Kino Stuff by Tim Shead

Kino and related tools make up an outstanding free-as-in-freedom video editing suite that is designed to work primarily with DV footage. Some important Kino links:

dvgrab

dvgrab is a command-line tool for grabbing DV video from a camcorder via IEEE-1394 (Firewire) interface. Footage can be stored as either raw DV files or AVI (with DV encoding) files.

Kino plugin API version 2

Charles Yates and I have been noodling around with ideas for a 2nd generation Kino Plugin API - you can see some preliminary (and I mean preliminary) work that's been done here.

timfx

The most recent CVS version of Kino (0.51) has support for plugins. You may want to have a look at timfx, the modest little collection of Kino plugins with the immodest name. Currently, timfx features the Image Luma transition, which creates a limitless variety of high quality (interlaced) soft wipes based on the luma in images you supply, while the Color Hold filter removes all chroma from images exept for a single color that you designate (you may recall the little girl in red from the otherwise black-and-white film Schindler's List). The Blur filter efficiently blurs your video with control over the blur radius, while the Soft Focus filter can make your source footage dreamlike / romantic - you can put away those pantyhose! The Corner Out plugin is an experimental DVE transition implemented in OpenGL - over time, I hope to develop experience working with OpenGL for creating more complex DVE effects for the next-generation Kino plugin API.

timfx Downloads

timfx Samples

A Note on Quality: As a former professional producer, quality is very important to me. You may notice some compression artifacts in the following examples - these are caused by re-encoding the altered footage back to DV prior to export with the libdv codec. Libdv is under constant improvement, and I am confident that its quality will continue to improve until such artifacts are imperceptable.

Image Luma

The following are just a handful of samples of what you can do with the Image Luma plugin. On top are the luma images used to control the wipes; on bottom are still images from partially-complete wipes. For reference, the first image on the left is the unmodified "B" footage (a plain black background was used for the "A" footage). All video images were exported from Kino as JPEG stills after rendering the Image Luma wipes. The luma images were all created in the GIMP. Enjoy!















Color Hold

The Color Hold plugin removes all color information from video, except for one color of your choosing.  Tolerance and softness controls give you control over the range of color hues that will be retained.  This can provide a dramatic effect where color is used to draw the viewer's attention to a specific part of a scene.

 The original source footage

Color Hold on blue

Color Hold on orange, with a large threshold

Blur

The Blur plugin blurs video under your control:
Original source footage
Blur, Radius 5
Blur, Radius 15
Blur, Radius 25
Blur, Radius 100

Soft Focus

Here are before-and-after shots using the Soft Focus plugin:
Original source footage
Soft Focus, with Softness 50 and Mix 0.5

Corner Out

No examples, yet. This effect is mainly an experiment into using OpenGL for "DVE" type effects. Although the plugin produces interlaced output, it does not properly deinterlace its input, so there is much room for improvements in quality. The current implementation will attempt to use GLX 1.3 "pbuffers" for hardware-accelerated offscreen rendering, but should fall back on GLXPixmaps for unaccelerated rendering as needed. Feedback on how well this works for varying video hardware / drivers would be well appreciated.