# depending on your camera you may need to change AVI to lowercase
for movie in *.AVI ; do
echo Processing "$movie"
ffmpeg -i $movie -acodec mp2 -ac 1 -ar 44100 -ab 96k -vcodec libx264 -vpre hq -crf 24 -threads 0 output/$movie
done

Save the above as a new file & make it executable. Then run the movieconvert command in the directory where you movie files are. All your movies will convert to x264 and get stored in the "output" directory. They use about 10* less disk space with no loss in quality.

The conversion is done using ffmeg which is installed on most linux distros.

[firefly]

that's a nice little script. Any thoughts on audio too?

[tomtor]

that's a nice little script. Any thoughts on audio too?

What would you need regarding the audio?

The audio is converted as well with that script (to mp2 format).

Any suggestions regarding video editing?

I tried kdenlive which works quite well...

[firefly]

just noticed the acodec flag, thanks. For video editing, I'm going to try kino... we'll see how it goes.

What would you need regarding the audio?

The audio is converted as well with that script (to mp2 format).

Any suggestions regarding video editing?

I tried kdenlive which works quite well...

[kkumer]

All your movies will convert to x264 and get stored in the "output" directory. They use about 10* less disk space with no loss in quality.

Hm, since you are transcoding from mjpg to H.264, I guess there has to be some loss in quality, right? Is this negligible for all practical purposes? (BTW, thanks for the script.)

[boriscleto]

HandBrake

[Entropy]

Yeah, Handbrake can now load arbitrary video and is sooo easy

[therion]

For Linux is best AviDemux, as You wrote



Avidemux - Downloads


It is free multiplatform video manipulating tool.
The best compression for K-7 and K-X video is X264 codec.

AviDemux contains also plenty of useful filters, very good denoiser
Mplayer hqdn 3D, which I can recommend when shooting under bad light.

[firefly]

Just as a followup here...

I abandonned AviDemux for conversion and used ffmpeg exclusively. It worked well, but had trouble filtering noise. Before compiling a new ffmpeg I thought I'd have a look around at the 'new' GUI stuff for linux.

I tried Handbrake per someone's suggestion here.

Files are easily queued, output results are customizable and look great. Full support for H.264 encoding via x264 is built-in, custom noise filtering via HQDN3D built-in. Output to either mp4 or mkv containers... really does everything I need.

I must say, adding files to queue via GUI is much less daunting than having to work with that avidemux batch scripting. I develop software for a living, the last thing I want to do when I get home is constantly develop/tweak scripts to perform video conversion functions.