In this article, I talk about editing videos (one of my hobbies) using one of the many open source video editors available--Pitivi. With this, I hope to get new GNU /Linux users started on video editing. Pitivi is good for professionals too.

While other FOSS video editors like OpenShot and Avidemux are good, Pitivi comes pre¬installed with Ubuntu 10.04. (You can also install it manually by typing sudo apt-get install pitivi) The latest version of Pitivi was 0.13.4, at the time of writing. This full-featured video editor is written in Python (with GTK +) and is licensed under the LGPL.

It is supported by the Gstreamer multimedia framework, so it can handle most of the available formats and conversion. You can also convert your videos to HD using Pitivi, which we will come to soon. For now, let's get started. I suggest you tryout these steps as you read :-). You can launch Pitivi from Applications > Sound and Video> Pitivi in Ubuntu (or run pitivi in a terminal window). You should see the welcome screen as shown in Figure ( The next step is to import a clip; click the Import button on the tool bar.

Choose the video file you want to edit. From the Clip Library area, drag your video to the preview area on the right, and to the video and audio panel too (sometimes also called a timeline, since it has a 'ruler' showing the time of various frames above the video and audio tracks). Your screen should now resemble Figure 2. Next, click
the Play button below the preview area. You will notice that a Seek bar moves along the timeline, showing how many seconds into the video the playback has proceeded.
At the bottom of the application window are the tools that we use for video editing (shown in Figure 3). We'll look at each of these in turn. Use the Scissors tool to cut the clips