Linux Video Editor Cinelerra 1.0 Released

Ogerman writes "At long last, Heroine Virtual's Cinelerra 1.0 has been released. This successor to the discontinued Broadcast 2000 project is absolutely amazing and should give Adobe Premiere and others a run for their money as it continues to mature. So, fire up those digital camcorders, get to work on all your latent indie-film ideas, and help put ol' Jack V. out of a job. Here's the 1.0 Press Release." For those unfamiliar with Cinelerra, check out the screen shots.

Comments

Wow more good news for low budget films

[zorander]

I like the way this is headed. Software like this is going to be instrumental in creating competing products against the mpaa and such. If indie films can be produced and sold _online_ even easier, then there will be more.

Then the giant may begin to crumble...

I'd like to think that, but I'm probably just kidding myself...

Brian

Re:Wow more good news for low budget films

[i_am_nitrogen]

I think the render farm is a pretty good idea. This product doesn't seem to be the kind of software to compete with Premiere. Even small studios with only 6 people usually have an extremely expensive (as much as $80g's or higher) dedicated render system in the basement or equipment room that does all the editing and effects in realtime, with client computers (usually Macintosh or SGI) doing little more than displaying the result. Larger houses don't usually have computers to do editing (at least not for the user interface), but instead have large consoles.

Compositing and 3D animation/CGI are usually done with single client computers and render farms, however.

Of course, I could be just making this all up.

video capture

[Savatte]

My ATI tv-card works pretty well under windows, being able to capture 30 fps at a good resolution. What brands of capture cards work the best with linux?

Re:video capture

[dcstimm]

I use the Wintv GO Hauppuage card and I can record tv shows with mplayer, xawtv, and vcr,

I like vcr the best because it has timed recording.

Here is a example:

vcr -g /dev/video0 -c 'divx ;-) low-motion' -v -p 38 -F 30 -q 100 -m mono -b 64 -t 32m tv-show.avi

-g is to set the device (my wintv card is /dev/video0)

-c 'divx ;-) low-motion' is the video setting

-v is for verbose

-p 38 is the channel to record

-F 30 is the frame rate

-q 100 is quality and its set to 100 which is best

-m is to set mono or stereo

-b 64 is the bitrate for the mp3 audio (64 is perfect for mono audio and 128 and higher is good for stereo)

-t 32 is the timmer, I have it set for 32min

and last is the file I am saving it to, which is tv-show.avi

Hope this shows you how easy it is.

Plus you can stick vcr in your cron tab to record tv while you are away.

vcr comes with most distros.

Toolkit?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the gui toolkit is that?

When will programmers learn?

[stubear]

Have these guys never heard of The Interface Hall of Shame? You should NEVER EVER utilize color in an interface where color correction is required. The UI hinders the user's ability to faithfully adjust colors.

I also wouldn't go as far as saying this application will give Premiere a run for its money because Premiere benefits GREATLY from its relationship with other Adobe applications. I can edit my work in Premiere then import the entire project, tracks, effects and all, into After Effects for post production work and final rendering. Not to mention the ability to import native Photoshop and Illustrator files without any special work arounds.

I also didn't see anything in the feature list which suggested this application is capable of editing web enabled video (QT, Real and/or WMV)

Re:When will programmers learn?

[gwernol]

ave these guys never heard of The Interface Hall of Shame [iarchitect.com]? You should NEVER EVER utilize color in an interface where color correction is required. The UI hinders the user's ability to faithfully adjust colors.

Exactly my reaction, except digging a little deeper I found the application is skinnable, meaning it could be muted to an acceptable level. However if they really want to go head-to-head in the professional market they should change their web site and default skin to something more appropriate.

If they can't get even this most obvious and important UI issue right it is hard to trust them on the rest of the product. It looks very unprofessional. The product names do not help here either.

I also didn't see anything in the feature list which suggested this application is capable of editing web enabled video (QT, Real and/or WMV)

They support QuickTime, and Ogg Vorbis audio support is nice. I assume they support all the QT audio formats as well.

