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Graphics Software

Cinelerra 2.0 Released 210

Eugenia writes "The best open source A/V production environment for Linux today, Cinelerra, has reached version 2.0. It sports H.264 video encoding/decoding & MPEG-4 audio encoding through Quicktime4Linux, the ability to load any MPEG or IFO file directly, the ability to import raw digital camera files through dcraw, gamma correction for raw digital camera files, better chroma key support and much more. On a similar note, the promising DIVA home video editor (written in GStreamer and Mono/GTK#) is progressing fast as well."
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Cinelerra 2.0 Released

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  • Please be nice ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by clueless123 ( 643205 ) * on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @10:07AM (#13547457)
    Dear Slashdot crowd.. As the mantainer of the cinelerra manual wiki, which runs out of my home cable connection on a P400mhz 64 meg machine ... Please, please, please be gentle..
  • Good (Score:2, Interesting)

    by suso ( 153703 ) *
    This is good because people have started to notice (and say on the message boards) that some of the recent versions of Kino have started to become more buggy.
    • This is good because people have started to notice (and say on the message boards) that some of the recent versions of Kino have started to become more buggy.
      So Kino is becoming more and more like Cinelerra ...
      But how is this good?
      *SCNR*
  • You guys look at the system requirements for this? They recommend dual Opterons.

    You know, being a lowly Computer Science major struggling to get through graduate school, I've often had dreams about making a small independent film. I've also had more realistic dreams of owning an Athlon64 system. Maybe the two dreams aren't too far off.

    One day I hope to have a masters and begin teaching, and in the mean time I'll simply write my master screen play. With high quality digital video equipment getting cheaper,
    • Re:Independent Films (Score:5, Informative)

      by clueless123 ( 643205 ) * on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @10:15AM (#13547540)
      Lots of people run cinelerra on smaller machines. I would say that anything above 1.5ghz + 500megs of ram would do ... I use a 2.2ghz + 1gig ram, and it does fine
    • Re:Independent Films (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It may want a dual opteron, however it has built in support to cluster machines to render video.
    • For realtime use (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @10:30AM (#13547676)
      All these specs are for realtime video editing. For offline video editing you can use a more modest system.

      Realtime, online video editing is for people who has clients sitting behind the editor and looking all the process to make changes at the moment.
    • You guys look at the system requirements for this? They recommend dual Opterons.

      They've always done stuff like this. Even back in the days when all they had was Broadcast2000, system requirements said stuff like "terabyte striped RAID". I don't think those were too common with most people looking for cheap video editing software at the time - and likewise, I don't think half-terabyte SATA drives are very common nowadays either. =)

      • Re:Independent Films (Score:3, Informative)

        by bfree ( 113420 )
        1. Cinelerra is not cheap video editing software.
        2. Cinelerra can handle high definition editing.
        3. 8 years ago I had a friend editing a TV Series made up of (12 I think) 5 minute programs in PAL. He had most of a terabyte in expensive fast scsi drives striped by a 5k video card in a dual Xeon (can't remember if 1M or 2M l2 cache). And yes, I really do mean the "video card" handled the drives, he had some more drives for software.
        4. Uncompressed raw video takes a lot of bits.

        If you want to produce broadcast q

        • The bottom line is while Cinelerra is Free software, it is not a simple cheap video editor, it is a broadcast video production suite intended to be used by people who are doing real work with machines built for the job.

          What is your experience with Cinelerra? Mine is that I produced a short video to publicise some work I did, and Cinelerra was a nightmare. It was extremely difficult to find any combination of codecs that would actually work. It crashed all the time. The sound filters made noisy garbled

    • by rampant mac ( 561036 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @10:45AM (#13547798)
      "With high quality digital video equipment getting cheaper, one day all I'll need is a decent camera, boom mike, power Linux box and some college drama students who will work for less than minimum wage."

      Uhhhh, since you didn't clarify, will you be filming the screen play you mentioned earlier or a low budget porn flick?

      `Cause I'm ready to help with a Paypal donation. For the porn flick, that is.

    • which is one of the reasons nobody touches it. Not the only reason but one of them. I try to migrate my Video editing system to linux about 2 times a year, every time I go back to XP, Premire Pro, After Effects and DVD lab.

      cinerella sucks horribly compared to even Premiere 5 from 5 years ago. it's not their fault it's just that all the pro packages for windows have a crapload of a head start on them. Granted, I have not tried the latest 2.0 release, but I do not have high hopes that they fixed all the DV
    • by bugnuts ( 94678 )
      Making a professional-quality movie is generally not cheap. The cost of a single lens on a pro movie camera could put you through college for a year, easily. Film ain't cheap, either.

