Spent a month looking for free editors...

I still don't have a computer that will run Moviestorm, but I have a plan in effect. Thanks to Ben_s I was able to get a raw moviestorm clip and spent some time testing that clip in a variety of free editors.

Well, long story short, stick to windows movie maker. While there are some good looking free editors out there, WMM is still more functional than they are anyway, and is already installed if you run XP or later. I used it for all three ShadowChildren episodes, including the chromakey effects, and it works quite well.

Concurrently I spent that last month (Thereabouts) getting my second desktop to run a linux distro, and came up with Dynebolic. www.dynebolic.com.

This is a good distro for several reasons, the biggest being that it is a Live CD, meaning that you boot from the cd and need install exactly NOTHING on your hard drive. In my case, the XP decided it didn't wanna go anymore, IE: had to connect to confirm it was 'genuine' and then refused to connect. I coulda got it to work eventually, but why? It wasn't performing the way I needed it to when it DID work, anyway.

So I went linux shopping. The distro I found is intended for multimedia artists. It included audacity, already installed and well over a hundred effects included, ardour, an audio editor like adobe audition, the GIMP, Hydrogen, a drum machine, a live synthesizer and more. All that was missing for my needs was cinepaint, but I was able to download and install that, along with Celtx. (Don't bother with Celtx, just stick to whatever word processor you currenty use.) Cinepaint can be tried on another live CD from www.grafpup.org. That one runs really fast even with only a 128M machine like mine.

The only bad thing is that there is only one free editor for linux, cinelerra, and it pretty much sucks. It's slow, complicated, and supports damn near nothing outside of quicktime and MP4 formats, and the latter it doesn't run properly. But it CAN export videos frame by frame for cinepaint use. That is pretty much the only think I will likely use it for.

Still, my clunky doorstop wanna be is now a powerful work computer again.

So, to sum up. Even if the moviestorm engine gets a more widely accepted codec, Windows Movie Maker is the best route for free users.

Free tools can be had for moviemaking/multimedia from www.dynebolic.com and www.grafpup.com, but you need the ability to burn ISO images which CD burner pro 3 (Free from www.tucows.com) will do.

Steelblade did you try the free zs4 t@b editor?
http://www.zs4.net/
It runs on a linux, windows and OSX.
I had it running on my old 500mb ram windows 2000 machine (for short clips anyway)

I wouldn't suggest it for basic editing..wmm would be much easier for that...but it will greenscreen create effects etc. & will export in wmv.
Not easy to learn though.

I had some success with http://www.jahshaka.org/. It's still a little rough around the edges, but worked well (and uses the 3D card to boot)

The storm movie-editor is readying release status, and while it isn't as powerful as these other apps it works well enough (if i do say myself)...

There are plans for more codecs, but they are giving more than their fair share of pain to the development team. We'll be needing quicktime for the mac port and that should appear on windows too.

<ponders>Perhaps we need a "who wants storm on linux" poll too....</ponders>

Woo Twak that's such good news about the editor. Is this basic model to be added to later, or does it include a greenscreen facility?

I had a look at the jahshaka site..I think they are bang in the middle of updates so the site acted a bit shaky (or shaka

)
Looks interesting though.

I did try both of those, zs4 was fine, if slow, but didn't have all the functions of WMM, Jahshaka just sat there and I couldn't get it to do anything. Even the Cinepaint page says "It's not Apple Shake. Represented as a pro tool, but has no studio users. Criticized for its incompleteness and lack of usefulness." I had high hopes for Cinelerra but I tried two different liveCD's with cinelerra all configured and ready to go, and go it didn't.

WMM doesn't greenscreen out of the box, but www.papajohn.org has free downloads that did this quite well.

The http://linuxmovies.org/software.html page lists a lot of free tools of differing quality and use, including Jahshaka.

I will look up zs4 for linux, though. It never came up on any searches I did on linux editors, but that just means not many have heard of it. The linuxmovies page listed would have mentioned it at least.

Windows Movie Maker is good for the basics, but it can get really frustrating at times.

I have a question though, what is the Apple program Shake?

The Director wrote:

Windows Movie Maker is good for the basics, but it can get really frustrating at times.

I have a question though, what is the Apple program Shake?

History of Shake.

i was going to say "what about Avid Free DVD?"

http://www.avid.com/products/freedv/index.asp

but i see that it's been discontinued, however, at least the windows version is available from other places as a Google search shows.

luckily i grabbed both the windows and mac versions before it was too
late. and Avid is maintaining the user forum and video tutorials which can be accessed from the above link.

Yep, tried avid, too. WMM did more, and faster.

Got the zs4 for linux, and the new one for windows, too. The linux version didn't run. Installed just fine, but there was no executable to make the file actually GO. The instructions on their site didn't help at all. In fairness, this might have been the computers fault, though. It recommends 512MB memory, and I have 129MB.

THe windows version handles Moviestorm's codec out of the box, but it still crawls, where WMM doesn't. Take a look at www.zs4.net if your still interested in it. There are some interesting tutorials (singing flowers, etc) as well. The only advantage I see with zs4 is handling more than 2 audio tracks, as WMM does. But it crawls even with just a vid loaded with no audio. I didn't wait around to see how fast it didn't go when I loaded in some audio tracks.

