Perhaps this is not the most fitted place to write this, but I was wonderring - What about capturing? Is DIVA going to support video capturing? If so, how? I am only asking since I did not find any cross platform VIVO library (There is the V4L and VFW, there is libDV for linux, but I couldn’t find anything that is cross platform).

That’s an important issue.

I’m not going to add capturing support until I get the “core” of Diva video-editing functional. But capturing IS very important. I’d LOVE to see one day a totaly plug&play camcorder support on linux (like: you plug a firewire cable, a window pops-up…). I’m wondering if this could be possible now with hotplug.

DIVA is going to be cross-platform among *nix platforms, I’m not much interested in the VFW stuff. I guess I’ll just implement capturing via Gstreamer. For example now GStreamer supports certain V4L sources (like Zoran-based MJPEG cards). On other platforms people will just have to write proper GStreamer elements and Diva will use them. DIVA will be crossplatform as much as GStreamer/Gnome/Mono/Gtk is. I think that means Linux, FreeBsd, Solaris. I have no idea if FreeBsd/Solaris has any kind of firewire/vivo support at the kernel level (yet).

more than less than easier than

if then and then I then

Premiere does sample-accurate audio editing, you just have to change the timeline units to samples instead of frames.

Also, here are some screenshots of Avid DS Nitris 7.6, which you will probably never get to use, unfortunately:

Basic editing: http://ywwg.com/images/ds_shots/ds01.png

Color Correction: http://ywwg.com/images/ds_shots/ds02.png

bezier effects timing editing (value vs time): http://ywwg.com/images/ds_shots/ds03.png

Graphics mode (for scratch and wire removal): http://ywwg.com/images/ds_shots/ds04.png

Node-based effects editing (analogous to gstreamer): http://ywwg.com/images/ds_shots/ds05.png

Things to note:

• items that look like buttons are sometimes buttons, or tabs, or menus.
• many features are hidden in rightclick menus, and often these right-click targets are mere pixels wide
• 2-d effect timing is very cool
• Node-based editing is considered very high-end, and is very cool

That looks really like big-balls proffessional stuff ;) But very cool indeed. I haven’t got a chance to work with Nitris, but during my last movie project I was offered to edit on some-kind-of-avid with a pro editor. I didn’t use this chance, instead I edited on Premiere at home. I did that because I wanted to take my time and polish every single cut without time limitations. AVID time would have been limited (budget). Since this was a 35mm cinemascope motion tape project I didn’t need any of the (cool) effects on AVID etc.

And now comes the funny part. Since edl/omf exporting in Premiere sucks badly, I wasn’t able to export my work for the lab. So I (sic!) manually re-written all the TCR timecodes for every single cut (about 140 of them) to an excel spreadsheet. Fortunately the TCR and timecode were burnt-in on the DV material I was editing. Later on I exported the spreadsheet to a text file (sic!) and using a custom-built console application formatted that to a valid EDL file.

You wouldn’t believe it, but I didn’t make a single mistake. The negative was cut at the lab in Berlin without a smallest glitch. After that, it was scanned in 4k and digitally color-corrected at Pictorion Das Werk. Now it’s being burnt back to 35mm on Arri Laser.

It was a funny experience but I don’t want to repeat that ;)