THAT took way too long

[rebeccmeister]

So. Recording lecture videos from home on the Ubuntu-machine today because classes were canceled. When using Fruit Computers, I wound up paying for Movavi as my video editor, and got the Movavi screen recording software as well, which collectively allowed me to record a patch of my desk with a piece of paper on it that I could write on, my lecture slides, and a wee thumbnail video of myself (because studies show it's easier to follow along if there's a person in frame).

When getting the Ubuntu-machine set up, I found a forum that suggested vokoscreen for recording my computer screen. One can use cheese to fire up one's webcam that one has pointed at the desk, but to my dismay today I discovered that when you press 'record' in vokoscreen it causes cheese to freeze. It also looks like guvcview will only allow one to produce a thumbnail from a built-in webcam, not a thumbnail from a plugged-in one, so that didn't help.

Eventually after a bunch of casting about, I discovered that there's vokoscreenNG, the next-generation version of vokoscreen, which mercifully does NOT cause one's cheese to freeze. Whew.

But then, what about the video editing step? S had recommended avidemux, but when I last looked I'd settled on trying OpenShot.

I eventually got OpenShot to work well enough for now, but ugh. Movavi has better built-in sound-editing capabilities, as best I can tell.

At this stage I feel like it would be helpful to go through some video tutorials on the basics for using Gimp, Inkscape, and OpenShot. Trying to learn how to use all these new tools while having certain looming deadlines has been stressful.

And don't even get me started on .rtf files right now. I have a lot of them from my Fruit Company days, now that I've learned more about the format I'm mad about them, and I want a piece of software that's in-between Notepad and LibreOffice but not sold by Microsoft.

Comments

[scrottie]

abiword used to be the lighter word processor program compared to the do-everything StarOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice. I haven't looked at it in ages. But TeX/LaTeX I guess might be a counterpart to RTF. RTF I thought at least was fairly open and standard, unlike .doc files. In one project in the past, I automatically generated a bunch of RTF that used a stylesheet, and I thought it was ok, so I'm wondering what you learned about the format that I don't know.

Probably though you need to try a bunch of note taking apps and find the one you like. Also remembering that R transdoc converts document formats programatically.

[rebeccmeister]

Thank you for suggesting abiword. I was able to configure the default appearance to achieve what I'm after, so I can open up .rtf in abiword and use it one way, and open up other document types in LibreOffice and use it in a different fashion. I think I'd seen reference to abiword when poking around to look for an alternative, but hadn't bit the bullet until now.

I have to imagine you're right, that .rtf is better than .doc, at least. I just read something that said that .rtf was actually also a proprietary Microsoft format and that often stuff will break after a while. But what I read could be totally wrong by now. From my searches I'm not the only person who appreciates a format with a small handful of formatting options as an organizational tool.

In other software news, I tried avidemux, but most of the time what I'm looking to do is cut out and splice sections of video, or occasionally adding text overlays, changing speed, or messing around with the audio for a portion of a video. Opening it up, it didn't look like avidemux offered those possibilities. So on that front I think I just have to keep muddling around with OneShot.

[graydon]

RTF is MUCH less standard than docx.

(.doc has been obsolete since 2008 and out of support absent "here's your quarterly truckload of cash" corporate contracts with Microsoft since 2015? 2016? or so.)

The thing is that while (at least one flavour of) docx is an actual, usable (if you're stubborn) ISO standard, rtf isn't, and isn't published, and there are numerous flavours of it and none of them are especially compatible with each other. Customers who want RTF are a source of horror and despair. (Mac RTF is probably pretty consistent with itself, but that's not the same thing as being consistent with other RTF environments or applications.)

Apparently the best Linux note-taking app is Joplin; like many other things in or adjacent to the Open Source world, its take on how you get the small handful of formatting is through a plain text markup format called Markdown. (I use text files for notes, as it was in the beginning and ever shall be, and this is compatible with Markdown, which I think goes a long way to explain why a plain-text markup format right there.)

[scrottie]

Sounds like something Microsoft would do. My experience with RTF was just reverse engineering what the current version of MS Word did and doing the same thing for people using the same version of MS Word, so that wasn't an issue.

The old Amiga notepad that came with AmigaOS 1.3 hit a sweet spot here too, with fonts, font sizes, bold/italic, and that's it. There's a niche for things like that.

[graydon]

There certainly is such a niche and modernly, Markdown has mostly filled it.

RTF in the same version is (usually) straightforward, yeah. It's the "we want you to generate RTF to work with our application which was last updated in the last age" that causes the cold sweats.

[scrottie]

avidemux was a weak suggestion. I think I said that that's what I was using without any idea of how it stacks up. Kind of like abiword, it's a for what it's worth, that's what I used to use a long time ago. So no worries there. Any time someone can suggest something better, that's great.

Currently, there's no video editing software in OpenBSD's ports, so I'm command line parameters to mencoder if I want to cut out or join clips of video. That I def don't recommend for more than the most trivial work.