Cinelerra 2.0 Released

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."

Comments

Please be nice ...

[clueless123]

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..

Re:Please be nice ...

[Nuclear Elephant]

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..

You've made two tragic mistakes in your assumptions: 1. That Slashdotters actually RTFA, and 2. That Slashdotters read documentation of any kind.

Re:Please be nice ...

[lukewarmfusion]

Ahh, yes. Heaven forbid that a website be visited!

Re:Please be nice ...

[Anonymous Coward]

You might as well just post your home address, so we can direct the fire department to your house.. :)

Re:Please be nice ...

[Swamii]

Mirrordot, Coral Cache.

Re:Please be nice ...

[JourneyExpertApe]

What Wiki? I couldn't find it. Can I get a link, please?

Re:Please be nice ...

[Doc Ruby]

How is any one Slashdotter supposed to know whether they should or shouldn't hit your server, after reading your plea for mercy? Are you asking people to hit only one page? Or are you asking us to guess whether we should be the ones to wait until tomorrow to smooth the demand curve?

You probably have to filter all incoming requests on their REFERER header, enforcing a quota on Slashdotters clicking directly from this website. Especially since Slashdotters don't read anything, just click till we smell smoke.

Re:Please be nice ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Drop by on irc; depending on the requirements I can probably host it for you. #[DOD] on quakenet, Deleon

Re:Please be nice ...

[dan the person]

Here's the manual for those interested:

http://www.ftconsult.com/twiki/bin/view/Cinelerra/ WebHome

Re:Please be nice ...

[petabyte]

While good, neither of those are the manual wiki of which the grandparent has requested Slashdot-Asylum.

However, the manual wiki doesn't open for me here so I'm guessing its already been blasted off the face of the web. I'd hope the grandparent would just take it offline until the storm passes ...

Re:Please be nice ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, don't go to http://www.ftconsult.com/twiki/bin/view/Cinelerra/ CinelerraManualTOC - it's several clicks from the article's linked page, and it's already dead. :)

Re:Please be nice ...

[Pope]

Why are you running on a home connection on an ancient machine? Get a real host! ;)

Re:Please be nice ...

[PhotoGuy]

You host the Wiki for (and presumably use) Cinerella? I'm amazed you'd have something as sluggish as a P400 anywhere in your house; Cinerella seems to require (or at least perfer) hardware many generations beyond that. :)

Re:Please be nice ...

[MemeRot]

A basic wiki can run on anything. Geeks tend not to throw out old machines, just repurpose them as something else: a router, host for project you support, etc.

Good

[suso]

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.

Re:Good

[Sweetshark]

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*

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

You joke, but Kino really has gone downhill. The authors have lost interest, and the changes over the last 18 months have made the GUI a mess, export breaks and poor quality (ffmpeg issues over and over), scenes get randomly deleted, and it crashes quite a lot.

Cinelerra was truely unstable when Kino was basic but usable, but in the last year or so, Cinelerra really have improved and become stable. There are still minor bug with some export functions and the odd FX might not be quite being right, but in general, Kino has become a broken toy and Cinelerra on the verge of being a very powerful video editor.

Maybe with a bit more resource they'll squash the bugs, and we'll have a fine product.

Re:But does it run on linux?

[clueless123]

Yes it does.

Independent Films

[SumDog]

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, 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.

Ah hell, who am I kidding. I'm way too lazy for all that.

Re:Independent Films

[clueless123]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

It may want a dual opteron, however it has built in support to cluster machines to render video.

Re:Independent Films

[WWWWolf]

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

[che.kai-jei]

i come from a quit-comp-sci-back-in-98-to-pursue Film. capital F.

celluloid film is lovely and everything but i hated video and DV for along time but that thinking remains elitist and inaccessible!

Dv gave the little guy a certain geurilla grain chic. but fidelity concerns esentially marginalised him with snobbishness and honestly too low quality. [consumers were getting better tvs, dvd players even in the usa]

DV really gave a better work flow than traditional film in terms of costs and time and labour. and then efficiency and managed control of the colloboratioe workflow as oposed to analgue video.
face it no kid couldve afforded betacam SP and its digital children!

in a way george lucas as early adopter has helped the small guy, ironic as it sounds [although maybe not as he has helped destroy the blockbuster!]
  firstly by fostering industry acceptance driving development in tools and subsidising initial R&D by being the first market!
  Hd dv cameras and so on.

the rate we are going the small guy will soon be king. that is what has the studios scared.
although it doessn't seem to be happening quickly with music, the fact remains the internet is enhancing music distribution and enriching the so called mainstream.

BiTTorrent+HD-DV+cheap computers to edit on.
p2p makes distribution easy and lest costy
the cheap HD kit makes it high enough fidelity for acceptance
now we are talking the real reason for all the DRM.
so the new distribution channels get locked down once again and closed off to the lone players like they used ot be.

90% of what the man in the street produces of shoestring budgets may be shit.
however in the new revolution.. we will get to make that choice.

itsa new darwinism in media. the dinosaurs wil ldie and the small furry mammals will win.

so basically go for it!

me im back in comp sci

cause i think video games will be more fun and
have more opportunities to be artistic.

new envelopes and all that!

really though it sounds high the cost of entry still..

but thats because cinelerra is no kids toy.

Re:Independent Films

[rampant mac]

"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.

Re:Independent Films

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could just use what your school has.... Most schools of even moderate size will let you use their equipment to edit the film. I edited a few movies that I did for various non-CS projects on the art departments dual G5s loaded up with software(all I used was iMovie and iDVD though, I didn't need anything more advanced). You don't really need your own equipment to make the film, just an imagination and a little bit of creative engineering.

Re:Independent Films

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the claimed features is the ability to real time edit 1080i video. That is going to require a beefy box any way you slice it. If your source video isn't so fat then a more modest box will handle it.

