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I'd like to point out Cinelerra even though I don't use it, yet.

In a similar vein though, I am a big user of Ardour, Jack and jammin to produce music. The tools are appropriate for the task and, whilst not perfect, didn't cost me money and allows me to be able to focus on my projects. Since I don't pay for the application my only investment is the time to learn it, the same reason people stick within a certain commercial platform. The difference is the Ardour project allows any financial contribution I make to be in preference of features I'd like added, improving the efficiency of my workflow. Becoming productive in complex software is the biggest factor in using it and the only incentive to change is when one type of software can do things the others can't.

I think the emphasis of these questions does not apply appropriately. It should be 'What is the current State of the Art in Video production in linux" and the answer is it hasn't caught up to the state of the art in audio production under linux.

Now before the criticisms begin, I find Ardour architecturally superior to commercial audio tools because of the underlying jackd infrastructure, not because of its feature set. I have watched the developments in the audio production space over the last decade produce change radically as they became more stable. Nothing interesting is happening in the commercial audio production space, it's all happening in Linux. As infrastructure advancements similar to jackd becomes more common in video editing the application space their will undergo a similar change - just not yet.

Any investment in time to produce an A/V product requires yielding value on a previous time investment in a skillset. When I invest that skillset in proprietary software my knowledge investment can be rendered useless overnight quite easily however, open source tools provide me with a way to protect my knowledge investment because the software has it's own intrinsic rights.

Value on knowledge investment is the value proposition of open source. You may have to put up with some bugs however, tolerating them means not incurring static initialization costs from learning over and over and that results in a permanent knowledge base, the basis for radically inventive ideas.

Anyone else use Cinelerra? I couple years ago it was a bit unstable at times but had some powerful features. It is probably only better now, although I haven't checked myself.

The first one that springs to mind is Cinelerra:

http://cinelerra.org/1/

There's also the Community Version of Cinelerra:

http://cinelerra-cv.org/

Honestly though no open-source solution is going to come CLOSE to Premiere. And since you can get Creative Cloud for $50/month, it isn't THAT big of an expenditure up-front, and if you're making money from the editing (and, if you're looking at a Premiere-level video editing platform, I would hope this would be something you're monetizing) $50/month isn't much to get all the tools you'd need for editing, compositing, graphic design, etc etc etc.

So, yeah, my suggestion is to find a way to afford $50/month for Creative Cloud, and barring that, check out Cinelerra.

Cinelerra works well - and has for years.

You have got to be kidding.

I have tried on several different occasions to get Cinelerra to do something useful, and have failed every time. The program is incredibly unreliable, and will crash or hang at the slightest provocation.

There are two versions in circulation -- the "original" Heroine Virtual version, still occasionally updated; and the "community" version. I have no idea what the alleged differences are.

It claims to accept a wide variety of video codecs, but in my experiments only appears to reliably support DV -- an uncompressed format that will quickly fill every disk you have.

Like Blender 3D, Cinelerra blazes its own trail for the user interface. In fairness, if you have some patience, it will gradually start to make sense. It's ugly as hell, but that ugliness could be forgiven if the program worked reliably and produced decent videos.

There are enough glowing reviews of Cinelerra out there to make me wonder if my setup is the problem, but I rather doubt it, since Kdenlive has worked just fine on the same machine. My current theory is that long-time Cinelerra users have learned over the years what bits are irredeemably flaky and just automatically avoid them.

The last time I tried Cinelerra in earnest was about two years ago. After about half a dozen crashes in an hour just trying to put together a slideshow-ish thing, I gave up and started using Kdenlive fairly successfully. But I still watch for updates to the Cinelerra packages. Given the number of updates I've seen over the past two years (very few), I'm not confident the warts have been addressed.

There are some nice things that Cinelerra (allegedly) does, and its timeline has a few advantages over Kdenline. If you know of some magical incantation that will get Cinelerra working crash-free, I will honestly give it another shot. But I'm not sanguine about the results.

Still wont run the only apps I need to ditch windows.

Sony Vegas and a couple other video editing apps.

there is NOTHING under linux that is usable outside very simple home movies. I'd pay 2X the price for Vegas retail if I could get it for Linux.

And yes, I have tried everything for linux video editing, they all either completely suck or are half done, or are designed for home users... OpenShot is nice for home use, sucks for editing a 1 hour TV episode with tons of composting and CG.

Sadly, the winner will almost certainly be edited in Final Cut Pro on a Mac ;)

Why not Cinellera on Linux?

