Working with the Librem 14
François Téchené
Latest posts by François Téchené (see all)
- Black Friday - November 29, 2024
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- Working with the Librem 14 - November 22, 2023
Last year, I got the idea of showcasing the power of the Librem 14 by making a professional quality commercial video of it.
This video would be made entirely with the Librem 14 itself. It would include everything that I love doing, which is 3D animations, 2D (hand drawn) animations, real world cinematic shots, all together with some nice rhythm and cool transitions.
That project was accepted by the Marketing team and after many hours of work, here is the final result:
The Gear
The challenge with such a project, was to show that it is possible to achieve a result that matches modern TV commercials visual standards, but with freedom respecting tools and a very low budget.
To do so, I did the pre-production and post production of this project with the following gear :
- A maxed out Librem 14 with 64GB of RAM, 2TB NVMe drive, and 4 cell battery (This laptop has been my daily driver for the last 2 years)
- A 13″ Wacom One tablet (Driven by the Librem 14 for the hand drawn animation)
- Two 32″ screens (Also attached to the Librem 14 for 3D and Editing work)
The Shooting
For the shooting session, I worked with my good friend, DoP, Thierry Cazorla. Featuring in the video was Diane Martin (also our make up artist) and Laurent Millé. None of them are professional actors so big kudos to them for having been so great during the shooting!
The shooting was recorded in 4K. We used a few LED lights and a small tripod dolly for the moving shots.
The fun fact is the Librem 14 and accessories that are featured in both filmed sequences were exactly the ones that I used during the post production of this project. That includes the Librem 14, the two 32″ screens and the Wacom tablet, along with my fancy pencil looking stylus. 🙂
Both scenes where made in the same room, which was Thierry’s leaving room at the time. A change of setup and lighting made it look like two different places.
The Pepper & Carrot Animation
The Pepper & Carrot animation was the first sequence that I worked on. I have drawn it with Krita, composed it with Blender, and edited it together in Kdenlive. It was a big project on its own and I wrote a blog post about it.
The 3D Animations
Aside from the filmed shots and the hand made animation, all other shots were made in 3D graphics, modeled and rendered in Blender. I went through all those tasks with my Librem 14, sometimes helped by a spare Librem 15 in order to do parallel rendering and boost the render times.
On such a Laptop, the 3D rendering was made with the CPU. With 6 cores and 12 threads, it is pretty good, even for 3D rendering. Having it running the same renders than the Librem 15, showed that it is actually 150% faster than the later for this specific task!
The scene of this particular shot was made with Blender and the TV screen effect was made with Kdenlive.
The Final Editing
After all the hard work to make the different shots, it was time to edit everything together. For that matter, I used Kdenlive in a 4K project. The final video is supposed to be in FullHD but being able to edit 4K footage in a 4K project makes it easier to re-adjust the framing of the shots while keeping a very sharp end result.
Kdenlive has recently become a lot more powerful with the ability to work with nested sequences. That helped me in making the transitions between the different shots as well as the final color grading, in a very professional way.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I would say that I am pretty happy with the end result. The Librem 14 is the fastest, while being the most respecting, secure, and upgradable laptop that I have ever had. I have been using it daily for all my professional computing tasks for more than two years and I am still very happy with it. The fast and power efficient CPU, the great quantity of RAM, and the speed of the NVMe drive makes this kind of project, recorded and editing in 4k, a breath with this machine. I should also mention that the laptop is nothing without software and I want to give a big thumb up to the people working on Blender, Kdenlive, Krita, Inkscape, GNOME and many other software that are becoming greater after each release and that are making the Librem 14 even more powerful. Thank you for that!
Librem 5 Holiday Sale!
Save $350 on the Librem 5 with the code L5SALE23 until December the 15th 2023.
This makes the Librem 5 cost $649 or even $549 if bundled with a Librem AweSIM plan!
Purism Products and Availability Chart
| Model | Status | Lead Time | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Librem Key (Made in USA) | In Stock ($59+) | 10 business days | |
 | Librem 5 | In Stock ($699+) 3GB/32GB | 10 business days | |
| Librem 5 COMSEC Bundle | In Stock ($1299+) Qty 2; 3GB/32GB | 10 business days | |
| Liberty Phone (Made in USA Electronics) | Backorder ($1,999+) 4GB/128GB | Estimated fulfillment February | |
| Librem 5 + SIMple (3 GB Data) | In Stock ($99/mo) | 10 business days | |
| Librem 5 + SIMple Plus (5 GB Data) | In Stock ($129/mo) | 10 business days | |
| Librem 5 + AweSIM (Unlimited Data) | In Stock ($169/mo) | 10 business days | |
 | Librem 11 | In Stock ($999+) 8GB/1TB | 10 business days | |
 | Librem 14 | Backorder ($1,370+) | Estimated fulfillment December | |
 | Librem Mini | Backorder ($799+) | 10 business days | |
 | Librem Server | In Stock ($2,999+) | 45 business days |
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