Re:Independent Films

[Lumpy]

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 import problems from the past 4 years. They still did not support native DV2 Avi files as of the last release from 6 months ago while every Windows and MAC editing application can and does happily. Btw, DV2 AVI files are what you want to work with when you use DV, it's the raw DV stream with the audio multiplexed for editing. DV1 files suck because you can get audio sync problems with them.

I just wish I could get sony Vegas or Premiere Pro to run under crossover office as it is the only chance to get real video editing under linux. and dont get me started about the lack of linux video effects composting software like Commotion or After effects... and please do not mention apple's offering, they have a huge price on it to encourage you to not use it (price of a Mac G5+software and then you can use it under linux, or buy aG5 and use it for much less.)

Cinerella is bloatware, it is slow and has insane requirememts that even high end pro stuff does not have. (AVID, the platform that they use for most hollywood movies and tv shows does not have the insane requirement that this does.)

I wish someone would make a commercial video editing app for linux that worked as well as Vegas or Premiere.. I'd even pay the $499.99 for it... but it does not exist and never will. there is no interest in making one.

Re:Independent Films

[bugnuts]

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.

Re:Independent Films

[Kevin_Peters]

I run Cinelerra on a P 3 600 MHz machine with 1.5 GB RAM. Works great for me.

Re:Independent Films

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Don't forget the chicken.

Re:Independent Films

[bfree]

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 quality material you need a machine capable of storing and processing lots of data. If you want it to not be painfully slow (and you plan on doing anything more then some straight cuts) you will want CPU power (preferably with 1M or more cache for standard PAL, too lazy to figure out what cache you would need to hold a small hdtv resolution frame let alone the largest.

If you just want to have a laugh making a few quick "home movies" you can sacrifice buckets of quality and wait for stuff to happen. If you are making something real you will need to be able to store and edit all your footage at least at the camera's raw uncompressed data rate and even now that is a significant drag to a cheap PC.

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. I'm sure the system requirements help them to cut back on the number of support requests from people simply playing with the software for fun.

Re:Independent Films

[balls199]

If you just want to make a film, either for practice or to later release for free on the internet, you may want to check out your local public access TV station. The public access channel in your area will probably have all the equipment you need to produce your film at highly subsidised rates. Usually, the only requirement is you give them the completed film for them to play on their station.

That's what I'm doing with my short film:

Shameless link to "Gene Sodiers"

It will be on tv, so you won't be able to do that porno you were thinking of, but they will allow you to do almost anything else.

They can't help the lazy either.

Re:Independent Films

[griasr]

i ran cinelerra on a athlon 1200 with 512 ram it was good

Re:Independent Films

[Anonymous Coward]

I use cinelerra on a Athlon 1800 with 500 megs ram :)

Re:Independent Films

[adamgeek]

part of the reason it pales in comparison to most other packages, is (last time i checked).. cinelerra wasn't for profit ;) ..hard to compete in development when your competition make money handoverfist vending their products.

that said, the high cpu/ram requirements are for realtime 2k, if i recall.. not realtime 480i. you can get by with much less if you're just doing DV. those requirements are onpar with almost any OS doing realtime 2k unless the suite comes with custom hardware tuned specifically for the app.

the price on Shake for linux ($4999) is a direct representation of the budgets of the people who want to use Shake for linux, i think. if you're on a tight budget, you're using a G4 or ibook or whatever and shakeOSX.. if you have crazy cash for a renderfarm etc.. shakelinux. I know it sucks, but that's life.

as far as NLE in linux for $499 or less, have you checked out MainConcept's mainactor5 for linux ($199?)? I haven't used it, but it might be promising for your needs.

Re:Independent Films

[Lumpy]

I have used main actor and it's worse off than cinerella. first it has not been updated for over 5 years. Version 5 cam out back when Adobe released version 5 of Premiere. the have "promsied" a version 5.5 upgrade for main actor but have not released even alphas for anyone for over 4 years now. it crashes alot, it's dv capture does not work and they warn you to not use it but to use kino instead, which only captures in DV1 avi or another uneditable or lossy format.

Yes, 480i is what 99% of the world is still editing in. and most people do not care about realtime. Hell even a $65,000.00 AVID we recently purchased here for the production department is not "real time" as these companies try to convince you exists. Nobody needs realtime except for live and you would be nuts to use a NLE for live. That is what a Sony DME9000 suite is for.

Video editing on linux is a non starter. that is why I am waiting for the price of a dual G5 to drop a bit more and make the jump to final Cut/OSX + shake for video and finally exorcize MS products from my home and personal business by the end of next year.

The fun part is that video editing does not need the latest and greatest. I know of friends making world class stuff on a dual P-III with 512 meg of ram using 8 year old AVID software and hardware. Stayting about 5 steps behind the rest of the crowd gives you value and the ability to do what the bleeding edge people do for much less.

Re:Independent Films

[WWWWolf]

I know, I know, I know. It's just a bit fun to see ridiculously high (but reasonable if you're doing pro work) minimum requirements.

I know people have used Cinelerra for "home movie" things with far less high-end gear. I agree it's difficult to draw the line on what is reasonable hardware requirements because that, of course, varies with what you need.

Re:Independent Films

[talenos]

That's why we have digital video. With an XL2, you can get something close to film look. 28 Days Later was shot using an older generation of the same camera. Yeah if you buy a film camera you're looking at spending a small fortune, but then you probably wouldn't care about using an opensource video editing program.

Re:Independent Films

[aonaran]

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.

Re:Independent Films

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah they recomend that machine for....

compressing MPEG-4 HDTV in realtime

that's something that you dont haveto do or you could use a renderfarm wich it supports.

dont think that others editors have less requiremts to encode at that speed

Re:Independent Films

[timeOday]

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 sound. Mind you, I'm not even commenting on the UI at all, as I'm not picky about that... but the basic functionality was very poor.

This was maybe as much as 2 years ago, so let's hope things have improved.

Very nice.

