A well-made video can replace many images and many more words. It’s thus not surprising that publishing videos is a growing trend. But how do you get started in what appears to be an expensive and time-consuming hobby?
Over the last few weeks, I’ve started experimenting with video. I did publish a few videos a while ago with mixed results. My DOSBox screencast gathered a pretty nice amount of views over the years, but I was never happy with the montage and voice. The morph effect demonstration never made any impact. Although it required more time and effort, its purpose wasn’t clear, people are usually searching how to do something, not just a demo.
So, after almost 4 years, it was time to take a second look at video out how to create good quality video within a reasonable time-frame and budget.
Make Videos with Kdenlive
Creating raw video material is actually fairly straightforward these days. However, on the subject of how to cut, combine and make videos, fairly little information is available.
There are a few commercial video editing packages, but they all were way more expensive than what I wanted to pay for an experiment. So I dug up Kdenlive. It’s still well-maintained and has all the options you’ll need.
After all those years, it’s still not available for Windows, which is a shame, but there are a few workarounds. Booting from a memory stick is one way, but I decided to go to my favorite visualization tool VirtualBox.
I have created an image that is freely available. You can download it from my company site (more on that later).
Publishing
After a few takes and a little getting used to Kdenlive, I ended up with this revised DOSBox tutorial. It focuses on going from an old CDROM game somewhere in your closet, to playing it on your computer.
Kindle ebooks
While I was at it, I also used this experiment to try my hands on a Kindle ebook. I used a setup almost identical to what Keith at BIT-101 is using.
I intentionally tried to keep it short and cheap, as not to overwhelm any one trying to get into this. You can [amazon_link id=”B008YY5WXE” target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]buy it on the Amazon Kindle store[/amazon_link].
If you are reading this blog, chances are you aren’t going to need the book. You can probably get the image running on your own. And the Kdenlive pages have tutorials and a full manual.
The book is just a focused compilation of just the things you need to get started.
[amazon_enhanced asin=”B008YY5WXE” container=”” container_class=”” price=”New” background_color=”FFFFFF” link_color=”000000″ text_color=”0000FF” /]