A case of video editing

Recently I went out and had a really great ride. Got a lot of rain, some good amount of driving in hill twisties, and overall some really great time.

As usual the dash cam had captured almost all the driving, and I thought of putting together a small timelapse video with friends as a memory.

Copied all the clips onto a portable hard disk. From there went into Ubuntu and put together a decent clip using OpenShot. A surprize was waiting for me though. Went to export and found out on my updated system with Ubuntu 20.10, OpenShot export with hardware acceleration did not work anymore. 

Puzzled I searched around via google, found a few solutions, tried them but to no avail. Then decided to shift to another video editor. On Linux the only decent choice is shotcut or kdenlive. Both did not support my midlife radeon integrated graphics.

So what else to try. I have windows on other partition, so I could try some windows programs. As expected, I downloaded a bunch of video editors and tried out gpu acceleration using couple of clips and transcoding. After 3-4 days of combinations, I ended up with Shotcut on windows.

One thing I noticed, in windows Task Monitor we have GPU tab and we can see real-time GPU usage. That helped quickly get me on board.

Thankfully I'm getting quite good performance. For converting a 720p 30fps video, I get about 25-30fps encoding performance. And to compare, if I were to do this on CPU, I get only 4-5 fps.

BTW Shotcut is decent, not a lot of effects and I'm yet to figure out transitions, but lets see, maybe I'll look up some tutorials and make sense out of it.

So yay!!