WMM does titles, as zs4 and probably others. (Didn't recall seeing it in avid) though I am likely to use cinepaint for that, since it has no real limits on fonts, etc. I can do Like 'Heroes' and paint the credits on clouds and mountains and such, If I want using Cinepaint. (See earlier post for a link to grafpup)

There are quite a few tools listed on the linux movies page (Also linked above) but the one that may end up having use here is MakeHuman.

This software is not an animation tool, per se, but it allows one to make custom human actors, fat, skinny, alien, etc. Blender can do all this, of course, but MakeHuman has an easy interface for this customization, and will export into blender as well as other more costly 3D modelling tools. Perhaps we can use this here for custom actors?

I recall that blender was mentioned for making custom animations (At least till an animation tool is released) so if the modding tool can accept blender files, perhaps it can accept makehuman files, too. It can be downloaded for free at http://www.dedalo-3d.com if anyone wants to look at it.

I had windows 2000 when I used t@b so wmm wasn't an option (it came with XP) however I did have 500mb of ram (extra ram isn't as expensive now and it does make a difference).
I have 2gb of ram on my new PC and I'm glad to have it.
I'm sure lots of people will find this thread useful.

The lack of (decent) free editors on the Windows platform is an issue that's bugged machinimators for the past few years. I've got no real solution myself, although I can recommend Sony Vegas as a comparatively cheap good editing package. You may all be interested in this thread on the Machinima For Dummies blog, which covers similar ground.

The Linux side of things is looking a bit more optimistic. I can definitely second steelblade's recommendation of dyne:bolic. It's a great distro, and as a live CD there's no danger of ruining your existing Windows install. It's pretty newbie-friendly, too.

@twak: MStorm on Linux - yes please. That'd make my life a whole lot groovier.

at the same time, i don't think that everything should be free. and while i do like a bargain, i also really don't mind paying for software. nothing horribly outrageous like the price tag on some pro packages (Premiere, Final Cut, for example), but something along the lines of 19.95 to 99.95.

when i got my emac a few years ago (along with extra ram), it was with the intent of doing some video editing and they had Final Cut Express - http://www.apple.com/ca/finalcutexpress/ - for about half-price (C$150), so i bought it. with one thing or another, i never really got around to using it, and now there is, of course, a later version, and i can upgrade for about a hundred bucks.

of course, Moviestorm doesn't yet work on a mac, and my emac is a little bit dated even though it is souped up, and i like to think of it as the 'little machine that can', but i am saving up for a new mac laptop. i still have my lovely Dell laptop though, and it's really powerful (core 2 duo, 2 gigs of ram, high-end N-vidia graphics card), so i can't complain. what i don't have is a great video editing program for it. just Windows Movie Maker for XP.

i'm actually thinking ahead, as i have no clue - yet - how to take Moviestorm files and edit them in a 3rd party program. once i get started doing it, i'll have to be happy with WMM. and if i could get Final Cut Express on a pc, I'd be thrilled. but that's not going to happen.

as for people willing to pay something for their windows video editing software, there are these popular and proven choices that all weigh in at around a hundred bucks, or less:

Adobe Premiere Elements
http://www.adobe.com/products/premiereel/
- U$99

Pinnacle Studio Ultimate
http://www.pinnaclesys.com/PublicSite/us/Products/Consumer+Products/Home+Video/Studio+Family/Comparison+Chart.htm
- U$50 - 80

Sony Vegas Movie Studio
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/products/product.asp?pid=446
- U$80

Ulead VideoStudio
http://www.ulead.com/vs/
- U$60

johnnie wrote:

The Linux side of things is looking a bit more optimistic.

I have only found zs4 for linux, and the aforementioned cinelerra and neither performed well on my hardware. Have you found any other linux editors that I might want to have a look at?

Dyne:bolic is very good, as I said. Lots of good tools for a variety of uses. Musix is another that I found, but I didn't list it because it did the same thing that Dyne:bolic did, only in portuguese, and that language is all greek to me.

For you Mac uses, you don't have to edit, etc, on teh same windows machine that you run Moviestorm on. With flash drives, burnable cds, network connections, etc, you can do the post production on your macs if you are already loaded with tools there. If I had a mac, I probably would have never bothered looking into the linux distros like I did.

steelblade wrote:

Have you found any other linux editors that I might want to have a look at?

Perhaps my use of the word "optimistic" was a little ... erm ... optimistic. What I meant was that there were a handful of useable and reasonably powerful tools for the linux platform, most if not all of which are free as in both speech and beer.

I'd agree, though, that stability and reliability on most of these products seems to be a continual problem. I've been investigating a lot of these myself over the past year or so. I'm a Linux nut, and given the choice I'll work under a *nix platform rather than anything else.

I haven't looken at Musix yet - thanks for the tip! Even if it's Portuguese, I'll persevere if it'll do the job.

You might want to look at 64 Studio, which I'm testing out at the moment. It's basically just a heavily tweaked Debian distro, but it looks pretty good to me so far.

I'm currently writing an article for the Machinima For Dummies website covering the different audio and video editing tools available under Linux. Don't expect to see it online anytime soon though - I'm shockingly busy at the moment, so I've had to put it on the back burner. I'll keep you all posted, and let you know when I finally finish it!

johnnie wrote:

You might want to look at 64 Studio, which I'm testing out at the moment. It's basically just a heavily tweaked Debian distro, but it looks pretty good to me so far.

Great minds DO think alike!

I found the 64studio a few days ago, finished burning a disc to look at it literally SECONDS before reading this post. I'll post my thoughts on it as real life steps aside and give me a breather.