[D14BL0]

This will be very helpful. I've always had compatibility issues with such kinds of files whilst using Linux. Hopefully this will allow for a bit more usability.

Re:Jesus..

[BlueTrin]

It was written in Java # .Net 2005, wihch explains the bugs.

Is this an accurate statement?

[coop0030]

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?

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is IS the best OPEN SOURCE one. There are some closed solutions that are good too, but they aren't open. This is as good as it gets today for professional A/V, for open source.

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[jjr23]

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.

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[bluelip]

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

Free to DL and test. (Watermark in output)

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[slashflood]

Cinelerra is pretty good. Here are some alternatives:

• MainActor
• Kino
• Piranha
• ...

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[jd]

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 Cinelerra for the rest.

Although still pretty meaningless overall, it would still be more useful to have some stats - what percent is it feature-complete, relative to some industry standard? How many industry-standard codecs does it support for both audio and video and how well? (Not all software will support 11.1 audio streams, even if the codec itself is there.)

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.

Having said all of that, though, I've never had any personal problems with Cinelerra - it's always done what I've wanted. But I've never given it anything demanding to do, so I can't use that experience as anything meaningful.

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[nEoN nOoDlE]

it might be the best open source A/V production environment, but Shake for Linux is a better compositor.

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[tji]

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.

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[rjnagle]

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.

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[jambarama]

Open Source software has often been acused of lacking in the graphical department. With the advent of more stable Inkscape 0.42.2 and user friendly Gimp 2.0 this has left us lacking only in the video department. Cinerella 2.0 was just released to close that gap. Coupled with alternatives such as diva , blender and others, what is linux and other Open Source operating systems still lacking?

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[SkippyTPE]

non-linear multi-track audio editing? (pref w/ video playback and pluggin support)

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[Anonymous Coward]

The "too much choice" troll: There are so many different options of allmost everything, I can't choose! MS does it right, no I don't want to hear about XP Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, WinCE or the 7 Vistas.

The "user friendly" troll: You have to use the commmand line to change [really obscure setting], until you can do it via GUI Lunix us useless!

The gamer troll: Tuxracer is a joke. I don't really care about all the games that are availabe, as long as there is no Starcraft and Counter Strike I ontinue to clam that the only game you can play is Tuxracer and maybe Solitaire in under Wine.

The 16bit troll: GIMP only works with 8bits per channel, my raws are too precious for that. No I haven't heard of UFRaw and I don't care if it does all you would wish to do with raws in 16bit colour space. CinePaint sucks, just because you can edit movies with hundreds of images does not mean it's any good and who needs 32bits per channel, Photoshop has 16bits as god intended and it's enough for everyone.

Add the trolls I forgot.

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[shmlco]

"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...

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[dorgy]

Thought I'd let you all in a little secret.

They, as in Heroine Virtual, is really a he. Adam Williams the name on the whois is the man in charge.

He just hides behind they because he thinks that taking him to court is a lot easier then taking them to court.

Though you still got to give him credit he did write all of this on his own more or less.

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about... Cinelerra! It evolved out of an audio editor, but there should be others.

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[shish]

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.

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[zenyu]

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.

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[jd]

Concentrated coding is like concentrated lemon juice - 100% good for you, but the taste is foul.

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[Bob Uhl]

Wow--Apple produces Linux software. Who knew?

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[Liam Slider]

Actually they bought Linux software, and the entire company that goes with it. See, Shake was being used for Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring to make all sorts of fantastic effects. Apple got wind of this, and all the hype around the movie....and bought Shake. Mainly so they could claim that Apple helped make Lord of the Rings, and so they could "kill" the Linux product and make money off a Mac version instead (this is why Apple priced the Linux version higher). Thing is, the Mac version hasn't gone over nearly as well as the more expensive Linux version, because nobody in their right mind is going to build a large renderfarm out of Apple machines. Far too expensive, and troublesome. Linux and cheap commodity hardware works much better and is easier to repair/replace, so they pay for the more expensive Linux version. Plus, many workstations in Hollywood are Linux based, so it's natural for them to buy the full Linux version for them as well, rather than just get a bunch of all new Apple hardware just for compositing.

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[Tyger]

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.

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[MemeRot]

From the website:
Buy Shake for Mac OS X
Full Version Upgrade
$2999.00 $999.00
Shake 4 for Linux retails for $4999. Render-only Linux version retails for $1499.

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[slashflood]

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 to be free' for Linux.

I'm fed up! If you wanna do high-end video/audio rendering/editing, you have to pay for it at any plattform. Do not complain, that there is no high-end software available for F/OSS operating systems.

Open your mind.

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[evilviper]

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, and new codecs like WMV3/WMV9/VC-1 are in the works.

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[labratuk]

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.

Re:Is this an accurate statement?

[tji]

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.

Camera support in linux

[ChrisF79]

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 a camera to work.

Re:Camera support in linux

[clueless123]

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.

Re:Camera support in linux

[jd]

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.)

Re:Camera support in linux

[Anonymous Coward]

If the cameras use firewire, they are either DV, MV or HDV cameras. For DV you can use Kino (GUI) or dvgrab (command line) for grabbing and exporting. For MV and HDV there is a small tool called mpg1394grab that used to be available from Kino's web site. (It's a pagefull of C code)

I have grabbed HDV (MPEG2 1920x1080i, stored on DV tape) with mpg1394grab. It works like a charm. If you have a monster PC like Cinelerra's web site recommends, HDV editing is actually quite smooth. And that's working directly on the HDV footage, not using some "intermediate".

Herman Robak
hermanr on Freenode

Re:Camera support in linux

[temojen]

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).

Re:Camera support in linux

[Micah]

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.

Re:Camera support in linux

[ross.w]

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 hold about 1/2 hour of MPEG2 video.

The camera records to disc in MPEG2, which means you don't get quite the same quality, and it's hard to do editing to the precise frame you want (only about 1 in 4 frames is really all there).

Re:Jesus..