Re:When will programmers learn?

[beens]

To my knowledge, no one is capable of editing web-enabled video like Real, or WMV. Most applications edit in an uncompressed format like avi or uncompressed quicktime (depending on if you're on a Wintel machine or a Mac) and then allow you the option to export the completed cut as a Real or compressed Quicktime file. If not, there are plenty of third party apps that will do it for you. There's good reason for this, in that users who have encoded video for the web probably don't want people to be able to pull it down and edit it, not to mention the processing overhead that would come with having to decompress codecs like real or sorrenson. Plus, you'd run into quality issues when trying to composite visual effects or transitions (wipes, fades, etc). Final Cut Pro can't do it, and neither can Premiere. I certainly don't think this should be a strike against this fine looking application.

Re:When will programmers learn?

[AJWM]

In one respect it has Premiere beat hands down: adaptability.

I haven't yet looked at the source for Cinelerra (downloading it now), but I have of Bcast2000, which I've used -- and no matter how convoluted, it has to be orders of magnitude easier to modify to fit custome needs than Premiere. (And yes, I'm familiar with the Adobe Premier SDK. Pardon me while I go throw up in the bushes from the memories.)

Premiere is okay as long as you only want to do with it what the programmers decided to let you. It sucks if you want to do something a bit different.

But Cinellera's aiming for a higher level user than Premiere anyway. Using it for web media (although it probably handles some of those formats) is a joke, the thing is designed for HDTV.

"prosumer" isn't a bad market though ...

[timothy]

A lot of Nikon coolpix users have paid $50 for the famous eBook on using it, and Cinelerra / HV might be smart to make something similar. Canon makes some great video cameras that are widely marketed at the "prosumer" crowd (XL1, GL1), and even though that term may grate on the ears of anyone so labeled, there are a lot of prosumers (arrgh, the sound! the sound!) out there.

Heck, anyone who learned Blender reasonably well (not me) will probably *prefer* the Cinelerra interface to, say, anything made by Apple :)

And if you count that group as including both high-dollar amateurs (dentists, lawyers, even programmers with some extra money) with an interest in creative editing, and low-budget professional users (like the folks who do wedding videos and take your guided horse-ride video etc, as opposed to the makers of Waterworld)*, there really is a big potential audience. Money to spend on it + motivation to learn a rigorous interface ... just like the people who buy the new "mid-range" (but still pricey) digital SLRs.

Also, Heroine Virtual's website is always fun to read, a little bit like Dr. Bronner's soap. When I have (garrh!) a dual 1.6GHz athlon system with a gig of RAM and a firewire card, I hope to find it usable for simple editing, because it looks rather fun.

timothy

* And those overlapping groups is just how I would define "prosumer" anyhow.

Re:Yet another video app that ignores audio...

[foobar104]

Friend, everything you said is perfectly valid, but... video finishing is not audio finishing. Fire, DS, EditBox, et cetera are not audio finishing equipment. They have audio input and output capabilities, of course, and you can mix tracks and whatnot. But that's just for scratch audio. The real audio will get mixed and laid down by an audio professional in a ProTools (or similar) suite after the editor finishes the video.

Basically, the reason why nobody cares about audio in video editing software is because the guy doing the video work is never the same person as the guy doing the audio work. Instead, it's two different people, both highly trained professionals, with totally different areas of expertise.

Now, if you want to complain about how a particular audio finishing program is inadequate, be my guest. But complaining about how video editing software is a bad audio editing tool is kind of like complaining about what a poor job your screwdriver does of carving your Christmas goose.

BSD & Avids

[Nessak]

I'm a video engineer who works out of a network Broadcast center in NYC on a syndicated news program. The company justed invested a huge sum of money into a newish Avid system call "Unity for News". No, this isn't for home or anyone who is not professional broadcast. But it is a fiber system with 7tb storage and a number of other cool features.

