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I use Cinelerra on occasion, and find that it's not too bad... If you're willing to get to know it and learn how not to anger it. After a while you can get the hang of things and find what you can and can't do safely. At that point it's actually not that hard to be productive.

It's also not very intuitive. Again, once you learn it it's not bad, but for someone who's new to it it can be tough. This was the issue my brother ran into; his PC runs Ubuntu quite well, and when he wanted to edit video I suggested Cinelerra. He used it for a while, but decided to invest in a used Mac just for Final Cut.

So, it's a powerful program, and worth looking into. This company actually makes turnkey Linux editing systems using Cinelerra, so it has potential.

According to the Linux Media Arts website, Broadcast 2000 is still an open source package, however I see no mention of it being under the GPL, nor any place to download it or the source code without actually being a LMA customer. My guess is that the software is open source while still being a commercial program (ie: not free-as-in-beer-or-as-in-freedom software)

Even cooler than that hardware: They're maintaining Broadcast 2000. Now somebody get me a microphone and a fire under my ass so's I can get busy recording some tunes...

Yes!

Specialized boxes are what really show off what nice things commodity hardware and malleable source code are capable of.

I'd like to see a lot more companies sell products analogous to the video-editing stations offered by Linux Media Arts; offer a known-to-work combination of hardware and software so that people at least have the opportunity to flock to it.

Audio workstations, please? I'd pay a thousand bucks for a $500-in-parts workstation (which these days can be quite a powerhouse in absolute terms), if I could hook a few pre-amps or a portable Mackie mixer up to it and start multitracking.

(I'm aware of a lot of all-in-one recording consoles, and even own one, but a) screen real-estate is nice b) there are a lot of things which a "real computer" could do as an audio workstation which would be fun to experiment with and c) ever tried to enter in text labels with the insane rotating-knob method of an Akai DPS1200?)

OTOH, the people who most care about this sort of benchmark often *are* the people who want them for servers, or who are themselves developers trying to benchmark raw performance to help them make programming / design choices, so it's not that surprising. For a lot of specialized uses (TiVo, say), adequate performance to do their job doesn't seem to be a problem at the moment ...

timothy

As video has become a central way to entertain, inform and influence the public, "the people," not just government and big media companies, must be given the power to create decent video presentations..

If you can't run one of the more popular commercial non-linear editors (Avid/Final Cut Pro/etc) I offer the following list of Linux alternatives.

(And before you mod me offtopic, note that Trinity uses Gstreamer. So there.)

NON-LINEAR SYSTEMS

Broadcast 2000 -- One of the more developed linux editors. Works with a variety of hardware. I personally haven't used it, but there is at least one company out there selling pre-packaged versions of this.

Trinity -- Another Linux solution - still very early in development. Uses Gstreamer though

MainActor -- I think this is a commercial Linux product, about $100.

And for fun...

AUDIO EDITING SYSTEMS

ProTools FREE - This is a commercial product, but this free, non demoware version, limited to 8-tracks, does not require dedicated hardware. It does require Mac or Windows, though I have no idea if it will run under WINE.

ProTUX - Although the web site denies it, this is basically an open source ProTools.

Audacity - A cross-platform open source audio editor.

I'm sure there are more, but these are the ones I know about.

W
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