Editing cellphone videos in Ubuntu Linux

If you have a slightly older android cell phone, chances are it records videos using the “3gp” format. When editing 3gp videos in OpenShot on Ubuntu, the audio and video can become unsynced. I have found that using the WinFF application you can convert the 3gp video into “DV – Raw DV for NTSC full screen” format, which will allow OpenShot to edit it correctly without having audio sync problems.

As a side note, sometimes when shooting videos with a cell phone, you may forget to rotate the phone to “landscape” orientation and be left with a vertical video that is rotated 90 degrees when shown on a computer. OpenShot can be used to rotate videos as follows:

  1. right click on the clip
  2. click Properties
  3. Choose the Effect tab (far right)
  4. Hit the “+” sign and then scroll down to “R” for Rotate.
  5. In the effects settings:
    • set the Rotate X, Y and Z to 0.00
    • set the Fixed Rotate X variable to 90.0.
  6. Hit apply

Learning Python for programmers – video lectures

In my day job I teach students how to program. Recently, I gave three days of review lectures for my CS 1301 (Introduction to Computation – With Python and Robots) class. These three 50 minute lectures brushed over all of the major topics we covered in class very quickly. They would be very useful to somebody who knows how to program another language (such as Java or C), and wants to learn the basics of python in 2 and a half hours.

If you would like to watch more in-depth video lectures on any of the above topics, find the appropriate day in the class calendar and watch that video.