One of the more interesting (and stable) peices of this system is a box called an Avid Airspace. It's a box with some very fast RAID drives, a few fiber/GigE cards, and three NTSC/PAL video I/O cards. Each one of these cards can take in a 601 digital feed (this is better then D1 digital found on minidv/firewire cameras.) Each one can output a 601 feed too. In fact, the show I work on broadcast live from this box. (Lifetime network also baught a simalar system, I've been told. Aslo a few local news stations are switching over to this system.)

Now the interesting part - these boxes run FreeBSD and a custom WM on X. All the other peices of the new Unity system (all win2k) are flakly, but these BSD boxes not only run great, but they output live broadcast quality video to millions of people daily.

So, will Cinelerra support these cards? I don't think so. (I don't think you can buy one of these cards without the system and I don't think the drivers are Free/Open.) But know that FreeBSD is used in more then just the CGI for big budget films.

Re:BSD & Avids

[Theaetetus]

Excellent point... Just for comparison, I work in broadcast radio, and our automation servers are all running proprietary flavors of Linux, and so are most of the automation systems for TV and radio in this market... Particularly with the proprietary flavors, they tend to be incredibly stable and reliable for situations where a crash could mean tens of thousands of dollars of fines as a result of dead air.

-T

Re:Final Cut?

[beens]

Umm, the old guard is already clutching their avids, methinks. I've been using FCP since it's 1.2 release, and it's 3.0 rivals anything that avid has out right now. The only advantage avid has over the FCP setup is tight integration with hardware, especially the protools stuff (since avid owns digidesign now). But, i think that with apple's recent purchase of EMagic we'll start seeing much better audio support out of Final Cut. The recent release of Cinema Tools for final cut jumps final cut up from a DV toy to a full-fledge HD ready motion-picture editing beast.

AND there are a whole host of good hardware video and audio cards coming out that enable a bunch of good realtime effects and whatnot for finalcut. Bottom line, avid is old news, and I think we'll quickly see FCP as the broadcast standard inside of 3 years.

Lossless MPEG-2 editing?

[koreth]

Didn't see this addressed in the documentation, so maybe someone here knows: Will Cinelerra edit MPEG-2 program streams without reencoding the audio and video? It'd be swell to be able to take the MPEG-2 encoded video from a ReplayTV or TiVo, clip out commercials, and burn to a DVD, but the trick is to do it without reencoding (which would cause quality loss.) Obviously the software would have to generate new keyframes in a few places depending on where the edit points were, but it ought to be able to copy most of the stream without modification.

The only software I've found that does this is M2-Edit by MediaWare Solutions, but its UI is awful and it's Windows-only.

Re:Yet another video app that ignores audio...

[Theaetetus]

Most Hollywood film is shot with reference... etc.

Most Indie film is shot with minimal ADR, due to lack of time, money, and knowledge. Thus, it's important to get the best audio on the first try. Foley, of course, is done later, but that's signifigantly easier than doing ADR.

Audio is not a separate art from video, unless you're doing something like Koyannisqatsi.

And no, I would disagree that the audio tools in FCP are on a par with the video tools in FCP. While the video tools aren't up there with Fire boxes, they are pretty good. The audio tools are a joke, though... and I like FCP. Primere is worse.

Also, we're talking about people who are concerned about spending as little as possible on their film... hence the need for a free video editor. Let's talk about those, please, rather than multimillion dollar Hollywood productions.

-T

Re: Augmenting crappy sound for video

[Amizell]

I don't know much about audio, though -- I would love to hear any suggestions or resources you could point me to, esp. regarding isolating human voices

The best tip I've heard on this is to get yourself a minidisc recorder. It is small enough to fit in a person's pocket, records decent quality sound (certainly good enough for spoken word, not bad even for music) and can power a small lavalier mic. When you begin shooting a new scene make a loud percussive noise (clapper, anyone?) so that you can line up the audio from the minidisc and the camcorder visually in your editing software. Poor man's SMPTE. : )

alex