[krelyk]

go-mono.com is down from here at the moment, but that's where you can typically find GTK# --
http://go-mono.com/ -> downloads -> latest sources
May I please ask the cinelerra/quicktime4linux/libmpeg3 developers to update their configure/makefile scripts and distribution files they do not include the dependencies... link to their sources elsewhere, but please don't bloat your distfile(s) by including THEIR sources as well... bad form :(

Is this good for VHS = DVD

[beforewisdom]

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

Re:Is this good for VHS = DVD

[WWWWolf]

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 most DVD players can play. Besides, CD-Rs are cheaper than DVD-Rs.

Re:Is this good for VHS = DVD

[beforewisdom]

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.

Re:Is this good for VHS = DVD

[WWWWolf]

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

Editing out trailers/commercials is... hoo boy... probably the big bottleneck here. I have absolutely no idea how this works out in Cinelerra, because the thing either was impossible to figure out, or crashed when I opened the video (situation as of an year ago, no idea if this new release is better). Plus, it's a full-blown NLE which probably doesn't have non-transcoding stream copy mode (I'd guess). There was this proggy called Kino, which could apparently cut video without massive re-encoding operations, but that (last I checked) specifically wanted DV format video files.

In other words, Linux just doesn't have anything comparable to VirtualDub, the single most best tool to do the job. =(

And as for making DVD menus... no idea either. I've heard a lot of rumors but never bothered to check out. As said, I make VideoCDs; There's a wonderful package for VideoCD mastering called vcdimager, which does have *some* sort of menu system support, but that's in the "good idea but needs serious hacking to pull off and there's no GUI or anything" territory and I just make VideoCDs with a couple of titles at most, so there's no real need for menus (overkill for 72 minute discs). Mastering menuless vcd's is very simple with it.

Re:Is this good for VHS = DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

You can run VirtualDub under Wine.

Regards,

Re:Is this good for VHS = DVD

[beforewisdom]

Thanks for the heads up.

I have used Video CDs before. I don't mind using them if DVDs are going to be a such a pain in linux.

I'm not about to buy a copy of windows to complete this project

Re:Is this good for VHS = DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

If all you want to do is copy tapes, any computer based solution is overkill. Just go to Walmart or Sears or your favorite electronics store and buy a stand alone DVD burner ... sort of like a VCR but burns DVD's. Plug your VHS machine into it and you are good to go.

If you have macrovision encoded tapes, you need to pick up a cheap TBC (Time Base Corrector) to fix up what macrovision does to the tapes.

Re:Is this good for VHS = DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

The best solutions for linux, IMHO, are avidemux with it's ffv1rec for capturing and mencoder.

Mencoder will allow you to capture at a high resolution, crop the borders, filter noise, and shrink to a usable resolution, and encode to mpeg2+mp2 (for dvd) or mpeg4+mp3 (for divx avi) on the fly on a 3 year old athlonxp. A good & quick solution if you don't demand the best quality.

ffv1rec can be used to capture lossy, and avidemux can then convert your movie to a wealth of formats, like the same as above. avidemux has loads of filters & codecs, more than I will ever need, and allows you to clip out commercials or other bits you don't want.

There are other options available, but these are the combinations of apps I tend to use most.

I tried cinelerra years ago, and while it has many usefull features, it is mostly way overkill for vhs2dvd conversion+ the version I tried was really slow, very picky about input formats, and had poor performance during capturing & encoding. I'll still give this new version a try, though.

Re:Is this good for VHS = DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

Try avidemux, it is essentially virtualdub & tmpgenc in one, and much faster than those, at least for making dvd & divx. Use dvdstyler or qdvdauthor to make menus painlessly. For really simple menus, use the perl script that comes with 'vamps', the linux dvd shrinker.

For (s)vcd however, tmpgenc still rules (it works well in wine I hear).

Re:Is this good for VHS = DVD

[Sheetrock]

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 and Q DVD-Author 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.

Re:Is this good for VHS = DVD

[Flying Purple Wombat]

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.

Re:Is this good for VHS = DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to copy these vhs tapes to dvd [...] Would this be software I would want to use?

Probably not - Cinelerra is more for cutting + pasting segments of video, adding sounds and doing compositing. It might be of some use, but it's likely to be far more than you need. For basic conversion, this is what I do with free tools on Windows:

The first step is to get the video into an MPEG stream suitable for writing to DVD. I convert my source to a ginormously huge AVI encoded with the HuffyUV codec - which is a free lossless video compression codec (hint: Quicktime files can be converted to AVI with the Rad Video Tools). I'd then do a tweaking pass with VirtualDub (resizing / cropping / whatever as needed) - again saving to another lossless file, then use BBMPEG to convert the processed AVI to a DVD-suitable MPEG stream (hint: set the output aspect ratio here if you're doing anamorphic widescreen). I'm not entirely sure what programs / codecs you could use on Linux. You may be able to capture directly to an MPEG, but that's something I'd recommend against if you have the disk space can so you can tweak and process the video file (change brightness, contrast, apply filters, etc) if you need to.

Now you have to author a DVD - creating menus to glue MPEG segments together and then turning them into burnable .ISO images. I've successfully used DVD Styler which is a cross-platform front end to the DVD Author tools (I've used it on Windows, it should also work on Linux). It isn't as full-featured (yet) as commercial packages - but it works well for me. (And I used the GIMP to actually create the menu images).

I then use the Nero DVD burning tools that came bundled with my DVD burner to write the output .ISO to a DVD+R disk with the booktype set to DVD-ROM (so that the DVD player thinks it's looking at a normal DVD). I'm unsure if CDRecord can set the booktype.

You'd probably need a couple of day's worth of testing to figure out all the best parameters - but those are the approximate steps I take to convert camcorder video to DVD.

Re:Is this good for VHS = DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a lot of good (and free) info and software for Windows systems at doom9.

