Cinelerra as an advocacy tool

This weekend, I was going to go to an acquaintance so that we could edit the material which we had filmed at the concert. Yes, we did use DVswitch, but due to me being somewhat late in proposing a video team, there was no team, and hence nobody switched anything. So instead we'll have to edit stuff now.

Since I'd never done anything of the sort before, I guess it's fair to say that I'm not exactly the expert. As such, I installed samba, plugged the (LVM2/ext3 formatted) external hard disk containing the movie files to my laptop, and served them over a gigE link to his; the idea being that we could then do the editing on his system, using the software which he knew.

After having copied those files (one 22G DV file, one 15G one, and a few much smaller ones), he loaded them into the editing software. Which promptly sat on its ass, making us wait, as it 'analyzed' the movie clip. This of course took ages.

As said, I don't really know a lot about movie editing. However, in preparation to this, I had been playing with Cinelerra CV, and so I knew that this particular application does not require such an utterly useless delay. This I told Werner, who got interested. So we went over to Cinelerra's website, and had a look at the features list.

That got him interested, and he suggested that it might be more interesting for me to install Linux and Cinelerra on his laptop, so that he could do the editing using that, rather than the Windows application that he wasn't entirely fond of anyway.

So I did. A few hours later, everything was up and running, we had had lunch, and we were copying data from my external hard disk to his. As we were waiting on the data to be copied, I installed foobillard, and we had a bit of fun playing pool and snooker.

Closing words, as we were wrapping up and he had a slightly more general look at the system: "sortof useful these days, isn't it?"

Sure.

I really believe that this kind of thing is the ideal way to do advocacy; rather than suggesting freedom for freedom's sake, one should suggest something people actually care about, and work from there.

Of course, that doesn't always work.