@calimerox “Worth a try”. Wow. Ahem. I tried every video editor available for Windows and Linux. All of them. Blender is the one editor that gives me the least amount of grief for the big project.
For smaller projects…which are about 90% of the work I get, I use Lightworks 14.5 on Ubuntu 18.04, paid edition (they had a promotion, a hundred dollars for a year) for about a year. Prior to that, it was DaVinci Resolve lite (on WIndows) for a year and before that, it was Adobe CC. Meanwhile, I have tried other editors to look for a viable, reliable, replacement.
So the fine people on the Lightworks forum had me go into my footage with a little program on LInux called ‘Mediainfo’ and they discovered, regardless of container, my camera outputs H264 video. Well, here is a pastebin of one segment: https://pastebin.com/xr3VuuFx Yes, I can re-encode it, but I will need to buy a bigger hard drive. Preferably an SSD. Mind you, their marketing material says that Lightworks can handle H264…I guess only to a point. Whatever the format is, Lightworks will only tolerate so much. Adobe CC used to handle the footage fine, but then they stopped (or have limited support). Why? because they wanted to save money (they really said that) because we all know…Adobe is hurting for money. We need to take up a collection for them.
You do not know what clients pay me. Less than minimum wage. I am being driven by pure will/madness. So getting funds to record with proper gear on proper formats and doing the right, proper industry-standard thing, which means, buying a Mac and their closed-source software is not happening anytime soon. Lightworks, for the big project, will not happen until I can buy a bigger drive and re-encode. The best horse right now, seems to be Blender. I load hours of footage on the timeline and Blender seems to be okay. So I will try, through force of will and a little more madness…to work on the project in Ardour/Blender/GIMP/Inkscape et al. Maybe I can learn/share something in the process. Like leveraging the link between Ardour and Blender via Jack.
I m not sure what is to wow about : I mentioned trying other containers than the one you mentioned, mp4. But I did get no answer. It s pretty hard to give advice or solve problems when substancial infos are missing like: did you try other containers? what is your os? etc etc. I m editing mp4s with a proxy workflow forever and it just works, so there are ways to have things work out. and it s not about budget. there are feature films edited on open source software with cheap cameras. when your client doesnt want to pay some bucks for a harddrive to do the project, maybe that s a bad start from the beginning. Maybe this is also the wrong forum to talk in depth about video editing…
@calimerox I have the feeling you are not reading the thread. The reason I write that is because a lot of your questions are already (repeatedly) answered.
I agree, this forum is not the place to talk about video editing.
What will be useful to know, which is my original question, how does one link Ardour with Blender via Jack? So I have one part of it figured out. But it seems really limited, like to the point of being useless. So perhaps, some good Samaritan can show, via video (and in English–because there is a Spanish video and I cannot speak Spanish), how to make the link useful and productive…?
As has been answered above, it is not likely to do what you want.
If you don’t feel like it was answered above, can you clarify exactly what you want it to do? For the most part the largest things that would be apparent it does is two fold:
Lock transport in sync at an audio frame level so that playback in one application is sync’d to playback in the other.
Allow for audio routing between applications (Assuming both are using the jack backend)
As I said above, I don’t consider the GH4 a bad camera at all, I shot with it for years professionally, and know many people that do, and put out great work. But it does have compromises to reach the market it was made for, and for many people those are fine. Most people doing what you are doing would invest in larger hard drives, as has apparently been told to you elsewhere along with here, and use a different format for editing, so they wouldn’t have the same problems you are having.
Maybe I am reading to much into the text but it sounds like you are getting offended when no offense was intended on anyone’s part.
And to confirm, yes the GH4 does record in h.264 for video, there is no way around that short of using an external recorder and larger drives.
This does not require Jack at all. The basic process would look like:
In the NLE:
Sync the audio clips together on a timeline
Sync the video clips on top of the audio on a timeline
*3. If the NLE supports it, then import that timeline into a new timeline so that it appears as a single clip, some NLEs support this some do not, some may do it another way by grouping clips or whatever terminology they wish to call it
Edit the clip into the final video, just make sure you are editing the audio as well as the video when you make cuts/etc.
Export the video(Possibly with a reference audio track) and audio tracks seperately (Stem export) so that you have one file for your finished video, and one file for each audio track that are all identical in length
In DAW/Ardour
Import the video (And if used a reference audio track) into the timeline, typically converting to use a lower quality just for sync at this point to speed things up
Import the audio files into the timeline, if you did the export from the NLE correctly all of them should line up if they all start at the same point in time (01:00:00 is a standard time to use for this, but session start could be fine as well)
Confirm sync between audio and video
Edit and process the audio tracks
Export the final audio to a file
Either in NLE or using seperate software like FFMPEG mux the final audio and video together to create a finished and deliverable product.
I am not offended, I am frustrated, which are seperate things. Specifically, that our tech, from media generating-to-editing is so bad that I cannot directly edit what I shoot. I used to be able to do that on say, Adobe CC, but can no longer. It is like going to the bathroom and a new policy is in place where you first must go through a maze before you can go. Editing ought to be fun and easy, but for larger projects, it is not. I feel ripped off by the manufacturerer and major corporate editing platforms. People suggest things that are not tenable for me at this time. That is why I am searching for ways to achieve the objective with the meager resources I have.
“This does not require Jack at all. The basic process would look like:” <—Ahh, okay. So I saw this video where Ardour and Blender were connected via Jack. It looked like there was some sort of syncing going on but am not 100% sure why. The video was in Spanish. The things you describe are what I do anyway, but feel that there is probably something cool out there that I cannot access yet.
@ Fathom Story i will put it here for people still want to follow this thread without reading the whole thing again, yes there came this info once about your os and machine once:
The machine I edit on is a desktop with an AMD Athlon X4 880K CPU, an RX 560 (4 gig version) graphics card, 16 gigs of RAM and SSD drives wtrh Ubuntu 18.04.
@calimerox I have the feeling you are not reading the thread. The reason I write that is because a lot of your questions are already (repeatedly) answered.
interesting viewpoint. If you check the very first answer you got in this thread it s me asking about providing the video you talk about (and you provided as a link the youtube search result for blender and ardour. not helpful.), and you still talk about (3 years later) some mysterious video where something is happening to work but no one knows what it is. I couldnt find infos about your version of Lightworks, therefore I asked, so not sure how you get these impressions.
If you are “not offended but frustrated, which are seperate things” please keep it out of the discussion anyways as it is no fun at all to communicate that way.
I see this thread going nowhere for too long and everything has been answered to above in depth already a few times.
@calimerox I provided the version of Lightworks. I am not sure what you are going on about. Perhaps reread the thread a bit slower…? You may find the answers to your questions in more than one post.
: - )
As for offended/frustrated, that was adressed to the good Seablade who mentioned “…it sounds like you are getting offended…” which I am not. It is an impotant point to address, to clarify that it is the editing situation (which should not have to be a situation in an ideal world) that is difficult to deal with (being cheated by a product that produces a bad codec), but the process of problem solving is not.
Back to the original query of Ardour/Blender, I saw a few more (newer) videos on the topic, which is in French, and it seems the link between the two programs is more for a finished product than for the editing process. That was my query, can this software link be used as part of ‘workflow editing’ and I now realize, ‘no it cannot, only end result.’ This is valuable knowledge.