Tool Chain

Post-production Begins! I am only 1/2 through the interviews I plan to do; but with nearly 20 hours of interviews in the can, the time has come to get serious about post-production.

I have been syncing audio and picture, transcribing interviews, and bookmarking material for the trailer, promos, and Kickstarter video. (There, the cat is out of the bag!)

Anna Anthropy at Dorkbot CHI via D5100

 

 

 

 

 
I have a preliminary tool chain on place:

I am using Akimbo for bookmarking the interview audio. This allows me to listen to MP3s of each interview on an android device, bookmark them, and take brief notes. I can then reconcile this with the footage when I am at my editing station.

I am an open source kinda guy. As far as possible, I am working with free, (as in speech) tools. I am not fanatic about this however. If I need to purchase software to get a job done, I will; but I will always favor an open source solution for my needs.

Right now the suite of tools I am using consists of: Kdenlive for vidoe editing editing; Audacity and Ardour for audio mixing/cleanup; Gimp for image manipulation and color correction; Gimp and Inkscape for graphics; and many many other little utilites for various tasks.

The wonderful thing about working with Linux, is that so much of the work I need to do can be automated with scripts. I have writen scripts to wrap around ffmpeg to do transcoding and resolution shifting of the vidoe; extract MP3s for transcription; and even do background rendering. I use the Ubuntu Studio distrobution. The low-latency kernel makes working with audio and video painless. As I have gotten older, I apriciate the value of stability over having the most bleeding edge releases. As a result, in the last year or so, I stopped chasing the latest release, and settled on Ubuntu’s Long Term Support (LTS) (12.04 Precise Pangolin) as my OS of choice.

I may find in future that I need to accomidate the work flow of others, or that I just must have some feature only available in AfterEffects, of FinalCutPro. But for the time being. This tool chain suits me well.

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