      But with evolving technology, even a crappy 1.7Ghz computer will be better than the old technology of Xacto knives and splicing tape.

      So, dream of making an independent film all you want, but it's your script, the directing, and the acting that'll make the film, not the post production work.
    • I'm no expert in Cinelerra (yet) but I did some basic work with cinelerra-cvs earlier this year. My system is a dual-P3 850MHz with 2GB RAM. The program was certainly usable, if a little clunky.

      Rendering could be faster, but that's why I'm getting a dual core AMD64 in a few months!
    • No, they recommend Dual Opterons in that specific config if you want to get the VERY BEST performance from it.

      That setup encodes HDTV in realtime! most of us don't need realtime HDTV encoding to MPEG 4 you only need that if you also have an HDV camcorder. ...and no patience.
  • by coop0030 ( 263345 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @10:14AM (#13547528) Homepage
    The best open source A/V production environment for Linux today


    Is someone tooting their own horn? Or is this really the best software for A/V production?
    • by jjr23 ( 784123 ) <(cc.llemir) (ta) (nhoj)> on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @10:24AM (#13547626)
      Yes. Cinelerra is awesome. I've been creating some custom DVD menu videos with it and it has been really great... especially since they have an optimized x86_64 version. Can't wait to see this new version.
    • by bluelip ( 123578 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @10:29AM (#13547670) Homepage Journal
      It's advanced, but difficult to use. (In prior versions anyhow)

      For ease of use w/ most of the advanced features checkout MainActor from Mainconcept

      http://www.mainconcept.com/mainactor_v5.shtml [mainconcept.com]

      Free to DL and test. (Watermark in output)
    • by slashflood ( 697891 ) <flow@howflo w . c om> on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @10:31AM (#13547689) Homepage Journal
      Cinelerra is pretty good. Here are some alternatives:
      • MainActor & Piranha look excellent. But they are not open source.

        Kino looks good, I think that would be the only open source competitor. Based on the screenshots, I would guess that Cinelerra is farther along than Kino.

        • "But they are not open source."

          Personally, I'd look at that as a consideration, but I wouldn't let something that stop me from using the best available tool for the job...

        • My take on it is that Kino is good for the home user. It's designed for DV editing, in fact. Cinelerra is designed more for power users. It is not simple to use, but it is very powerful in what it can do, if you learn how to use it.
        • MainActor & Piranha look excellent. But they are not open source.

          We hear that all the time: there simply is no commercial support/software for Linux. There is no professional audio/video software available for Linux. The truth is, there is a lot of high quality (commercial) software for Linux out there. But I got it, whenever someone's talking about the lack of a specific software, he's talking about free as in beer software. There are equivalents of Windows/OS9|X software, but 'for chrissake it has
          • You seem to be reading quite a bit into the response. Perhaps you didn't read the question this was answering...

            The front page post described Cinelerra as "The best open source A/V production environment for Linux today" and the parent post asked whether that was true. Two of the products listed failed to meet the criteria for comparison.

    • There aren't many video editing suites for Linux, so it is debatable as to the worth of such a statement, even if accurate. Anything can be the best, if it is the only one out there.

      Having said that, A/V production is not a one-step operation, these days. There is a lot Cinelerra doesn't do that you might want to, which means that for those operations, you'll need to use something else. In turn, that means that if you use something Cinelerra won't work well with, for some reason, then you can't use Cinelerr

      • I've not seen an FFMPEG release in some time

        AFAIK Basically everyone uses their own copy of ffmpeg pulled from CVS; the suckiness of the front end (web site, release page, etc) is caused by everyone being 100% concentrated on the actual code.

      • It uses FFMPEG, if I recall correctly, but I've not seen an FFMPEG release in some time and the website links seem to be a mess of redirection. That's not good.

        I don't know what you're getting at here. FFMPEG doesn't make very frequent releases, but that's just a completely arbitrary metric. I don't think any project depends on releases of ffmpeg, they all use a CVS snapshot.

        For the record, development on ffmpeg is going as quickly as it always has. Most of the "almost working" codecs have now matured,

      • It uses FFMPEG, if I recall correctly, but I've not seen an FFMPEG release in some time and the website links seem to be a mess of redirection. That's not good.