Re:Is this good for VHS = DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

>In other words, Linux just doesn't have anything >comparable to VirtualDub

except avidemux2 which is really great...

>And as for making DVD menus... no idea either

look for dvdauthor (backend) and DVD Styler (gui) or QDVDauthor (gui)

Re:Is this good for VHS = DVD

[beforewisdom]

I didn't even know what I did not know, let alone where to start.

Your post gave me a blueprint of what to do.

Thank you so much for typing it in!

I am going to save it to a text file and use it as a guide.

Thanks so much!

Steve

Will Cinelerra CVS update to work off of 2.0?

[starseeker]

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

Re:Will Cinelerra CVS update to work off of 2.0?

[Anonymous Coward]

I develop a bit for LiVES. I do very simple video editing as a hobby. Here's a sample:

http://www.reimeika.ca/marco/latest.html

All encodes use Theora/Vorbis/Ogg.

Re:Jesus..

[zootm]

Wrapper around GTK+ for Mono. 'tis that simple.

Re:But does it run on linux?

[D14BL0]

"The best open source A/V production environment for Linux today, Cinelerra, has reached version 2.0...

No clue...

Editing? What about capturing video?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you know, some of us who do video editing actually shoot the footage ourselves, as opposed to just ripping DVD's and adding "RIPPD BY L33T" on the title screen.

What sort of level is video capture in Linux? imho it's no good to be able to edit on linux if I have to capture on windows or my mac.

Does it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it rip my DVD's to DIVX? And how fast does it do that?

Any stats for comparsion available?

Or will I have to install this to find it out?

Re:Does it...

[temojen]

Does it rip my DVD's to DIVX?

No. It's a video editor.

Re:Does it...

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe the app you're looking for is called "dvdrip"...

iSight compatibility?

[qwertphobia]

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.

Re:iSight compatibility?

[qwertphobia]

that's libdc1394, not libdv1394. whee.

UI?

[Anonymous Coward]

But has it a good userinterface or does it still suck?

Re:UI?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the main problem with Cinelerra's gui, really? I don't find it all that hard to use. Is it just the choice of colours and the wasteful use of screen estate that put most users off?

Re:UI?

[Fallingcow]

Last time I used it... man, yeah, those colors would make baby jesus cry.

Why didn't they use something less... garish?

Seems like an OK program otherwise, the couple of times I've played with it, though a little crash-prone. But those COLORS! WHY?

First Mono

[kahei]

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!

Joking maybe?

[marcantonio]

what normally is a boring server operating system - studied in computer science classrooms, hidden in back offices

That's funny, that boring server OS has been on my desktop since '99. Great project, but that's kind of a dumb way to start your description of it.

Re:Joking maybe?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you knew the author, you'd know his dry sarcastic sense of humor. Plus read the rest of the copy on the page.

So yes, he was pretty much joking.

For realtime use

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Can it be a video mixer/switcher?

[Anonymous Monkey]

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.

Re:Can it be a video mixer/switcher?

[PitaBred]

I'd wager to say "no". Video Toaster and the like are very specific for running videos... a current system still doesn't have the bandwidth in software to run many streams like that. Try playing more than 2 or 3 videos at the same time, see if your computer slows down.
But either way, this is meant for video editing, not for broadcasting as far as I know.

Re:Can it be a video mixer/switcher?

[Anonymous Monkey]

I was thinking the same thing. Too bad, not only is the Toaster expensive it also tends to crash (from what I have heard) and they only make a windows version. I know on my Xandros box I can play four DVD's at the same time without slowdown, and it dosent crash like my win box. Alas, this must be a hack for another day.

Re:Can it be a video mixer/switcher?

[Anonymous Coward]

Live Channel seems to be the biggest software live video switcher/mixer on the market.

Re:Can it be a video mixer/switcher?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_jockey#VJ_softw are
A list of applications that might meet your needs

Re:Can it be a video mixer/switcher?

[zotz]

Anyone know of anything for doing decent titles? Or is Cinelerra's ability in this area improved.

Anyone used to use the amiga 2x00 with, what was it, the video toaster?

all the best,

drew

http://www.ourmedia.org/node/53984

Re:Can it be a video mixer/switcher?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about GIMP or Inkscape? Alpha channel is your friend.

Re:Can it be a video mixer/switcher?

[zotz]

OK, thanks for the hint, so what would the procedure be for getting various title effects overlaid onto your video?

Can you give or point to a simple howto?

all the best,

drew
--
URL:http://www.ourmedia.org/node/53984

Re:Can it be a video mixer/switcher?

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of effects do you have in mind?

Re:Can it be a video mixer/switcher?

[zotz]

Scrolling, slides, fade ins and outs. Things like that. I have not done any video work since back in the late 80s or early 90s on a friends amiga.

I remember doing things like this.

Here is a video I just put up at ourmedia:

http://www.ourmedia.org/node/57503

all the best,

drew

Re:Can it be a video mixer/switcher?

[arose]

As far as I can see you can do all that with the 'Title' video effect.

Re:Can it be a video mixer/switcher?

[zotz]

I have played with that effect, but could not get it to behave properly. Perhaps that is a result of my ignorance.

all the best,

drew

Re:Editing? What about capturing video?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cinelerra can capture video, too. However, there are better capturing tools than Cinelerra for Linux, which you would probably prefer to use. You don't have to capture the footage within the editor application. You can capture with one tool, edit with another, and compress with a third. I prefer that.

Re:Editing? What about capturing video?

[clueless123]

If you want to capture composite video, then you need a video capture card (independant of linux) You can use Video4linux to capture and record video from a variety of video-in cards, TV tuners and others. If you are using a DV camera, you should have no problem using firewire + dvgrab to capture into DV (I do both all the time )

Usability?

[gilesjuk]

Have you ever tried any of the previous releases?

The interface is so appalingly bad as to make it fairly unusable. I hope this version seriously improves on previous versions.

