Editing video without a GUI? Really?

It seems counter intuitive - if ever there was a program in need of a graphical user interface, it’s a non-linear video editing program.

However, as part of the May First board elections, I discovered otherwise.

We asked each board candidate to submit a 1 - 2 minute video introduction about why they want to be on the board. My job was to connect them all into a single video.

I had an unrealistic thought that I could find some simple tool that could concatenate them all together (like mkvmerge) but I soon realized that this approach requires that everyone use the exact same format, codec, bit rate, sample rate and blah blah blah.

I soon realized that I needed to actually make a video, not compile one. I create videos so infrequently, that I often forget the name of the video editing software I used last time so it takes some searching. This time I found that I had openshot-qt installed but when I tried to run it, I got a back trace (which someone else has already reported).

I considered looking for another GUI editor, but I wasn’t that interested in learning what might be a complicated user interface when what I need is so simple.

So I kept searching and found melt. Wow.

I ran:

melt originals/* -consumer avformat:all.webm acodec=libopus vcodec=libvpx

And a while later I had a video. Impressive. It handled people who submitted their videos in portrait mode on their cell phones in mp4 as well as web cam submissions using webm/vp9 on landscape mode.

Thank you melt developers!