        Don't worry. ffmpeg is under very active development. It's just, as you say, they haven't made a real release in a while. Gentoo et al make do with 0.4.9_pre2005xxxx snapshots for now.
    • it might be the best open source A/V production environment, but Shake [apple.com] for Linux is a better compositor.
    • I haven't used Cinelerra, although I played around with the interface a little.

      I always found its system requirements to be extremely steep, even for a NLE (which are usually pretty steep to begin with).

      I'd prefer something that demands a little less memory and firepower.

    • Open Source software has often been acused of lacking in the graphical department. With the advent of more stable Inkscape 0.42.2 [inkscape.org] and user friendly Gimp 2.0 [gimp.org] this has left us lacking only in the video department. Cinerella 2.0 [heroinewarrior.com] was just released to close that gap. Coupled with alternatives such as diva [mdk.org.pl], blender [blender.org] and others, what is linux and other Open Source operating systems still lacking?
    • Is someone tooting their own horn? Or is this really the best software for A/V production?

      It really is the best, but is difficult to install properly and a bear to learn to use.

      If you just want to cut clips out of a video and arrange them in the proper order try something like kino.
  • I'm not at all familiar with video editing in linux but now that I've seen this, it has sparked my interest. I want to add video tutorials to my site but once I buy the camera, the cost of Final Cut or similar software would be pretty rough. My question to those of you in the know is, do you need drivers for video cameras in order to import into linux? If so, are they generally available? I'd definitely consider using linux as my production environment for the videos if it wouldn't be a headache getting
    • If your camera has dv-out, firewire or any other way to create a dv, you are done. You can also use any of the video4linux drivers, but the quality is not as good.
    • Under "Device Drivers -> Multimedia Devices -> Video for Linux", you'll find a limited range of drivers for cameras. (Most of the drivers are for TV tuners and webcams, but there are capture card drivers there. A TV tuner card is not directly usable, unless it has line in OR you put a VCR between your camera and the computer to convert the signals to TV modulation.)

    • Yes you need drivers. No, it's not a hassle. If you have a recent distribution and a IEEE 1394 (Firewire) DV camera the driver should load automatically. The drivers should already be provided by your distribution (all the cameras use the same driver).
    • by Micah ( 278 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @01:26PM (#13549372) Homepage Journal
      You just need to load all the *1394 modules. There are four of them. If I was at home I could give the specific names. :)

      Once those are all loaded into your kernel, just plug the camera in, turn it on and position the tape, and run the dvgrab utility. It will start "play" on the camera and do the transfer automatically. Really pretty easy, and AFAIK, any DV digital camera will work fine.
    • As an alternative, depending on your needs, I found my Sony DVD Camcorder registers as a mass storage device with Linux. In fact you can even read the disc in a regular DVD drive once you have finalised it, which can be faster than using the camera one. You can drag and drop the individual MPEG files anywhere you want.

      Downsides:

      You have to finalise the disc to get files into the PC, which means for a non RW disc you either have to wait untill you've filled it up or waste part. (they're A$5-7)

      The discs only
  • I just gone done figuring out how to watch some old VHS tapes, without a tv, using an old vcr and linux.

    I think I would like to copy these vhs tapes to dvd so I don't have to deal with the tapes anymore.

    Would this be software I would want to use?

    Forgive the obvious question, I am new to the whole multimedia thing on linux
    • Actually, the best thing is probably using mencoder (part of mplayer) to capture the video through TV card, then using... something... to encode the video. (I've usually used virtualdub to capture and tmpegenc to encode in Windows. Nowadays I use mencoder and capture directly to xvid video; I suppose there's mpeg encoders like.. um... transcode? to do the thing.)

      I'm not sure if it pays to encode the video at DVD quality though, it's not really worth all of the effort. I've personally used VideoCDs, which

      • Thanks for the info.

        Right now I am watching the tapes via kdetv.

        Blank DVDs are no problem. I have a stack.

        My problem is that I don't even know what I need to know to move all of this stuff to DVD.

        Beyond getting it to DVD I would also like to edit trailers out of the vhs and make menus ( & mrls ) on the dvd.

        Most of the literature I found on the web assumes a lot of knowledge.
        • by Sheetrock ( 152993 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @12:17PM (#13548693) Homepage Journal
          I don't think there is a simple way to do what you want under Linux yet. I know it's possible because I've managed it, but the process is confusing (and, at least at the time I did it, buggy -- I had to use one version of a DVD tool to make the menu and an older version of the tool to put the image together because the newer one was causing skips in the video.)

