[TriLUG] FOSS formats for digital video

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

I give a guest science talk at a local school (same talk 
each year). Since I'm taking an on-line course at the 
moment, it occured to me that some people outside the school 
might be interested in the talk and I could put it on my 
webpage. The school has a new looking video camera and is 
quite happy to shoot my talk and help make a web version of 
it for me. The teacher who has all the hardware can do the 
titles and splice images etc into the movie for me, so I 
won't have to do any of the editing, which is a big help, 
since I don't know the first thing about any of this.

They're a Mac school and the teacher wants to do it in some 
format starting with 'i' (itunes, imovie, ibook...?) and 
mentioned Quicktime (I don't know if this is different to 
imovie, or the protocol under imovie). I said I'd be happy 
to have it in Quicktime, but that I can never get Quicktime 
to work on my Linux machine and as well I'd like to have the 
talk in a format that would work for non-Macs (I'm happy to 
have it downloadable in a couple of formats). I mentioned 
real, avi, dvx. The teacher looked at some pull down menu 
and said "they're all proprietary, you don't want those". I 
said they worked fine for me.

I got nowhere and eventually changed the subject.

What format(s) does video come off a modern video camera?

If the teacher does all the editing on a Mac, will the 
stream be converted to iMovie format before the editing and 
it won't be convertible to other formats post edit? Are 
there format converters? How do I get a multiple formats?

What format(s)/protocols are cross platform, or at least 
well supported in Linux?

Thanks Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!