I've been bitten by the video bug lately, probably inspired by my wife's interest in the Flip video camera. We don't, of course, have said camera, but I figured out earlier this week that our digital camera can take very short videos. I also found Kdenlive, a video capture and editing package for Linux.

I've been warned that video editing is very complicated, and even more complicated on Linux. I was happily surprised when I downloaded Kdenlive, installed it, and found it to be extremely easy to use. You can see my first effort here:

You can see exactly how easy this tool is to use if you want the video. I'm clearly not the next Copola, and yet I was still able to make a simple video sequence, or at least 9 seconds worth of video sequence. It's actually as easy as loading video/pictures/music into the project workspace, then dragging them around to where you want them to appear in your video. Right click between two tracks and you can create a transition, like the cross fades that I used. If you want to get really tricky you can add effects like the fade to black that I did at the end. That's as simple as right clicking and choosing "Add Effect."

All in all, I'm going to have a lot of fun with this toy. Watch this space for more examples that you don't want to see.