3 stars (SuSe and Digital Video Editing) - I'll be happy to be proven wrong by 10.0, but one area where 9.3 was very weak was Digital Video (DV) editing. There are and abundance of robust and stable commercial packages available for Windows for around $100. My favorite is Pure Motion's Edit Studio. The Suse trial version of MainActor crashed frequently and I could not get Broadcast 2000 to run at all other than in DV capture mode. Kino worked, but is low on features and not intuitive. Cinelerra looks powerful, but its specs demand high-powered hardware, and it scared me off. I understand that there are licensing issues with DRM, codecs etc, but DV has now become a mainstream activity on home PCs. I could easily migrate to Suse Linux, but I have to keep a Windows box around to edit DV and create DVDs. For out-of-the-box DV editing, Win boxes are way ahead on points - don't even consider Linux if you do DV exclusively. On the other hand, the KB III burning software distributed with Suse works flawlessly, and I was able to get freeware MPEG-II conversions running. The quality of the encodings when viewed with Xine was amazing. One very interesting DV tool in Linux is the Blender 3D graphics program, which includes many video post-processing features, and allows you to add special effects, graphical overlays, and animated titles. [However, Blender also runs fine on Win PCs.] If you don't mind hunting down and installing packages to mess around with, it is worth considering Linux for post-processing. Firewire support worked flawlessly up to a point, but I had to find packages to support DV capture from my Sony camcorder. I also had problems getting Suse to recognize and mount a large-capacity LaCie firewire drive, partitioned into NTFS and Fat-32 partitions. One other issue is file formats. I work with commercial vector graphics packages such as Adobe Illustrator and would like to see more robust import features on the Open Source side. I realize that Ado... SuSE Inc :: suse :: linux :: 10 :: 0 :: dvd :: suse :: inc :: software :: linux :: suselinux10 0(dvd) 01 october :: 200 :: SuSE Linux 10 0 (DVD)
