Weekend of Nothingness

There are some weekends in which great things are accomplished. This wasn't one of them.

I spent entirely too much time on Saturday attempting to use one of the Linux-based video tools to create a slide show of our Heroscape game. It was extremely frustrating. Instead of doing the obvious thing and giving it up, I persevered. What a colossal waste of time!

The Ubuntu distribution comes with two or three video editing programs, but they aren't automatically installed -- you have to use the package manager to do that. Then, once you've installed them, you have to figure out how to use them.

I tried using Kino, which is a very basic editing video editing program, and it appears as though you can import the JPEG files into the project and then set the duration for each picture; but every time I tried to set them to something other than 0.367 seconds, the program would revert them to their original values. Changing to the frame perspective and attempting to make each picture endure for 11 frames (the maximum it will allow, apparently) also appeared to work, until I clicked on the next picture. Then it, too, went back to the original values.

Avidemux had similar issues. I spent a bit of time looking through the on-line forums to see if anyone else had experienced similar problems, or had come up with some kind of solution, but none of their solutions worked. In this case, not only was there a problem figuring out how to create the slideshow, there was a problem trying to export any kind of movie format because it claimed that the proper libraries weren't installed.

That's the other problem with these Linux distributions. They come with a specific, matched set of code libraries, and you have to use the applications which are matched to your particular set of libraries or things don't work right. This is synonymous with the DLL issue in Windows: sometimes when you (re)install an old game, it attempts to overwrite a common DLL with an older version. This will break all your newer games/applications. I had been hoping that Linux wouldn't have this problem, but so long as applications are written to take advantage of common libraries, and are not self-contained executable entities, we'll see this happen again and again.

I don't like going back to using Windows Movie Maker, but it is still the fastest way of getting the job done (outside of going out and buying a Mac). All you have to do, is to import the pictures into the timeline and poof! you're practically done. Then it's just a matter of adding in the music track, and you're set to go!

The music track was kind of a last-minute thing. I was warming up on my guitar and found a few cool riffs, so grabbed my 8-track recorder to see if I could make something out of it. Not the best riff in the world, but the main point was to get the slideshow done so everyone could see what we've been up to lately.

Next time a slideshow project comes along, I'm going to go out and find an open-source app that's intended to produce slideshows instead of videos. That's probably the main issue - trying to use a program that's meant for making videos to make slideshows.