Spent a month looking for free editors...

Kino - http://www.kinodv.org - is another non-linear DV editor for GNU/Linux.

steelblade wrote:

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.

Breather has come and gone, and 64studio is pretty much dyne:bolic all over again.

The distro I found required 64bit computering, so I can only run it on my wife's laptop. There I found only 2 tools that dyne:boloc didn't have. Stopmotion, and ktoon.

Stopmotion is a tool for taking still frames, either captured directly from a camera or loaded from the camera's jpegs to make stop motion features. This has also the side effect of being able to 'reassemble' cinepaint files after effects are added. More on cinepaint in a few paragraphs.

Ktoon is an animation tool, now 5 years in the making, but seems not near far along enough. It starts with a blank slate that you draw on, then you can move to the next frame while the first is a 'ghost image' that you can trace over, adding any movement desired.

That's pretty much it. I was able to import a jpeg background, but it only used the top right corner of it, and there is no way to adjust the pictures size IE 640x480 bumped up to 1280x760. There are no keyframes to adjust motion IE arm starts here, moves here in 12 frames. It DOES claim to export to flash, but I didn't get far enough to try it. All in all, use cinepaint for this if you can't get a full blown (and unfortunately full priced) animation tool. While you don't get the 'ghost image' you DO get a flipbook that works just like other animators have done for near a century now. There is also better brush selections, etc., and a better cut and paste interface. If you know gimp at all, then you should be able to handle cinepaint, there is very little different on interface.

Using cinepaint from scratch like this is a useful side effect, however. Cinepaint is normally used for special effects in films such as the Harry Potter series. One has to 'export' their movie as a series of still frames, (relatively) easily done if 35m film stock is used, then make adjustments, then 'reassemble' via stopmotion listed above, or virtualdub. Normally I use WMM for this part, though it takes 2 passes to speed up the result to actual film speed.

See above posts for the 64studio link. The included ktoon didnt run there, I needed to find another copy to try it. linux.Softpedia.com has a livecd of it, if you want to see it for yourself. Cinepaint can be found as a livecd from grafpup, also to be found on linux.softpedia.com.

Thanks steelblade - I still haven't had a chance to look at 64 Studio in any great detail. From what you've said, it doesn't sound too promising, though

I do know for a fact that 64 Studio does ship in a regular ol' 32-bit flavour - try http://64studio.com/download. I'm not directly linking to the .iso out of respect for their bandwidth, but you're looking for the i386 version from any of the mirrors (64studio-live_2.0_i386.iso is the filename at the time of writing).

johnnie wrote:

Thanks steelblade - I still haven't had a chance to look at 64 Studio in any great detail. From what you've said, it doesn't sound too promising, though

I do know for a fact that 64 Studio does ship in a regular ol' 32-bit flavour - try http://64studio.com/download. I'm not directly linking to the .iso out of respect for their bandwidth, but you're looking for the i386 version from any of the mirrors (64studio-live_2.0_i386.iso is the filename at the time of writing).

THanks johnnie, But I think I"ll stick to Dyne:bolic for my linux needs.

I'm not saying 64studio is bad, far from it. It's just that dyne:bolic does the same things (more, actually) with a smaller hardware requirement. It's too bad that Dyne:bolic doesn't have cinepaint built in, though. That seems a bit of a lack on their part.

steelblade wrote:

It's too bad that Dyne:bolic doesn't have cinepaint built in, though. That seems a bit of a lack on their part.

Yeah, that does seem weird. I suppose it would easy enough to plug it in to the distro oneself, but still ... seems like an obvious piece of kit to include by default.