Video Editing with LiVES

LiVES, Linux Video Editing System, is a no-frills video editing software. Its features include realtime capturing from Windows, resampling of video at different frame rates, rotation, resizing, cropping and editing all video formats supported by mplayer decoder. On the audio front, it supports various sound formats together with ogg Vorbis, or directly ripping sound from an audio CD to wav for use in the video, ability to resample, trim and append audio. 

Installation



You’ll find the binary tar.gz file of LiVES on www.xs4all.nl/~salsaman/lives/. Only 1.39 MB in size, it won’t take you very long to download it. Untar the downloaded file as follows: 

#tar —zxvf LiVES-0.8.1-bin.tar.bz2.tar

This tar file contains plugins and skins for the software among other things. Also, the tar file has a few more tar files inside. Untar these as well to use with

LiVES.

#tar —zxvf lives-encoder-plugins.tar /usr/share/lives/



plugins/


#tar —zxvf lives-themes-0.8.1.tar.gz /usr/share/lives

Once this is done, you will need to install another software - ImageMagick for certain functions of LiVES. This is also a small software, which can be downloaded from sourceforge.net. Install the downloaded file as follows: 

rpm -ivh ImageMagick-5.4.7-5.i386.rpm

Now, LiVES is ready for action.

Using LiVES



For the hands on exercise, we will have to open a mpg file in LiVES, use some frames from the middle of the file, add an effect and save it in another format.

Open LiVES by clicking on its icon from your Gnome or KDE desktop, or just type lives-exec from the terminal Window. When it opens, click on Open file or press Ctrl+O. This will open the file open dialogue box. Click on the MPG file that you want to open and press Enter.

LiVES interface is divided into two main parts, upper part,which has preview Window, first frame and the last frame of the video, and the lower part which is the timeline.

Adjacent to the first and last frame boxes are text boxes that let you edit a chunk of the movie clip. For example, if we need frame numbers 100 to 250 from the imported MPG movie then we would write 100 in the first frame text box and 250 in the last frame of the movie. 

Now we have to add the effect to the frames. Click on the Effects menu and choose colorize. In the colorize Window click on the option of ‘random color on each frame’. This will add a tint of random color on each frame of the selection.

Click on FileSave selection as and give the filename to save to from the dialog box that pops up. The software by default installs with mencoder that encodes in avi. Other encoders can be downloaded in order to export to other formats. 



The encoding settings can be set from Tools Preferences, encoder and effects tab.

That’s it, for further use of the saved file you can use the backup option in the File menu. 

Geetaj Channana