Ilene makes a video ... and you can, too

This is total guerrilla video. Ilene made it with our many-years-old Casio 1.3-MP digital camera (which shoots .avi video) and edited it in iMovie on the iBook G4. (Follow Ilene on Twitter for tips on food, health, vegetarianism and avoiding eating stuff that can kill you.)

We output the iMovie "project" as a Quicktime video and then uploaded it to YouTube, which takes care of the Flash encoding.

This is no big deal if you're accustomed to dealing with video, but for a couple of people who don't do this all that often (or ever), it shows how relatively easy it is to shoot, edit and distribute a video with whatever 5+year-old equipment you happen to have laying around.

Where I'm going: My near-future plans for video entail trying to edit it in a FOSS environment, and that means looking at the various video-editing solutions for Linux and BSD.

I tend to favor software that's not in perpetual alpha mode, has a relatively large user base and isn't prone to crashing. I also favor cross-platform applications.

For this reason, I'm focusing on Blender, which is mainly for 3D animation but will also serve as a video editor.

At first glance, Blender appears to be an excellent project with an active community centered around an application that runs not just on Linux, Windows and Mac OS but also in OpenBSD, and probably every other BSD as well.

I have had Blender installed on both my OpenBSD and Ubuntu systems for the past many months but haven't yet figured out how to use it.

Cutting video with KDEnlive: If you're OK staying in Linux and using KDE apps, KDEnlive looks like it's shaping up to be an excellent video editor. There's currently no KDEnlive port for OpenBSD but there is a port in FreeBSD. (Even though I'm not running OpenBSD at this particular moment, I'm still keeping an eye on what will and won't run in it ...)

I'm very interested in following the progress on KDEnlive as it becomes a more "mainstream" portion of the KDE software bundle. I've said before that this is the one app that could bring me over to the KDE camp (I'm currently partial to GNOME and Xfce on the FOSS desktop). Not that you can't run a KDE app without the full KDE desktop, but it somehow seems so "wrong" (and yes, I should probably get help for this).

To that end, reader arochester sent me a link to this Nixie Pixel video about editing with KDEnlive.