“With the increasing popularity of both Linux on the desktop and
home-brew multimedia production, it seemed like a good time for
Focus on Linux to look into the capabilities of Linux and Linux
software in the multimedia video editing and sequencing department.
Now, I’m not a professional video editor, so this article isn’t
intended for that audience. I have, however, used a number of video
editing packages under Windows and MacOS of the popular computer
retail store vintage, so that will be my basis for
comparison.”
“In order to produce this article, I acquired two popular video
capture devices that are PCI-based: a Hauppage WinTV board, which
uses a BT878 with a Temic 4039FR5 tuner, and a Pinnacle Studio
DC10+ analog editing board, which uses a Zoran chipset for motion
jpeg encoding. There are some USB-based devices out there, but the
USB connection really can’t support the frame rates necessary to do
any serious amateur production work.”
“Because storage can be a major limiting factor when doing video
work, the system used for this article was equipped with an 18GB
software RAID-0 subsystem connected to a Mylex BT-958 (ultra-wide)
PCI SCSI controller. Data throughput rates as tested by bonnie were
well beyond the 6MB per second supported by the DC10+ card.”