What I find sad is that AVISynth, a fantastic scripting language for frameserving and editing video has not (successfully) been ported to Linux. It seems like the perfect pluggable non-GUI scripted video editing environment, but it's only for Windows.

Cinelerra could be used to create a good Linux vid, but I've never been able to do anything productive with it, and even when you do get it working, it'll crash on you worse than a Win 3.1 deployment. http://cinelerra.org/

This guy does an awesome job with it... but the "only one frame error" thing is the kind of incideous nightmare that makes it unusable to me: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jYFJw1dT18&feature=fvw

Linux may be free, but there's no truly viable MS Office alternative, nothing that matches Exchange, there's no professional level Photoshop, there's nothing to edit videos with, nor post processing, good luck doing complex audio work

Ardour, anyone? It has been around for quite a few years, and is a really great professional grade DAW/production system. Try googling before posting something quite that ridiculous.

If you are a creative professional -- Linux is completely worthless. Sorry, but it is. I wish that were not the case, but there's no professional-level creative apps for Linux.

I guess all those Xara users, Ardour users, Cinelerra users, MainActor users, Blender users, VariCad users, Jahshaka/CineFX users, etc, are completely boned.

Of all the programs available for Linux, few are of comparable quality to those available to Windows or OSX.

That's just stupid. There are programs of poor quality on all of the major operating systems. Linux has its share of badly put-together programs, but saying that "few" are of comparable quality simply illustrates that you don't spend very much time with Linux systems or just have very poor choice in software.

"...Linux for me does not yet have a killer app, K3B (CD/DVD burner) and Amarok are better than anything in Windows, but for a start, there is nothing like Photoshop, and no killer video capture and editing software, and for some, games are important too..."

Yes the whole rerason you have an OS is so you can run applications on it. If you ned a Photoshop-like app "gimp" can do what most people need but it still lacks abilty to work in 16-bit per channel color and color managment is not easy in Linux at all. As for video editing there are some good programs look here: http://cinelerra.org/docs.php

Get it at cinelerra.org

Nope, sorry, looks like it's a Linux-only application.

http://cvs.cinelerra.org/getting_cinelerra.php

for example, show me where you can get a Linux video editing application that even comes close to commercial counterparts like Final Cut Pro or Avid.

While I cannot comment on Kino, Cinelerra has a "community version" which is an unofficial fork(?) of the project. This version is generally recommended over the official release because it is easier to build and contains bugfixes that the original may not have incorporated yet. The projects goal is to provide more timely bugfixes/patches to the original Cinelerra as developed by Heroine (which only releases updates every several months). More information can be found here.

For those unfamiliar with the history of Cinelerra, the developer(s) are anonymous so as not to jeopardize their current employment status; apparently the author(s) believe there might be a conflict of interest with regard to their day job(s). Regardless, Cinelerra is an excellent product though it is probably overkill for most home users. The learning curve is relatively steep as well. There is a slightly dated (circa 2003) yet interesting article which has an interview with "Jack Crossfire" (pseudonym for the developer(s)) that covers some of the directions the software is taking which can be found here.

While I cannot comment on Kino, Cinelerra has a "community version" which is an unofficial fork(?) of the project. This version is generally recommended over the official release because it is easier to build and contains bugfixes that the original may not have incorporated yet. The projects goal is to provide more timely bugfixes/patches to the original Cinelerra as developed by Heroine (which only releases updates every several months). More information can be found here.

For those unfamiliar with the history of Cinelerra, the developer(s) are anonymous so as not to jeopardize their current employment status; apparently the author(s) believe there might be a conflict of interest with regard to their day job(s). Regardless, Cinelerra is an excellent product though it is probably overkill for most home users. The learning curve is relatively steep as well. There is a slightly dated (circa 2003) yet interesting article which has an interview with "Jack Crossfire" (pseudonym for the developer(s)) that covers some of the directions the software is taking which can be found here.

Either your are deliberately trolling, or the "last time you looked" you didn't really try. Either way you have no clue what you're talking about. Yes Cinelerra is nowhere near as popular as other NLEs, but this?

As for Cinelerra, I would guess that no professional editor would have ever even heard the name, let alone have a clue about what it is.

Well, even I couldn't quite figure out what it was supposed to be last time I looked at their site. Apparently also some sort of special effects rendering thing, except it cannot import from or export to your editing program, so I'm not sure what it might be used for.

Did you even try? As the first google hit would have told you, "Cinelerra does primarily 3 main things: capturing, compositing, and editing". Cinelerra is a NLE -- E stands for EDITOR. You don't "export to your editing program" it *is* the editing program.

