What is Novacut?

Novacut is a project aimed to create a multi-source, multi-user, distributed video editor. That means that multiple people can edit a project (television show, movie, independent film) and do so from multiple sources of input (multiple cameras, microphones, graphics, voice clips, sound effects, etc.) They also plan on making a community for video artists where they will publish their content under creative commons licenses.

They plan on using open source tools, such as CouchDB, GStreamer, Git, GTK+, Python and WebKit, while creating their own distributed media library, all while being compliant to the GNOME desktop and therefore available in the Ubuntu desktop. All this means is that Novacut will standing on the shoulders of giants and will thus able to produce an amazing video editor in a shorter amount of time.

Why is This Project Important?

This project, to me, is important because it will bring a TV-quality editing suite to the Linux platform. Not only that, but because multiple people can edit a project at one time, using multiple video sources, work flow will be a breeze for many professionally produced television shows and films.

But what About OpenShot and PiTiVi?

OpenShot and PiTiVi are new video editors for the Linux desktop. OpenShot is a fairly new program developed by Jonathan Thomas which uses the MLT framework. The makers of PiTiVi are Collabora, a company from the UK who have put a lot of time and effort into the development of the GStreamer Multimedia Framework, which Novacut will be using. Thus, although Novacut and PiTiVi are not be related, they will be built upon the same framework. OpenShot and PiTiVi both have their place in the world of video editors for Linux - as just two years ago, the choice of non-linear video editors in Linux was slim - but they represent the at-home user and are not intended (although may be used by) professional video editors and projects.

Why Did I Donate?

I love film. I may be a web developer and currently studying as a computer science undergrad, but I love watching everything from zero-budget stop-motion independent films, to epic Oscar-award winning films that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. I've joined a local film society at my school and enjoy watching foreign films such as The Passion of Joan of Arc, Vivre Se Vie and tomorrow night, Floating Weeds.

I have a small background in television, helping to produce local hockey and lacrosse games for TVCogeco for over 2 years and did everything from graphics, instant replay, camera and sound. I have also been an avid video editor, where the first website I ever made was based around strong-man feats that my friend performed and recently memorial videos and other sporting events.

My friends and I have also thrown around script ideas and will be looking to produce a small, independent film by Summer 2011.

Plus, for donating $200, I will "get the producer credit in one of our test-pilot episodes." Helping the future of an exciting Linux-based project and helping to produce a pilot episode? Sounds pretty exciting to me.

But Wait, You Don't Have Money

It's true. I am a student and donated this money from my student loan, which will further force me to get a job while I attend full-time university. I tried to get sponsorship to go to UDS-N from Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu, but they rejected my request (which is really too bad because it falls on my reading break, which means I would have been able to go without missing school). The Novacut team will be flying to Florida for UDS-N, so my $200 donation will go towards helping them meet fellow programmers and gather excitement around the Novacut project.

Finally...

You can read more about the Novacut project from their website, their blog and a one-on-one interview by my friends at OMG! Ubuntu!.

I urge you to help out with the Novacut project by donating to their cause or by helping them out with your programming skills.

I'm upgrading my external hard drive from 1.5 TB to 2.0 TB. Not a big jump, no, but it's a good opportunity to throw the 1.5 TB in the closet for backup/storage.

My 1.5 TB external was hooked up to my Dell Mini 9 netbook and used as a media server as I found it far too small (dimensions-wise) to be used for programming or school. Since the old external was already attached, I threw on the new external, formatted it to ext4 using gparted and started transferring the data.

Here's the command I used:
sudo rsync -avrz /media/external/ /media/external_/

D'oh! Can anyone catch what I did?

My Dell Mini 9, equipped with a less-than-powerful Intel Atom N270 was gobbled up by the command, almost making the netbook unusable.

You see, I'm used to using the tar command tar -xvzf filename.tar.gz which extracts an archive of files.

For tar, '-z' means

-z, --gzip, --gunzip --ungzip

meaning that the file is compressed with gzip.

For rsync however, '-z' means

-z, --compress compress file data during the transfer

Yikes! My little Intel Atom N270 was trying to compress all my files before transferring them! Not good nor efficient for local transfer.

If you're transferring MB or GB of data over a network (and have the time and CPU power to compress files), then by all means, use the '-z' with rsync. But don't use the '-z' flag when copying data from one local hard drive to another, especially when using a netbook. That's reserved for people by the name of Brett Alton.

So i switched the transfer over to my new latop, sporting a Core i5 430m, transferring 1.5 TB of data without sweating

Here is the suggested command to use (changing the path names of course):
sudo rsync -av /media/external/ /media/external_/

Good luck!

In a previous post, I learned how to compile driver support for my girlfriend's Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch. This is less than satisfactory for some, so I was pointed to Martin Owens Wacom drivers in his PPA.

Run the following in the terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal):
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:doctormo/wacom-plus
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install wacom-dkms xf86-input-wacom

Then reboot.

Don’t forget to register your tablet at the Wacom website, because you can specify Linux as your operating system. We might get even better support if a lot of people do this.

Good luck!