Hey Sesi,

checking such tutorials I notice that some of them are done in Linux.. my question, as I'm struggling having houdini properly working on my Hardy Laptop .. is.. which distribution are you using tu run such tutorials.. and what software for capturing them .. which I never found a good solution for it.

thanks a lot!
cheers

Those videos would be mine. I use Ubuntu linux exclusively, most of the videoos having been done in version 7.04, but I'm using 8.04 now as well.

For video capture I use RecordMydesktop, works like Camtasia where it captures the desktop in one pass and encodes as a second, separate, pass.

If I'm doing still screen captures I use Imagemagick. The “-pause” option for the “display” tool works like a charm.

I find using dual monitors also is enormously helpful for workflow when I'm concentrating on lesson creation.

Let me know if you need any more information. I've been planning to make a “How-to” video on my workflow, just haven't got to it yet.

Just a bit more info. on Recordmydesktop. It should be listed in your Synaptic Package manager and I install the gtk-recordmydesktop as well as the command line app.

While I don't regard it as a drawback, Recordmydesktop only encodes to .ogg/.ogm format. The open source Theora codec.

I use Alltoavi to convert to .avi format, which is my preferred format.
http://alltoavi.sourceforge.net/ [alltoavi.sourceforge.net]
A lot of people prefer .mov files, but I don't like the quality. For the Sidefx site though, they want the streaming function so the videos there are .mov

Obviously, Alltoavi doesn't convert to .mov. It's a bit trickier to find a direct converter from .ogg to .mov. I'm finding Prism video converter works fine.
http://www.nchsoftware.com/prism/index.html [nchsoftware.com]

Hey
thanks for your reply… even if “it was not was I was hoping for” ..
dont get me wrong.. problem is my laptop I guess… I'm on ubuntu since 6.06 now … and always on thinkpads… always release upgraded.. and maybe a clean new setup would help me here.
basically I'm having lot of problems with 8.04, houdini included which is terribly slow (GUI) ..
I dont yet have tried recordmyDesktop cause I remember giving a go once.. not working… forgot it (I slightly lost my nerd side.. and cant be bothered too much anymore when things doesnt work )…

just another question then … I guess you are on NVidia on a desktop machine then … ?

Most definitely Nvidia, nothing else is worth the effort. No, both my machines are laptops. A 5 year old tank of an Acer 32bit Intel P4 laptop that I love and a newer, much smaller HP 64bit AMD Pavilion which is for travelling.

Ubuntu 7.04 which I have on the Acer is bullet proof. 8.04 is on the HP and not nearly as stable, although the only real trouble has been with getting the wireless to work and some mouse focus problems in Firefox. Houdini worked right away.

The key to have recordmydesktop work well is to have the correct Performance settings.
Frames Per Second = 24
Encode on the Fly = disabled
Zero Compression = enabled
Quick Subsamplling = disabled
Shared Threshold = 75
Full shots at every frame = enabled
This last is most important for capturing the 3d viewport.

Thanks you very much,

I planned anyway to go back to 7.04 .. it was much more stable afterall .. and sadly I have no busget to buy a new thinkpad which now finally comes with nvidia as well …

thanks for the recordmydesktop tips! I'll give it a try for sure.

cheers

Hi guys

first of all, thanks for the great tutorials.

I do all my video conversion in linux with ffmpeg, I do image secuences to dv avi, h264 mov, small movs for revisions, ogg to any format etc.
and the thing is FAST!!!, even with HD footage

I know is a command line utility but is actually very very easy

example:
ogg to h264 mov
ffmpeg -i out.ogg -vcodec h264 test.mov

image sequence to small mov for review etc
ffmpeg -i imageSeq.%04d.png review.mov

image sequence to DV AVI
ffmpeg -r 29.97 -i myLOGO_V02.%04d.png -target ntsc-dv myLOGO_V02.dv

very usefull if you need to deliver DV AVIs.

here's a bunch of info for any flag

http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg-doc.html#SEC5 [ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu]
is actually very very nice

Hi Peter,

Any tips on getting the audio to sync up with the video using recordmydesktop? No matter what fps I record at, my audio seems to run along at twice the speed during playback.

thanks

No, sorry, I haven't encountered that problem. My only thought is that you have “record on the fly” ON. That's the only thing that sucks of processing power and may cause the delay.
Is it a consistent delay or does it go in and out of sync.? If it is consistent then you maybe able to shift the audio. It's an extra editing step, but doable.
If it fluctuates, then perhaps your player is not caching properly.

Actually I have it OFF, I tried recording a single audio channel but playback reports 2 channels each time. Anyway I'll keep at it and see what I can find out along the way…

thanks anyway and looking forward to meeting you at the bootcamp

cheers

Indeed, I'm looking forward to it as well, although since it's only 4 weeks away I'm a bit frantic getting ready.

Are you using the default audio in 8.04. I didn't fool with mine and it's the alsa drivers. Perhaps there is a latency there.

Ubuntu 8.04 switched to Pulse as default Audio system… maybe with ALSA it works and with Pulse it doesnt?…
I finally solved almost every GFX problem I had with my ubuntu laptop.. now Houdini works like a charme and so everything else.. except recordmyDesktop (using the GTK application though, didnt tried the command line yet, i know I'm lazy) … which just overload the cpu as soon as it loads and I cant even set preferences… I'll give a try with the command line later on.

but finally I solved the OpenGL problems… a massive cleanup and clean manual reconfig of the xorg.conf was needed.

cheers.