Finally, as that same link points out, cinelerra.org is a more appropriate community site searching for Cinelerra documentation. I'm not sure what your google search "experiment" is supposed to tell us. You couldn't find your specific terminology on the one site you searched therefore the functionality doesn't exist? C'mon. Heroine Virtual, which is *not* trying to sell Cinelerra and doesn't have a marketing dept. doesn't mention Avid or FCP proves something?

I have edited a few personal DVDs with Cinelerra. While it may not be perfect, it has come a long way in the last few years in terms of features and stability. The kind of non-information you're spewing doesn't help anyone.

• the Official Version of Cinelerra, which is available here: http://www.heroinewarrior.com/
• the "Community Version" (aka Cinelerra-CV), which is made from the official version, but developped in a community way (mailing-list, bug-tracking, IRC channel...): http://cvs.cinelerra.org/

• the Official Version of Cinelerra, which is available here: http://www.heroinewarrior.com/
• the "Community Version" (aka Cinelerra-CV), which is made from the official version, but developped in a community way (mailing-list, bug-tracking, IRC channel...): http://cvs.cinelerra.org/

It's time to learn how to use Cinelerra-CV, the best Open-Source non-linear video editor: http://cvs.cinelerra.org/ Doing that kind of video with Cinelerra-CV is possible.

For hardcore techies, Windows is hardly a powerful-enough network OS. Besides, most things that Web 2.0 boasts of are perfectly handled by free and open-source software that are, as mentioned in the article itself, 'increasingly available on any platform'. Firefox supports AJAX and CSS competently on Linux (better than IE6 does on Windows), and so does Opera. In fact, as more and more applications move to the web and utilities are being deployed online, the core operating system is increasingly being seen in terms of how good it is as a kernel and how powerful it is, rather than how easy it is to use and what programs are bundled with it. That's bad news for Windows.

I recently upgraded my computer, and I'm rediscovering my geeky side. As a result, I'm spending more time on the net that I used to, and I use FC4 all the time. The only thing that I use Windows for is to run Cubase (I'm a musician). The web works fine for me on Linux, I maintain my site from here (with much more ease that I could on Windows), I browse the net, I use GAIM, I lookup Wikipedia, I listen to online radio, I watch DVDs, and I download torrents.

If I wanted, I could work with music right here, I could edit videos, and much more, things that I could never do online, and for free. I'm sure Mac users have as much, or more, choice. It's not long before Windows will be seen as the 'poor man's choice', a OS that you choose to use when you aren't intelligent enough to learn any other.

Insightful? How about Kino or Cinelerra or Lives or Mainactor?

help me switch BACK to linux by showing me a decent graphical video editor.

What problems block your use of Cinelerra?

Have you seen Cinelerra? (Or try the community fork here, Manual TWiki here). I found it to be pretty good, much better then Kino, but then I'm not a professional video editor.

deb http://garbure.org/debian/ ./

Alas, no altivec optimisations yet. It is probably significantly swifter on AMD or Intel.

Cinerella is already forked into http://cvs.cinelerra.org/about.html I was personally wondering about Mac OSX, but from Herionewarrior.com:
"Video processing takes too long to do on a single computer. In fact no matter how fast the computer, no matter how much tediously hand optimized assembly language is behind it, it's Gaul awful slow. Every video program has a clustered rendering system of some kind and Cinelerra is no exception.

The biggest difference between this renderfarm and normal renderfarms is you don't need to pay for node licenses. You can keep installing nodes without paying for either the operating system or the application."
So, this seems to be specifically for budget clustered rendering. Check their link to sourceforge.com. How droll!

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/ 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/ and Jahshaka http://www.jahshaka.org/ - there's also Kdenlive but that seems to not be actively developed any more: http://kdenlive.sourceforge.net/index.html

The cvs version contains vast improvements to the mpeg encoding by providing a yuv4mpeg output stream that can be fed to the latest ffmpeg or mpeg2enc version. When I started using it, my mpeg quality went up and my render times improved 4x. I don't know if that change made it into 1.2.2 or not.

Multimedia on Linux is very capable and progressing rapidly. I highly recommend using the cvs versions of video editing and encoding applications if you have the ability to manage the instability, because the features are implemented rapidly in cvs, but take a while to trickle out to the stable releases.

An added bonus is that you are better able to contribute meaningful feedback to the developers, which makes them more likely to listen when you have a feature request.

You want a non-linear editor for linux?