          Here's what I did to do the conversion:

          • Capture video from the TV input card to the disk. As suggested, 'mencoder' is probably the best program for the job. First figure out how to watch a live stream from the TV card using 'mplayer', because once you get that working you can reuse most of those parameters with 'mencoder'. ("mplayer tv://88 -tv driver=v4l2:norm=ntsc:chanlist=us-cable:input=0:al sa" with no break in alsa (thanks Slashdot) gets me channel 88, but you may need to tweak this line depending on your area and Linux version.)

          • Edit video. The programs I found for this are picky about what video format you're editing, so you'll need to tell mencoder to output something compatible with your video editor in the step above. Cinelerra was too buggy for me at the time, so I went with 'avidemux' -- it was more straightforward for me, but probably far less advanced than this new version of Cinelerra, and I'm sure there are other editors out there.

          • Convert video to DVD format (if necessary.) If your editor isn't capable of editing MPEG2 video/audio then after you're done cutting you need to convert your finished product to DVD-compatible video. This part was the most awful for me and will probably require the most reading and tweaking. The program 'transcode' ultimately worked out.

          • Create DVD menu. I followed an online tutorial and did this with a graphics program ('gimp') and composed the result with 'dvdauthor'. I thought the process was ugly but since then GUI menu editors have been released (DVDStyler [sourceforge.net] and Q DVD-Author [sourceforge.net] in particular look pretty good.)

          • Create DVD layout. This is an XML file you feed to 'dvdauthor' that defines your DVD -- the menu, titles, chapters, etc. Looks difficult, but there are sample templates and tutorials out there that you can copy from and tweak for good results.

          • Create DVD filesystem. 'dvdauthor' again, taking that XML file and those videos and transforming them into a DVD filesystem. After this finishes your output directory will resemble the layout of a DVD.

          • Test DVD filesystem. 'xine' will let you watch the content of the output directory as if it was a DVD if configured properly. The command is 'xine dvd://(path to dir containing VIDEO_TS)' -- if output is in '/video', 'xine dvd:///video'.

          • Write image to disk. For me, this is 'growisofs -speed=1 -dvd-compat -Z /dev/cdrom -dvd-video'
          You've gotten a few comments since I typed this up, so I might as well add that it wasn't much easier for me to create a VCD or SVCD under Linux than a DVD (given that most of the pain is in getting the video in the correct format). You can create a DVD without a menu and, at least as far as my players go, it's treated the same as an SVCD (video launches on startup, skip back and next will move you through chapters, etc.) so it might be worth trying to make a menuless DVD if you're more interested in quick than fancy.
          • Thanks for taking the time to post that, Sheetrock. I'm trying to work out a system for converting old home videos to DVD and your post gives me a some good places to start. Unfortunately, no mod points today, otherwise you would get +1, Informative.
  • by starseeker ( 141897 ) * on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @10:17AM (#13547556) Homepage
    The default Cinelerra is quirky enough that gentoo doesn't want to install it by default - is this fixed in 2.0?

    Cinelerra-cvs http://cvs.cinelerra.org/ [cinelerra.org] is a fork which incorporates a variety of patches (apparently the original Cinelerra is developed by a single author, so cinelerra-cvs tries to avoid the bottlenecks that often result). cinelerra-cvs can be installed on gentoo, and once one switches to the Bluedot theme it's not half bad to look at :-).

    Also of interest are LiVES http://www.xs4all.nl/~salsaman/lives/ [xs4all.nl] and Jahshaka http://www.jahshaka.org/ [jahshaka.org] - there's also Kdenlive but that seems to not be actively developed any more: http://kdenlive.sourceforge.net/index.html [sourceforge.net]
  • Does it work with the iSight? I've been trying to get it to work recently with Fedora Core 4 but dv1394-2.0-pre is currently lacking support and dv1394-1 won't compile with gcc 4. Such is the way of Linux, yet I still try.

  • I do believe this is the first Mono application which is not .NET related by nature to have its own /. article.

    Congratulations! In recognition of this feat, I hereby present you with this valuable mock-pewter model of an assembly! If you open the little door and look inside, you can see how type information and other metadata is held in a neat, extensible mini-rdb inside!

