Akirad Project ... start living open source!

In this film howto trilogy, we'll finish our DVD photo album with Cinelerra. As you can see, Cinelerra is very powerful, even without 3d transitions ( for now ) it has a user interface that can make anything possible. But on this tutorial, we'll only cover the steps to make our DVD.




Warning: You should read previous parts before going on:
cinelerra is very easy - 1/3 - 2/3

Before continuing, here are a couple of tricks: If you have an opengl 2.0 video card ( as with the new nvidia cards with proprietary drivers ), you can use the x11-opengl to speed up preview using Settings > Preferences > Playback > Video driver.

If you are not one of these lucky users, you must go to Settings > Preferences > Performance and enable "Use Background Rendering". This way, Cinelerra will make a motion jpeg sequence as a preview. Mind that this requires quite a bit of free disk space. If you do not have a lot of space, you can set a lesser jpeg quality with the tool symbol near Video.

Now, go back to the Cinelerra main window and you can see a red progress bar ( the preview "cocking") .




Come back to our Tutorial
Add two video tracks

now put two images with same time start time and duration. As you can see, the top image hides the bottom image.

Be sure that on Settings > Format you have set RGBA or YUVA. before going on to the next step. This way, Cinelerra can use transparency. Do not use interlace at the moment..

select the top image and drag ChromaKey ( from Resources > video effects ) onto it.

Now enable "generate keyframe when tweaking" and make a frame at the beginning without change, and one at the end that hides the whole image.

And now, why not do some zoom eye-candy?. Make the sector Z (blue line) bend like this:

on the compositor, you should be able to see somenthing like this.

As you know, the keyframe works very quickly and smart. Note: the fade keyframe is linked to all other video tracks, so before starting to work with fade, it is useful to press Shift+Tab on a selected video track. This way all other tracks will be set in "non-armed" mode. In this pic you can see a "simple" transition with fade:

but you can also use a video transition. All you need to do is place it at the start and end of the top video track.

Cinelerra titleing is very complex and well may be a topic for our next tutorial, for now I will explain a little trick that can help you to make an impressive title. Open gimp and choose any Xtns > Logos

make a logo

and on Menu window Dialogs choose Layers

delete the layer on bottom

now you can see something similar to the pic:

The gray squares represent transparency. Save the file with a .png suffix and load it into Cinelerra. Now add another video track ( no one said we can't use more video tracks - they're free :) ), and paste the gimp-created image onto it. Move, fade, zoom... add all the effects you want... the title is ready!

If you want to add a videoclip, add 3 extra audio tracks ( 2 for music and 1 for the videoclip's audio ). In order to have stereo sound, we must modify the settings as seen in the next pic.

After adding your favorite song, your video begins to take shape...

A little suggestion here: do not use too many effects. Your purpose is to show your photos as best you can. A good way to show your photos is to add all to one video track and do a slow move. Be sure not to drag them off the screen, and add only fast transitions. The music does make a difference..
To zoom, make x and y bends this way:
make sure that on the View menu you have selected x-y-z camera and press 2 to hide the transitions. Now with the zoom-x-y selector on main bottom bar adjust the z-x-y line on the video track equally. Now click on the line and draw the curves.
As you can see, this is a very useful method!

Use another track if you want to make a transition between two photos with very different sizes.

For the video clips, load and insert them between video and audio tracks. Note: you can use the viewer to cut the clips or you can cut it and insert it on other clips directly on the track (minding "arm" status)


When you are satisfied with your work, you can export it to an mpeg4, as explained in part two, and burn it on DVD. To make a DVD, we'll use qdvdauthor. On my Akirad repository you can find a special rebuild of qdvdauthor with some fixes, like build optimization, buttons and mplayer+xine support. If you have Ubuntu, and my repository enabled, type this in a terminal:
sudo apt-get install qdvdauthor-akirad
Start qdvdauthor. On the tools menu, install templates. You should see this:


Click on Connect


Select all thumbnails you want to import- now you can install them for the current user (default) or all users ( needs admin password )


Now click on Add / Organize video. Note: if you see:

insert a name for you project and browse for a DVD destination folder. I used a DVD folder in Home. On qdvdauthor, choose the video file and use Autogroup.

Now you can add all Videos made with Cinelerra. Go to DVDauthor > Add from Template and choose one

Now you can drag and drop the thumbnails on the template and do this next:

you can see:

If your video is very long, you can edit and add automatic chapter selections.

Now you can see:

now you must configure all buttons- use right mouse button and be sure that all scene selections jump to our video

We are ready to make a DVD! Click on:

and you will see:

check the bottom flag and insert an empty DVD

click OK.

your DVD is done!
If you want to check that your DVD works,

• disable burn
• click OK
• open the video with gxine dvd:/$HOME/dvd
• burn it with: growisofs -Z /dev/dvd -dvd-video $HOME/dvd

That's all for now.

Byez
Paolo Rampino aka Akirad and Robert Pence ( Truefire from easygeek.org).