Tutorial
French Translation of the Tutorial
Spanish Translation of the Tutorial
Instructional Video on youtube
If Packages for your Distribution of Linux are not available, or if those that are, are not recent enough, you might need to compile the Open Movie Editor from Source, here are a couple of hints to help you.
If you need to compile the ffmpeg library from source, make sure that you enable the following switches:
./configure --enable-gpl --enable-shared
Also check the messages, and make sure that all the codecs that need other dependencies are included, and if neccessary enable the appropriate switches mentioned in ./configure --help
Libquicktime is an important component for File Export in Open Movie Editor. When you install it from the packages that your Distribution supplies, there are often important codecs missing. So when you compile from source, carefully check all the messages that are displayed when running ./configure, and make sure that you get all those codecs right. You will also need to specify the following option:
./configure --enable-gpl
Don't forget to install some Frei0r plugins, there are plenty available in the Frei0r Plugin Collection.
If you are working on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, you can follow the following commands to install the latest Version of Open Movie Editor.
sudo apt-get install openmovieeditor
sudo apt-get build-dep openmovieeditor
The commands above install the Open Movie Editor and all the necessary dependencies for compiling it. Now you just need to download the latest Version of the Open Movie Editor and put the downloaded File in your Home Folder. Then follow those instructions:
tar xzf Desktop/openmovieeditor-*.tar.gz
cd openmovieeditor-*/
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install
If you own a DV Camcorder, and you want to transfer your recorded tapes to the computer, the recommended tool to use is dvgrab. While it is a command line tool, it is quite easy to use, if you follow this example:
dvgrab --autosplit --format dv2 --size 0 --opendml my_videofile-
The autosplit option splits your video into a new file whenever a scene change happens. This is, whenever you paused or switched off your camera when recording your tape. This is convenient, because it organizes your file such that each file represents one continuous recording.
The format dv2 option selects the avi dv2 file format for your recordings, which is not only compatible with the Open Movie Editor, but also with a number of other Video Editing Applications that run on Windows.
The opendml option is necessary for video files to have sizes larger than 1 GigaByte. A word of warning though, while files larger than 2 GigaBytes work well under normal Linux Installations, it can be impossible to copy such large files to harddisks that were formatted for compatibility with older Windows Versions (FAT Filesystems). Unfortunately external USB Harddisks are often formatted like this, so be aware.
The option size is set to zero, which makes the dvgrab software disable the default file size limit of 1 GigaByte. This is necessary, because DV Video Files may become rather large, and having them split into plenty of small files is not very convenient. Read the previous Paragraph to understand why the Splitting is enabled by default, it is for compatibility with certain Harddisks.