  • How dose it work with live video? Can you use it to switch between several inputs during a live broadcast? I can't seem to find any information saying it could, but that would be extremely cool if it did. A good switcher deck can run well over $1k, and a video toaster will run into the $10k range. If this could do broadcast video it would make home live broadcasts something that we all could do.
  • by WWWWolf ( 2428 ) <wwwwolf@iki.fi> on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @10:37AM (#13547743) Homepage

    Have they actually improved the GUI? I could never ever figure out how to use Cinelerra. (This coming from a long-time Blender user. I'm no stranger to weird interfaces, it's just that sometimes it's easy to hit the limit =)

    And toolkit? Do they still use the weird, inconsistent, completely unaesthetic toolkit? (A lot of cool pro X11 software seems to use fltk these days, why not that?) I don't really mind it that much, but it'd be nice to see a GUI that doesn't make eyes bleed.

    And video compatibility? Specifically, I'm curious how it handles all the stuff captured with mencoder. Can I toss a MJPEG AVI in and it thinks it is what it is? How about XviD support? Make me drool and say it does Theora and Vorbis?

    • by Anonymous Coward
      I actually used Cinelerra instead of Premiere in a New Media class at my University. It was fairly simple stuff... creating a couple of 30 second movies from still photos and clips that were given to us. We were supposed to mix the audio, do scene changes, add titles, crap like that.

      It took me a full day and a half to figure out the interface, but once I did, I found that I could use it quite easily and effectively. I really learned to love the program after a while. The GUI is of course, still a pi
      • A friend of mine picked up Premiere Elements after I was pretty familiar with Cinelerra. So I gave Elements a try and found the interface easy to figure out but clumsy. My work flow wasn't as streamlined as it was in Cinelerra, once I'd figured out the interface. Of course, it may just have been that I didn't spend enough time working with Premiere.


    • Cinelerra has supported opening, editing and rendering Theora and Vorbis for a little while now.
    • Make me drool and say it does Theora and Vorbis?

      It does. It's supported outputting to Theora for a long time, but it's only had full editing support for the past few months.

      In fact, it's right on the front-page of Theora.org
  • I tried building it several times, and every single time it was broken.
  • Subject says it all.
  • I also thought I'd mention avidemux as a great and simple general purpose video editor.

    I've also used Kino, but that only edits DV files.

    Both are great pieces of software worth mentioning.
  • GPGPU for GP? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Doc Ruby ( 173196 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @10:50AM (#13547850) Homepage Journal
    This kind of app seems ideal for processing on the GPU in the videocard. Not just for rendering the display, but for the codec even on a server. Is there any work on such a beast? Probably ideally a GStreamer filter with APIs running on the CPU, which internally sends the data to/from the GPU, calling an app that actually runs on the GPU, a GPGPU process for graphics processing. Like maybe a Sh shader in a GStreamer wrapper. Such an architecture could allow a GStreamer filter chain to use multiple videocards in parallel in a single machine, for scalable multiprocessing that doesn't bottleneck the CPU, leaving it free to run the rest of the app, UI, network/disk, etc. Is it out there somewhere?
  • by danigiri ( 310827 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @10:57AM (#13547916)
    Mmmmm... I really wonder how do they manage MPEG4 audio encoding via QT4Linux...

    According to Apple [apple.com], non-MacOSX OS's are not licensed to export AAC audio using QuickTime due to licensing concerns. According to the developer note, once a suitable license is acquired the interested party then could happily encode to AAC using QuickTime.

    I'm dowloading the source code... I'm really curious.

    • Ummmm... I have taken a look at the source code of QT4Linux.

      It seems that they are using the OSS faac [audiocoding.com] to do the actual MPEG4 audio encoding, which they have integrated into their QT4L wrapper.

      So I suppose that they might be using QT itself for the H.264 part but not for the audio part (the summary is quite misleading). I'm not all that familiar with the source, but this is what it seems.

      Note1: On the FAAC site there are the relevant notices of the licensing of MPEG-4 audio

      Note2: The QuickTime Pro ap

  • by Skapare ( 16644 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @11:18AM (#13548113) Homepage

    I cannot find any mention of support for the DV format on the web site. There is mention that Quicktime4Linux has a front-end for libdv. But there is no indication whether that works at the editing level, or at the capture/playback level. I will be storing A/V files in DV format, captured and played back on an ADVC-110 [canopus.us] or the like. I would like to know if Cinelerra would be an editor option for this project without having to make any file format conversions along the way.

