Comment Re: A Clapboard (Score 1) 103
I've been trying without success to make sense of the post I'm replying to. My best guess is that the poster is unaware that he does not know as much about the tools available in Linux as he thinks he does. And that his reading comprehension was, for some reason, not very good when he was looking at earlier posts.
Blender runs on Linux and contains a very good NLE (and a fantastic suite of CG tools as well). Audio clips brought into Blender's NLE can be displayed as waveforms, which makes synching the spike of the clap to the exact frame when hands come together very easy. Blender can handle any reasonable number of simultaneous audio clips (think of separate voice-over, action, and background music), as well as any reasonable complexity of overlaid video clips.
Audacity also runs on Linux and is an excellent tool for removing background noises from an audio clip. I have also used it to shift the pitch of speakers, and somewhat to extend and/or compress parts of an audio clip to better fit a video sequence.
Combined with a $300 digital videocam and a $100 digital audio recorder, you've got everything you need to make good quality 720p videos. That is not good enough to get into the wedding market, but it is sufficient for real estate sales, vacation travelogs, news and views interviews, "how to" stuff for YouTube, etc.
One last point: any live-action audio, such as recording an interview, should be cleaned up in Audacity or a similar audio editor. Since the audio will need to be handled separately from the video, there is no particular advantage in going the extra expense of wireless mic to videocam recording. And I suspect it would be easier to handle two different streams from the start than to split a combined audio/video stream into its components (think splitting MPEG4 into its component H.264 and AAC). But of course this depends on the encodings the camera uses.
Rather than spending more on a fancier videocam, I'd prefer to spend it on a second audio recorder (boom mic plus lapel mic) and/or entry level videocam (one set up for head shots and the other at middle distance.)