Video editing woes

I officially give up on Linux for video editing, for the time being. I have a firewire device (Presonus FP10), and that may be my sticking point. I don't want to drop back to a higher latency device. Your results with a different soundcard may vary.

Earlier today, I wiped my partition, and reinstalled RemixOS fresh. I hadn't done updates at that time, but had updated my nVidia driver. I tried to add video clips into OpenShot. I had ASLA set up to play back through my FP10. It crashed. I dragged and dropped one of the files into its media pool. It didn't crash. I dragged three more there. It crashed. It just ... vanished. VLC Player tells me they are MJPG 640x480 videos, framerate 25. Audio is 11024 Hz, mono, 8bits, araw. They are in AVI containers.

My hardware is

Mainboard : Asus M2N68-AM Plus
Chipset : Athlon64/Opteron/Sempron (K8 Family) HyperTransport Configuration
Processor : AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ @ 2300MHz
Physical Memory : 2048MB (1 x 2048 DDR2-SDRAM )
Video Card : NVIDIA GeForce 7025 / NVIDIA nForce 630a
Hard Disk : Seagate ST3160215ACE (160GB)
Hard Disk : Western Digital WD32 00AAKS-00UU3 SCSI Disk Device (320GB)
Monitor Type : LG Electronics L1750S - 17 inches
Network Card : NVIDIA nForce Networking Controller

according to PC wizard. One of these HD's is IDE, and one is SATA. I am using: Remix_OS-12.03 64-bit.

I uninstalled Openshot and mltlib and installed KDEnlive. I got it to play back, but its audio was glitchy; and the glitches remained even in the final rendered product. It never played back right, although I had gotten fewer glitches in playback previously than I did after a fresh install. I set it up to play back in ALSA, as I have detailed elsewhere in this forum. I have posted a bug report to them. I got no better results with KDEnlive after updating everything. The problem also wasn't with the format, in all probability, since at one point, I had a more recent version of KDEnlive (0.8 or 0.82), and the clip proxies were also glitchy, but differently so. KDEnlive holds a lot of promise for powerful video editing, as it has many powerful filters and is pretty flexible how it sets them up, but while I could get excellent results using it to render video, and a separate application to render audio, I consider that too much trouble.

I tried Cinellera, but the audio played back too loud, and it kept locking up.

I tried to get KDEnlive to play back through my FP10 in a fresh install from:

debian-6.0.5-amd64-DVD-1.iso

In it, I could not get the sound to play back at all in KDEnlive with my FP10. When it did play back, e.g. when playing back a video in IceWeasel, opening or moving any window seemed to cause the audio to gap. This is not the case in Remix OS. Its realtime kernel seems to give it more stable audio. If I was doing Linux audio, I'd use Remix_OS. The audio only applications seem to run fine. I haven't gotten a audio/video application to be stable yet. Since I can run more VST plugins in Windows, I will continue to do my audio work there; although the allure of a more stable platform for recording/live performances does yet hold some interest for me.

If your setup is anything like mine, and you want to do video editing with audio through a firewire device, I recommend you not try the current incarnations of Remix_OS or Debian. I wish I had better news about Linux video editing; but perhaps this will save someone else a lot of wasted time. I hope taking the time to report my results to you guys will help result in more stable Linux software one day.