  • Yea, I RTFA'd ... and while it talks about command line options, I couldn't seem anywhere it talks about converting a set of JPEG to MPEG. Surely there is some way to do something like convert *.jpeg output.mpeg similar to what one can do with the Imagemagick "convert" command ... but that only seems to support MPEG2 and I'd love to get the better video codecs for higher quality and smaller size output which it appears this has. TIA.
    • Dunno about cinelerra, but mencoder can do this. From the man page:

                    Encode all *.jpg files in the current dir:
                                  mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -mf fps=25 -o output.avi -ovc lavc -lav-
                                  copts vcodec=mpeg4
  • by bugnuts ( 94678 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @11:31AM (#13548241) Journal
    I've found that the divx codec encodes excellent compressed movies of games (things with lots of explosions combined with text and lots of motion) which is my primary usage of movie software.

    Is divx export available in this? I know about Xvid project [xvid.org] and would love to know if it works with Cinelerra.
  • I'm a long-time user of Linux, but for movie editing I've just recently accumulated the full Apple setup - 23" screen, dual 2.7GHz G5, Final Cut Express HD, DVD Studio Pro

    Can someone who knows both systems compare the strengths and weaknesses? If Cinelerra is good enough to compete, I'll definitely consider a dual-dual-core Opteron for my next film setup in a coupla years. As much as I love my Macs, it would be nice to combine commodity priced hardware and open-source software if it would do the job adequa

  • by Conti ( 914631 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @12:48PM (#13549017)
    Cinelerra is for sure the BEST video editor on Linux. The UI is a bit hard to learn, but when you're used to it, it's fast and efficient.
    Here are 2 videos I made with Cinelerra:

    http://www.europephoto.com/studios_conti/stunt_13_ mars_2005.avi [europephoto.com]

    http://www.europephoto.com/studios_conti/2005/Cont i-Stunt_30_Avril_2005.avi [europephoto.com]

    They were downloaded thousands of times, and it's about motorbikes.
    Those 2 videos were made entirely with Linux (mono-boot machine, with no windows OS installed on it! ;-))
    The list of software used is written in the end scrolldown. The computer, which runs Debian SID has a XP2400 processor, 1Go RAM and around 500Go of diskspace.

    • Cinelerra is for sure the BEST video editor on Linux.

      Wrong.
      You obviously don't know what you're talking about.
      First of all there is MainActor - a commercial 'Home User' NLE. With all the features you'll ever need and much less resource hungry I presume.

      Then there is Shake (http://www.apple.com/shake/ [apple.com]). A compositing tool, not a NLE, yes, but I'd guess the built in NLE capabilities pound every OSS NLE into the ground.

      Then there is the discreet/Autodesk Line of Tools. Smoke and the High End Effect Kit "Flint"
  • How does this compare to FinalCut or Avid?
    • by rduke15 ( 721841 )
      How does this compare to FinalCut or Avid?

      As far as I know, it doesn't at all. Cinelerra seems to have a different purpose than professional video editing, (as I had noted [slashdot.org] a few months ago by looking at their site and documentation).

      For example, the very first thing done in editing is batch capturing the footage. Well, it doesn't look like Cinelerra supports that. From this relevant part of the manual [heroinewarrior.com]:

      Because of the high cost of developing frame-accurate deck control mechanisms, the only use of batches now

  • by Nice2Cats ( 557310 ) on Tuesday September 13, 2005 @01:32PM (#13549427)
    One reason I dropped Linux in favor of Mac OS X -- apart from the fact that I needed a laptop that would let me just slam the lid to put it to sleep -- for my main computer was that video editing is such a pain. Cin I never got to work, the documentation was useless (it was basically "if you don't know how professional editing works, go away"), and trying to recompile it was disaster. Kino was okay, but simply not advanced enough. At least the people working on it were polite.

    I don't want much out of video editing -- short clips of the kids for the grandparents, mostly -- and the combination of iMovie and iDVD is simply awesome. Maybe it isn't enough for pros or even semi-pros, but this is one area where Apple kicks Linux ass. I did one DVD using Linux, and that was enough for a lifetime, or at least until somebody gets a good clone of iDVD working.

    • the combination of iMovie and iDVD is simply awesome. Maybe it isn't enough for pros or even semi-pros

      That's an understatement. iMovie can't even deal with clips longer than 9 minutes long.
    • Really? I've created a few DVDs with iMovie and iDVD now, and for the most part I've found the experience to be excruciatingly painful. iDVD seems to be intentionally crippled to protect Apple's pro products, and iMovie is just weird. Where's the rotate function for fuck's sake?

      Having said that, I'll take your word for it that the Linux options are worse.
  • I would love to edit video in cinelerra, but I will be damned if I can figure out how to do the things I want to do in it. Give me a Mac and Final Cut Pro. along with DVD studio pro.

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." -- Bertrand Russell

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