People really need to choose either GTK or QT when designing complex Linux software. Both these libraries have good widgets and look fairly professional.

Re:Usability?

[eno2001]

I have to echo this sentiment. I come from a background where I've worked with Avid/Digedesign products, Adobe Premiere and a few low budget Windows apps (Avid had one a few years back, but I currently use Sony Vegas on Windows XP) and I can say that Cinelerra has a lot of great features but an unusable UI. The fact that to work with two video sources, you need to run two instances of Cinelerra is preposterous. This is a perfect situation where the use of MDI is called for. Trust me, I've been able to make the move from say, Photoshop to GIMP with little trouble. Cinelerra (in it's last version) was a bear to work with. And the UI widgets aren't to helpful either. Bevelled buttons might look neat, but without proper graphics to tell when things are engaged or not, Cinelerra adds that much more work for the user.

I'm not trying to assail the project itself. I think the concepts behind it are wonderful, but the UI needs to be rethought. If the developer would do what the Xine folks did, and build a base library of all the power in Cinelerra, then build a separate UI to put over the libs while allowing others to write their own UIs, I think we could have a killer app here...

Re:Usability?

[eno2001]

I should mention that I hated Xine originally for the same reasons that I don't fancy Cinelerra. Their UI was clunky. I was an MPlayer fan at the time and I didn't care if Xine had a few extras because the UI was so godawful. When they separated the UI from the functionality and allowed others to write UIs, I chose Gxine and was converted to being a bi-platform fan of both Xine and MPlayer.

How about usabilty?

[WWWWolf]

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?

Re:How about usabilty?

[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 piece of shit. But a loveable one. :)

You just really have to stick with it.

Re:How about usabilty?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 piece of shit. But a loveable one. :)

Comments like this I find truly puzzling.

Compare iMovie. This morning a coworker (unprompted) told me about how -- never having used iMovie, or any video editing software -- he sat down at iMovie and 15 minutes of just-shot video footage, and had a finished movie in half an hour.

Why does "fairly simple stuff" take a day and a half to figure out? I can't think of any other program -- and few products at all -- that wouldn't be laughed out of the room for such a dismal interface, e.g., "It's a great web browser! Took me a day and a half to figure out how to get to amazon.com to order a book. But then I learned to love it!"

You just really have to stick with it.

Given that there are programs whose interfaces are not described as "a piece of shit", I have to wonder why anybody would.

Re:How about usabilty?

[Tyger]

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.

Re:How about usabilty?

[KayosIII]

The UI is essentially the same - It is very similar to most other 3 point editing suites in that respect... The keybindings are non standard which is a bit of a worry... I actually like the cinelerra key bindings better than the standard ones though. Yes they use the same toolkit. It was designed specifically for cinelerra - They have however replaced the fruit salad theme with a nice dark grey one. Cinelerra is designed to work best with uncompressed video... However most of the files I have thrown into it (2.0) have worked just fine... I use Cinelerra with Blender (which I assume you are doing) - the best shot is to render out each frame as a different image. You can easily load each image as a frame in your animation... Since cinelerra understands alpha channel information seamlessly. you can layer your animations - ie render your background independently of your character animation... Then if you need to adjust the animation you only need to re-render the character not the background

Re:How about usabilty?

[evilviper]

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

Re:I guess you could use this...

[clueless123]

I can give you $1500 to $2500 reasons why ...

does it compile yet?

[RelliK]

I tried building it several times, and every single time it was broken.

Re:does it compile yet?

[shoor]

I finally knuckled down and got it to compile, drawing upon my C programming past. I did this for both the official slackware 10.1 and the unofficial 64 bit slackware 10.1 using cinelerra-1.2.2-src.tar.bz2.

After running ./configure --prefix=/usr, I did
'make 2> /tmp/make.err' to get a separate file
with just the errors. Then I went in and
modified the code to get rid of the compiler
errors. I didn't try to understand the code,
so I may have been breaking things, but at least
the program started and put up windows.

Here are the names of the files, and the
diffs that I made (Not that in cutting and
pasting from the output of the script that
ran the diffs, lines have been automatically
wrapped around and stuff, and I don't know
how to undo that.):
cinelerra-1.2.2/guicast/arraylist.h :
0a1
> #include
cinelerra-1.2.2/mplexhi/multplex.c :
343a344
> break;
cinelerra-1.2.2/mplexhi/main.h :
50a51
> #include
cinelerra-1.2.2/cinelerra/builddate.h :
1c1
  #define BUILDDATE "Thu Sep 8 15:12:52 PDT 2005"
cinelerra-1.2.2/cinelerra/recordmonitor.C :
1008c1008 /*((dv_t*)*/dv/*)*/ = dv_new();
cinelerra-1.2.2/cinelerra/virtualnode.C :
474,475c474,475
get_prev_auto(input_position, direction, (Auto*)prev_keyframe);
get_next_auto(input_position, direction, (Auto*)next_keyframe);
---
> prev_keyframe = (IntAuto*)autos->get_prev_auto(input_position, direction, (Auto* &)prev_keyframe);
> next_keyframe = (IntAuto*)autos->get_next_auto(input_position, direction, (Auto* &)next_keyframe);
cinelerra-1.2.2/cinelerra/panautos.C :
27,28c27,28
              previous = (PanAuto*)get_prev_auto(position, direction, (Auto* &)previous);
> next = (PanAuto*)get_next_auto(position, direction, (Auto* &)next);
cinelerra-1.2.2/cinelerra/main.C :
14a15
> #include
cinelerra-1.2.2/cinelerra/floatautos.C :
252,253c252,253
              previous = (FloatAuto*)get_prev_auto(position, direction, (Auto* &)previous, 0);
> next = (FloatAuto*)get_next_auto(position, direction, (Auto* &)next, 0);
cinelerra-1.2.2/cinelerra/virtualvnode.C :
330c330
                                                                                              (Auto* &)mode_keyframe);
cinelerra-1.2.2/cinelerra/tracks.C :
298c298
                                              (Auto* &)mute_keyframe);
cinelerra-1.2.2/cinelerra/virtualanode.C :
474,475c474,475
get_prev_auto(input_position, direction, (Auto*)prev_keyframe);
get_next_auto(input_position, direction, (Auto*)next_keyframe);
---
> prev_keyframe = (PanAuto*)autos->get_prev_auto(input_position, direction, (Auto* &)prev_keyframe);
> next_keyframe = (PanAuto*)autos->get_next_auto(input_position, direction, (Auto* &)next_keyframe);

For the standard slackware 10.1, I was able
to get by with just this:
cinelerra-1.2.2/cinelerra/main.C :
14a15
> #include

And, it seems more trustworthy too, though I
haven't figured out how use in either distro
yet. Nor can I get it to compile in my
linux from scratch distro.

