Open Source

Shotcut now has Keyframes!

by

I’ve mentioned a few times in passing that for the most part I do my video editing with Shotcut, an open source alternative to Premiere or Vegas. I still keep Premiere installed on the off chance I need to keyframe something (like the THX logo in last weeks MGR video), but now it seems that miiiiight change considering they have officially added the ability to add keyframes to your projects!

Perhaps the most requested feature is the ability to move or smooth pan-and-zoom images or digital photos. We chose to address that in a more general manner by allowing filter parameters to be key-framed and animated rather than build something specific. Well, after long wait and much work, this has been introduced with a new Keyframes panel. It has an icon on the main toolbar to open the panel. There is much to say about this new feature and be sure to watch the videos as they become available. Keep in mind that this is new, incomplete, and a little unstable. Here are more caveats:

  • No support for undo/redo (pending filter support for this)
  • No keyboard shortcuts yet
  • Not yet available for transitions or generators
  • Only the following filters support keyframes at this time:
    • Gain / Volume
    • Brightness*
    • Circular Frame (HTML proof-of-concept)
    • Color Grading* (no simple)
    • Opacity*
    • Size and Position* (simple only, no curve UI)

It’s new, so I expect it to not in perfect working order, but a great start nevertheless. If they keep it up and get it at a point where it’s on par with other non-linear editors I’ll have a reason to retire premiere completely. :happy:

An entire day of editing cardboard box porn

by

I’ve been going over video footage I’ve accumulated over the last week, and surprisingly I have quite a bit to share. I’ve been dividing it all up into small videos of course, it feels weird to actually have footage in the can so to speak, if only I had more time for this sort of thing.

I did commit a sin tonight though, for almost an entire year I’ve only used Shotcut for my videos as that offers the ability to edit my OBS recordings along with their individual audio tracks, while newer versions of Adobe can handle this I don’t think it’s worth it to me to pay a monthly fee when I can achieve what I want out of an Open Source program. But tonight I had to take one of my clips into Premiere Pro to do some keyframe work, something Shotcut lacks at present. I also had to use it to loop an animated gif into another format as Shotcut kept having a stroke whenever I tried to import it. So I guess ye olde CS6 still serves a purpose… although Shotcut has been kicking all kinds of ass when it comes to video editing options, filters, multi-platform support and a thriving community.

I definitely recommend Shotcut if you’re looking for a video editor on the cheap, or an excellent Open Source competitor that runs on Linux, which Adobe doesn’t. 😛

If you have the Steam Controller and Linux you might want to check this out.

by

Found a cool open source driver and UI for the Steam Controller.

1464027385screenshot1

They don’t have an rpm package for CentOS 7, but compiling it should be easy enough. This will be really nice for games that don’t cooperate with the Steam UI properly, IOW DOSBox which yes, I have installed under Linux. There are some old classics I’d like to play using the Steam Controller (like Jazz Jackrabbit) which gave me absolute hell under Windows.

Some good news on the Open Source front

by

Grand Theft Auto 3 is getting it’s own Open Source engine called OpenRW. I love hearing stories like this, the more games that are playable under Linux the better (with excellent ports of course).

On another note, Dota 2 which is already working under Linux will be getting Vulkanized. Well, the good kind. 😛

We’re going to release vulkan support soon, probably sometime next week. That DLC checkbox is an error and shouldn’t be visible yet. Sorry for the confusion.

That’s awesome. I’ll be even more hyped if and when other source titles join on the vulkan bandwagon. Especially gmod, the optimization is piss poor on Linux when I run it on the highest settings.

It seems Infostealer.Limitail was hiding in my copy of gzdoom

by

I came back to my desk with a snack and found that my antivirus found Infostealer.Limitail hiding in an old copy of gzdoom (1.8.02). At first I thought it was a false positive because I get those from time to time with other games that may not be popular enough, but this actually made some registry changes to my system (which have since been repaired). Fortunately the Trojan is only troublesome if you use Internet Exploder or Microsoft Firewall. Which in my case I don’t use those, I don’t believe in setting all my eggs in one companies products. I also don’t believe in using shit programs.

Still this was an unpleasant surprise since I did download gzdoom from the original website, which for some reason is now gone. I did find a newer copy of gzdoom that was released in December of last year. I scanned it and this version came up clean, although it also came up clean the last time. I scan any executables I download unless it’s something obvious like Waterfox for example. I’m surprised this didn’t trip sooner.

Time for a new browser

by

Seamonkey has been pissing me off lately with a couple bugs. When I watch a video for the first time and want to adjust the volume the video freezes. Another bug and this the most annoying one, whenever I download a file it randomly fails and I have to retry. Most of the time I can get it to work on a retry, but with certain downloads it requires me to redownload a file more than twice… and that’s a waste of bandwidth and time that I don’t need. Another bug and this seems exclusive to my CentOS 7 install is the inability to play audio within the browser… So I’ve made the switch to firefox.

It’s gonna take some getting used to, not a whole lot though since it’s fairly similar to seamonkey, and that makes sense since they’re both under the mozilla umbrella. I installed my usual selection of plugins (FlashBlock, NoScript, etc), and installed NewsFox as my RSS reader. At some point I’ll get around to installing Thunderbird.

I can tell I’ll need to get used to FireFox’s aesthetic. But it shouldn’t be too difficult.

OBS is now my one and only.

by

I’ve been tinkering with old DOS games and finally found a way to record them under OBS without crashing DOSBox or recording a blank screen. I’ve been tweaking some .conf files to make the games play more to my liking. Now I can fully retire FRAPS, although to be fair I haven’t really used it since a friend on Steam showed me OBS. I kept FRAPS installed in case I ever felt like recording DOS games. I guess that won’t be an issue anymore. 😛 I’ve stress tested Commander Keen and Jazz Jackrabbit and it recorded quite nicely.

In case you haven’t heard of OBS it’s a capture/streaming program. However unlike FRAPS you can install additional plugins and it’s fully Open Source. Also unlike FRAPS it’s also Linux/Mac Friendly. You can check it out here.