Video Timeline Setup

No configuration is required if everything is to meant be run on a single machine, and the version of Ardour comes from http://www.ardour.org. Everything is pre-configured and included with the download/install.

Single Machine

If Ardour is compiled from source, or installed from a 3rd party repository, three additional tools will need to be installed manually, which are used by Ardour to provide video features:

Ardour requires xjadeo ≥ version 0.6.4, harvid ≥ version 0.7.0 and ffmpeg (known to work versions: 1.2, 2.8.2, 5.0)

The Ardour development team is in control of the first two applications. ffmpeg however can be a bit of a problem. To avoid conflicts with distribution packages, Ardour looks for ffmpeg_harvid and ffprobe_harvid.

All four applications need to be found in $PATH (e.g. $HOME/bin or /usr/local/bin). For convenience the binary releases of harvid include ffmpeg_harvid and ffprobe_harvid. Ardour binaries from ardour.org do include all relevant tools and most GNU/Linux distributions also provide those.

Binary releases of the video-tools are available from ardour.org via a dedicated installer script: install_video_tools.sh.

The easiest way to install the video-utilities on Linux is by running the following line in a terminal:

sh -c "$(curl -s -L http://git.io/tVUCkw)"

Studio Setup

As Setting up a proper A/V post-production studio can be a complicated task, it is advised to read the info in the previous section to get familiar with the tools involved first. As much as the Ardour team streamlines and simplifies the single machine setup, the studio setup is focused on modularity.

  • TODO:
  • Synchronization ardour → video-display-box should be accomplished by external means. Jack-transport(netjack), MTC, LTC (OSC and/or ssh-pipe work but introduce additional latency + jitter)
  • Ardour launches XJREMOTE (environment variable, default 'xjremote' which comes with xjadeo).
  • Either use a custom shell script that ssh'es into the remote box and launches/controls xjadeo there, selects the sync-source and passes though communication between ardour ⇔ xjadeo via ssh (xjadeo is launched stopped with the session).
  • …or override xjremote's behavior—instead of IPC with a local running xjadeo-process, using OSC for example. Xjadeo would run permanently and Ardour will just tell it to load files and set offsets via OSC. See xjremote-osc example script.
  • If the video server runs remotely, Ardour needs to be configured in Ardour > Preference > Video (hostname of the video-server).
  • Ideally the machines have a common shared folder (NFS or similar). Ardour's import (audio-extract) and export (mux) functionality depends on having access to the video file. Also Ardour's video-import transcodes the file into a suitable proxy-format that allows reliable seeking to any frame…