FC3 rpm???

[Rick Richardson]

Subject says it all.

Thought I'd mention

[pardasaniman]

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?

[Doc Ruby]

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?

How do they manage MPEG4 audio?

[danigiri]

Mmmmm... I really wonder how do they manage MPEG4 audio encoding via QT4Linux...

According to Apple, 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.

Re:How do they manage MPEG4 audio?

[danigiri]

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

It seems that they are using the OSS faac 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 app in windows is licensed to generate MPEG-4 audio but custom apps aren't

Re:How do they manage MPEG4 audio?

[mpol]

They probably use AAC software from http://www.audiocoding.com/
Since it's patented you're probably not allowed to distribute binaries of it (even though PLF for example does), but it is allowed to distribute source code, since that's regarded as just a blueprint, just like lame (mp3 encoder) and freetype (Apple bytecode interpreter).

Windows port?

[doublem]

Yes, but does it run under Windows?

Support for DV format?

[Skapare]

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 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.

Re:Support for DV format?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cinelerra supports DV, it's the only format that I've used with it.

Mod Funny!

[bubbaD]

I was tempted to mod funny, but with a name like "rampant mac," I'm surprised you didn't point out the obvious, why use a linux environment if you can run Mac OSX? Unless its for geeks putting together a tech cast ala Dr Dobb's http://technetcast.ddj.com/, its seems likely ease-of-use would trump OSS software for would-be budget filmmakers.
Apple is pursuing the budget A/V geek market, and offering free-as-in-beer software (and Firewire for videocameras) with Mac minis. I don't do video editing myself, but are they aiming to eventually port to OSX or am I missing something?

Re:Mod Funny!

[MooUK]

You missed the budget bit. There may be free-as-in-money software for mac platforms. But the hardware itself is considerably more expensive in an Apple machine, and free-as-in-beer software can be had on much cheaper hardware.

Kubrick is Smiling in Heaven

[Sundroid]

Geeking out about technology is fine, but real creativity and bravery happen when you pick up a video camera and start shooting.

I've just looked at "2001: a Space Odyssey", Kubrick's masterpiece, again recently, and although it was made in 1968--a time when these fancy computer-aided motion-picture tools were not available--the special effects still look spectacular. Yeah, 1968, when Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were both only 13 years old. Indeed, in "2001", you cannot spot a keyboard, a mouse, or a laptop, and guess what? A computer (HAL-9000) is one of the leading characters. I've written a re-review of "2001" (at http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/2005/09/2001-space-o dyssey-by-stanley-kubrick.html) on my blog (http://sunandfun.blogspot.com/), if anyone's interested.

Easy question - does it do JPEG-MPEG conversion?

[Hulkster]

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.

Written in what now?

[Anonymous Coward]

...written in GStreamer and Mono/GTK#...

GStreamer is a library. Mono is a platform. GTK# is the only language of the three. Properly written it would be:

...written in GTK#, using the GStreamer library and running on the Mono platform...

If you don't know what something is, don't comment on it.

Funny? Sourceforget

[bubbaD]

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!

Can it handle creating divx movies

[bugnuts]

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 and would love to know if it works with Cinelerra.

Feel free to drool.

[reality-bytes]

Cinelerra has supported opening, editing and rendering Theora and Vorbis for a little while now.

Re:Editing? What about capturing video?

[Anonymous Coward]

Capturing from a DV camcorder works great, just make sure you use a FireWire card (which would be required even if you were on Windows or OS X).

Re:I guess you could use this...

[Anonymous Monkey]

I can give you $1500 to $2500 reasons why ...

I prefer small, unmarked bills.

Re:Easy question - does it do JPEG-MPEG conversion

[Anonymous Coward]

And see your shell explode with that many jpeg's expanding in the CLI for a 3h video.... ^_^

Couldn't resist, sorry.

Re:Easy question - does it do JPEG-MPEG conversion

[Anonymous Coward]

mencoder
transcode

Re:Easy question - does it do JPEG-MPEG conversion

[Hatta]

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

Why not Pitivi?

[Anonymous Coward]

A GStreamer-based video editor for Gnome:

http://www.pitivi.org/

Please someone contrast it to the Apple setup

[mihalis]

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 adequately.

My source is the Sony HDR-FX1 - does Cinelerra handle 1080i HDV well, for example?

Re:Please someone contrast it to the Apple setup

[Anonymous Coward]

My source is the Sony HDR-FX1 - does Cinelerra handle 1080i HDV well, for example?

Actually, yes. I have an HDR-FX1 myself, and use mpg1394grab to capture. You need a very fast CPU to get smooth performance, though. A 3.4 GHz Xeon with a few GB of RAM, PCI-X graphics card and SCSI disks worked quite nicely. No need for "intermediary codecs".

Re:Please someone contrast it to the Apple setup

[BigBuckHunter]

I would recommend giving it a try on your existing setup. YellowDog, Gentoo, and some debian derivatives work fine on your dual proc PPC.

BHH

Re:Please someone contrast it to the Apple setup

[KayosIII]

I have done a little work in both FinalCut and Cinelerra...

