Product Review: Page (1) of 3 - 05/31/05

email article

print page

More Related Stories

The open source operating system, Linux, has been exploding in popularity for good reasons. It?s got stability, it?s light on the computer?s resources, several great GUIs are available for it, and you can get it already packaged with a good selection of great applications, and there are thousands of other powerful applications available and in development. Also, you can get several distributions of it absolutely free.

Perhaps the only weakness for digital artists has been the lack of solid video editing apps for Linux - not that there aren?t any in development! SourceForge.net alone lists 9455 multimedia projects (not all for Linux, but all open source), and Freshmeat.net lists 5948. It seems promising that there will be a near-future explosion of good multimedia applications, but right now, what is the working digital artist who is using Linux supposed to edit video with?

Well, MainConcept , a leading producer of digital video products has stepped in to fill the void with a solid, 32-bit video-editing program called MainActor . MainActor is available in a version for Microsoft Windows as well, and your purchase of the product key will unlock both, which can be a plus for those working on multiple platforms. You can also download versions that are optimized for SuSE 9.2 Linux, or Mandriva Linux. It's interesting that MainConcept released MainActor 5.5 for Linux before it had released a 5.5 update for Microsoft Windows. The trial download is fully functional, except that it adds a watermark to the video output. You can then decide if you like it and purchase the product key for $199. MainConcept states that they cannot offer a GNU license due to the fact that some of the code for their proprietary commercial encoding products is also incorporated in the code of MainActor.

I will admit that my first experience with MainActor was not a particularly good one. The MainActor 5.2.1 package downloaded and installed just fine on Mandrake Linux 10.1. However, when I opened the capture tool, it did not recognize that I had the proper IEEE 1394 drivers for it to operate. This was not a fault in the package, but in my installation of Linux and a few other misunderstandings. I know this because most other people on the user forums were not having this problem. After several failed attempts to install the correct software drivers, I finally learned to compile raw packages from the downloads on the IEEE 1394 For Linux site. It still didn?t work, probably because I wasn?t putting the files in the proper folders.

MainActor's interface

I?m still a Linux newbie. During the time I took to work on the problem, Mandrake Linux became Mandriva Linux , and released a new distribution (10.2 LE 2005 ), and MainConcept released a new version 5.5 update to MainActor. I mistakenly thought installing both of these updates would solve my problem. I misunderstood how software application developers interact with operating system developers, and especially the Linux community, which is a little more loosely knit than a major corporation that just produces one operating system. Does such a thing exist? Actually MainConcept?s new release of MainActor was packaged to install correctly on Mandriva Linux 10.1, which has it?s own series of software updates available that are not part of the version 10.2 Limited Edition 2005 release. I found out all of this with the help of MainConcept?s Linux support guy, Markus Kramer, who said:

That is why we offer pre-built packages. Unfortunately 10.2 has quite a number of changes in contrast to 10.1, that would require its own version.
Currently the status of the different distributions regarding IEEE 1394 support as well as the complete runtime environment is at a different level for each of them, making it a little tricky to get MA up and running without a custom made package. We are still working on additional packages but that is quite a time and resource intensive task as each of the distributions needs to be installed, the build environment needs to be setup, the package requirements need to be inspected, MA has to be built, a custom packaging spec has to be created ...
As a result of this, packages become available in the order of internal priority of different distributions. Some distributors i.e. decided to support development by providing early access to their upcoming products while others just expect us to find out ourselves about their plans and different products, which does not stop them from complaining about packages being not available or incompatible. 

Page: 1 2 3 Next Page