Recording audio and video simultaneously with Ardour

[great_lakes_timeseed]

Hi,

I want to record acoustic guitar performance videos that I can post on YouTube and whatnot. I'm recording with Ardour 4. For some reason, when I try to record video at the same time (I've used both Cheese and GTK UVC and it happens with both) the video program doesn't run. It just says "There was an error playing video from the webcam". Any suggestions on how to fix this? Thanks.

[glowrak guy]

I would separate the recording tasks, and play to the strengths
of affordable technology. There are many inexpensive quality hardware video recorders,
from a smart phone on a tripod, to used but older-school camcorders.

In the meantime, try to record the audio with timemachine, or a jackd commandline recorder, to minimize
system overheads and complexities. When recording A/V simultaneously, make a 'hit' sound before playing,
that will make it easy to sync imported audio to video.

Once you choose the best video codec for your needs, and a video app that imports audio,
It may take some ffmpeg command digging to find a command that will convert
the merged production to a format youtube can use, and the process will likely involve
more than one linux video app to finish the process. Openshot, cinellera, lives, kino, avidemux etc etc
are all in various states of readiness, so some search-engine reading awaits. But there may be
some linux how-to videos on youtube, as yours is a popular task.

The weakest link in the audio recording chain determines the quality. An expensive mic
on a cheap audio-input is a waste, as would be a cheapo mic in a pro audio interface.
Yet another range of compromises to consider. But it's almost the weekend.
Cheers

[ssj71]

I've used ffado successfully for this sort of thing. But to make it keep sync, you have to apply a patch. I made step by step instructions in this thread:
http://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?p=56988#p56988

You will need to alter the ffmpeg call slightly to record the stream from your webcam, or you can just stream the webcam to your screen using something like mplayer.

[great_lakes_timeseed]

Awesome! Thanks for the replies.

[Tootler]

1. I record audio and video separately. I use a video camera for the video and a multitrack recorder for audio, but using Ardour is just fine for the audio, just use a separate video camera. You can either record both simultaneously or you can record the audio first then "lipsync" your video.

2. I transfer the audio and video to the PC and use ffmpeg to extract the audio from the video.

3. I then use Audacity to align the actual audio with the audio from the video so both start and end at the same time. You should be able to do this in Ardour.

4. I then export the modified audio as a flac file. I use flac as Open Shot, the video editor I use does not accept wav files and I believe in transfering the audio in lossless format as it reduces the audio degradation when the video and its audio are compressed when rendering the final video.

5. I then use Open Shot to create the final video from the separate audio and video. I only need steps 2 & 3 because Open Shot does not display an audio waveform either in the video or audio. If you use a video editor that displays an audio waveform, you can align your video and audio directly in the video editor.