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This weekend I tried out an open source video editing program called Jahshaka and really liked it.

It stemmed from the need to put together this slide show thing with music and moving pictures, but not wanting to use Powerpoint (or Impress, or similar programs) because of the limited transition / animation effects as well as the desire to export it to a video that would be burned on DVD for playback, since it’s my opinion that it’s always safer to do that for these kinds of presentations.

Before anyone jumps in with suggestions about all the other programs I could have used, I should add that I was specifically interested in finding an open source application that I could use to do real video editing, since I may want to do more of it in the future. I stumbled across Jahshaka and committed to going with it, despite the fact that I had less than 24 hours from the time I first downloaded it to learn it and produce the final result before the party.

It turned out to be really easy. I haven’t done video editing in a really long time, and never digitally on a personal computer, but the process was pretty painless. I probably should have taken a few minutes to learn about all the various built in fancy effects, etc. that the program has, but since I was in a hurry, I just did them all manually (using keyframes like you would with Flash animations). Putting together the animation scenes was pretty simple, and then I just rendered them all out, and used the editing feature to arrange them in the various tracks and mix them over the music.

The program supports exporting the finished product directly to various video formats, including DivX and MPEG2 for DVD burning. The only hitches I ran into in the process were my own fault. There was one scene that looked a bit choppy and was missing some frames in the middle of the final output after I had finished exporting, which I later realized was because my hard drive had filled up while I was rendering that animation sequence, but at that point it was too late to go back and redo it. The other hangup was that once I went to burn the actual DVD I found that my DVD burner had crapped out, so I couldn’t do it that way after all. I exported it to a DivX avi file instead and just ran it from my laptop instead of the DVD player, so it worked out fine in the end.

All in all, I’d recommend it to anyone who is looking for the same things I was in a video editing package. Like I said, I really haven’t used it that extensively, and I’ve done virtually no research into the alternatives, but for what it’s worth (taking that into consideration) I think it’s a really good product. It runs on Linux, OSX, and Windows, with a Solaris port on the way.