Video editing is Achilles’ heel of Floss environments.
Lot has been done through years, and it is now quite easy to approach video editing from different sides, within the Floss community.
One way is, off course, ‘dividi et impera’: instead of using gigantic problematic softwares like for example Cinerella, it is possible to use small handy applications to performe one specific step at a time. This is a very efficient way of developing small projects and experimental videos, animations and little clips of any kind. A list of available applications can be found here.
Piksel, always very sensitive to video issues, organized this year a number of initiatives in that direction.
An example is Open Video Workshop by Richard Spindler; the intent was to go through a complete movie making work flow, using Open Movie Editor (a  tool that provides basic movie making capabilites), dvgrab, dvdstyler, ffmpeg, etc.


Federico Bonelli and August Black performed a project similar in approach and target: “Kaos – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead“. The film, shouted and edited in few days during the festival, was premiered on Saturday night at USF Sardinen. The short, inspired by Tom Stoppard’s play, is a nice experiment on languages and the poetics of absurd. Characters are running around the screen, they look unsure, not knowing what to do, divided by order and disorder. They throw a coin, which gives always the same result: solutions are probably there, but you need to visualise them, and lots of what is happening is not relevant nor related to the main plot… But what is the main plot of our fictitious life styles? The authors used a second hand video-camera and free tools only… Success!

If Floss film production is still a pioneering process, real-time video, procedural video scripting and other delicious experimental practices can find a wider set of possibilities and applications within a Unix/Linux environment.

Some of these tools were presented on Saturday afternoon at Teknikerkroen. Lluis Gomez y Bigorda and Yves Degoyon introduced PDVJtools, a group
of externals to facilitate visual work in puredata. The blobs function, by example, keys anything that moves and has a shape bigger than the defined numbers… Fresh code in full development!
Robert Atwood, who explored the use of free software for creating numerical feedback loops at multiple levels, gave a short demonstration of Jackbytes, his own
applications for sound and visuals communicating via JACK and
jackbytes. His presentation is available online.

Emanuel Andel introduced Tagr.tv, a dedicated video blog platform documenting in real-time all kinds of digital and media arts events. The idea was born during last piksel; collaboration with thenextlayer, a similar project by Armin Medosh, is active. Participation is open! Tagr.tv aims to abandon youtube and feature its own media system…

Christian Thater explained the advantages of GIT (Distributed
Revision Control), a version control system
designed to handle very large projects, most notably the Linux kernel. This distributed system is safer because only the owner needs writing permissions; this creates less conflicts and no discussions about who is allowed to commit because none has privileges. This system is fast and includes powerful tools for visualising
and navigating a non-linear development history. It was created once upon a time by Linus Torvalds.