Using Kino to make YouTube videos

A few days ago, I decided I wanted to make a little demo video of myself using Ubuntu. I wouldn't create anything too complicated but I would use Ubuntu to produce it. I have a Sony digital video camera and a firewire cable so all I needed was some software to help me get the video into a YouTube-acceptable form.

After little research, I found Kino was the best option for me. The first step is to capture the video from the camera to the hard drive. I used DV AVI Type 2, OpenDML AVI, and checked 'Put Timestamp in File Name'. Putting the timestamp in the filename was cool. I actually didn't realize the time and date were encoded into the MiniDV tape so it was neat to see that detail come out during capture.

Now to capture, I just had to plug firewire cable into the camera and computer, click the Capture button on the Capture tab in Kino, and hit play on the camera. I could see that the computer wasn't dropping any frames and I could view the video with sound on the computer as it was captured using the GTK method on the Display tab of Kino's Preferences.

Editing is a serious task but with a little time, you'll be able to do quite a lot. I kept it simple, just adding a title to the end for a few seconds. Finally, comes Export. The first few times I exported I either ran into a 186mb file for 9 minutes of video or the export would quit without producing anything. What finally worked(and what made me want to write this post to tell you about it) was to go to the Other tab in Kino's Export mode and pick XviD MPEG-4 AVI Single Pass(MEncoder) for the Tool and 4:3 Broadband Quality (320x240, 564kb/s) for the Profile.

I then ended up with a 19mb file that looks pretty good. If you'd like to take a look at the result of this process just go here. I hope this helps you to produce your videos in Ubuntu. If you have any suggestions on better ways to do this, I'd love to hear 'em in the comments.