Well I finally got around to recording a video. Unfortunately, it was a lot more difficult to figure this all out than I thought it would be. I ended up doing the recording on my laptop as my desktop graphics card decided to die on me last week. Here's what I did:
- {l Code}: {l Select All Code}
avconv -f alsa -i pulse -f x11grab -s 1920x1080 -i :0.0 -s 1920x1080 -r 30 -vcodec libx264 -preset ultrafast -crf 0 out.mkv
That recorded my entire screen. I'm not sure why I needed to specify -s twice, but I did. All that I needed was a 1024x768 window to be recorded, but I gave up trying to figure out the magic series of options to do that. After fiddling with pulse audio controls for a while, I got it to record the application sound as well. What I was not able to record was my microphone (as this video I'm making includes audio commentary). After failing to get it to record from the microphone on a separate track, I gave up and used Audacity to record the commentary separately, and that worked out well.
So now I'm to the editing phase. I have a .mkv video and a .wav (or .ogg, or .whatever I want) audio track to add to it. I need to do the following:
1) Crop the video from 1920x1080 to the 1024x768 section of the screen I need
2) Trim the beginning and the end of the video (and audio)
3) Add the commentary audio track to it
4) Trim the audio commentary and align it correctly to the video
I tried out kdenlive and after 10 minutes, the only thing I was able to figure out was how to add the audio commentary and nothing else. I wasn't impressed that even a google search for "kdenlive video crop" turned up nothing useful. So I gave avidemux a try and it has been much more productive. I still have some issues with it though, such as trimming the video clip doesn't seem to adjust the audio accordingly (so the video and audio are completely out of sync). And to crop the video I have to specify the format to save it as first, and I'm not sure what to select (I'm guessing one of the MPEG4 options). I tried cropping and saving the video as a test, but then it wouldn't play back the cropped video.
Just thought I'd comment on what I've been doing. Hopefully by the end of the day I'll finish my video editing, but I'm not holding my breath. I'll share the final product when I upload it.