Both have a simular feel... the default layout is almost identical. To me at least Cinelerra feels a little more spartan - final cut is packed with a lot of functionality... Having said that Cinelerra does do pretty much everything I have needed to apart from progressively speeding up or slowing down footage.

Cinelerra is designed to be primarily used with HDTV footage and supports all HDTV formats

The areas where Cinelerra really shines are

1. Network rendering - you can use a hetrogenous network of computers to render your video in the background while you are working... Need more processing poweer - add more cpu's - I think Premiere will have something like this in its next version - other than that I don't know of anything else that does that this side of $40,000
2. Cinelerra attempts to do everything realtime - no need to render complex effects etc... though you can set it to render in the background.
3. support for 16bit per pixel and floating point colour spaces.... Including HDR footage.
4. Sound processing - Cinelerra grew out of an audio processing packages many many years ago and still has really good sound support
5. Basic compositing support - channel ops animating layered video tracks that sort of thing

Some areas where Cinelerra is a bit weak....

1. The UI demands that you spend a little time learning the finer points - Keybindings are non standard - settings take a little time to get your head around. If you are familar with 3 point editing the actual use of the program should be straight forwards
2. dv capture - being primarily HDformat targeted application MiniDV capture has not always worked to put it bluntly... I know that the linux kernel constantly changing the sementics of the firewire interface doesn't help. I have yet to test this version - but they have switched methods so I am hopeful.
3. export - there are not too many formats that can be exported that actually read properly in anything else - I think the current list is Mpeg1, Mpeg2 & Quicktime w/ mjpeg compression. And for me at least the mpeg conversion was broken for a little while now. With H.265 support being included and tested to work with Quicktime 7... I am happy to say that this situation has improved massively... Basically if the mpeg2 export works I will be happy - that means I can go to DVD authoring software and all my bases will be covered

mencoder

[Anonymous Coward]

As you were already told, use mencoder and dvdauthor. You can use mencoder to encode the video directly from your capture card to the desired format.

Read the manpage.
Specify width=768:height=576 with the -tv paramter. I suggest you to use the following filters: crop=720:540:24:18 and pp=lb. The second is for deinterlace. If you don't use deinterlacing, you MUST specify ildct:ilme options to the libavcodec encoder.

I have not used dvdauthor. I, myself, encode my things to MPEG4 CDs, by capturing to MPEG2 or MJPEG first:
mencoder tv:// -tv input=1:norm=PAL:driver=v4l2:width=768:height=576 -aspect 4:3 -vf crop=720:540:24:18,pp=lb -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg:vbitrate=10000 -lameopts abr:br=112:mode=3 -endpos 01:05:00 -o zapis1.avi
And then encoding:
mencoder zapis1.avi -oac copy -vf hqdn3d -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=1:vbitrate=2500 -o /dev/null
mencoder zapis1.avi -oac copy -vf hqdn3d -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=2:vbitrate=2500 -o result.avi

The reencoding does actually achieve better quality in my case, when you capture for a DVD, you should however not do it, and capture directly to the desired format. That means MPEG2, MPEG format, etc. Maybe 7500 video bitrate. The denoise filter I use in the reencoding is not needed, it might help achieve better quality, but it would most certainly slow down the encoding too much for a realtime capture.

2 videos made with Cinelerra...

[Conti]

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

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

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.

Alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

There are currently other alternatives under development for those interested. Among those, check out PiTiVi for something based on GTK and GStreamer. They need hackers. (And there was also a speech about it at the GUADEC, you might want to take a look at the video archives)

On another note - way to render iMovie in Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anybody know a way to use just the render option of Cinelerra to post-process from iMovie project file or otherwise ? More specifically, I have an iMovie file (which is a directory containing all media, effects, transitions and meta-data files) uploaded to my Linux (AMD64) fileserver share. Once there, is there a way for Linux server to export the output to say, H.264 or mpeg2 or streaming clip or Vorbis ? Can XGrid ( or Automator task) technology be applied to ease the whole thing ? The rendering software on MAC takes a long time if you donot have a high end hardware.

System requirements

[Micah]

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!

Final Cut and Avid?

[VoidEngineer]

How does this compare to FinalCut or Avid?

Re:Final Cut and Avid?

[rduke15]

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 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:

Because of the high cost of developing frame-accurate deck control mechanisms, the only use of batches now is recording different programs during different times of day

Sounds completely unrelated to the standard batch capturing, and seems to be more related to PVR type use or something.

As someone familiar with professional film/video editing, I actually always wished there would be a Linux alternative to Avid and FCP, but haven't seen any yet.

And I always wondered if Cinelerra could be of any use in a professional editing environment. Maybe for some special effects? Or some special format conversions? I don't know, and if someone has seen a use for it alongside Avid/FCP, it would be interesting to know.

Is Cinelerra a useful tool to add to an Avid or FCP editing room?

Re:Final Cut and Avid?

[mjeppsen]

How does this compare to FinalCut or Avid?

Dear lord, I hope you are trolling.
I'm sure it doesn't compare favorably at all. Avid software has been developed for over seventeen years. Final Cut Pro is at version 5, and compares VERY favorably to Avid, and vice-versa...my guess is that Cinelerra isn't anywhere close to either of them at this time. I am curious to see how it develops over the years though.

Matthew Jeppsen
www.FresHDV.com

Linux video badness is one reason I switched

[Nice2Cats]

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.

Re:Linux video badness is one reason I switched

[prockcore]

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.

Cinelerra looks like ass....

[Chanc_Gorkon]

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.

Re:Cinelerra looks like ass....

[KayosIII]

Thats funny I found the whole thing remarkably simular to final cut... What do you want to do? Like I said before the "fruit salad" theme is gone - and now the app is a traditional compositor dark grey

Re:Cinelerra looks like ass....

[Chanc_Gorkon]

I dunno. Maybe I would like it to use some gtk widgets or something a little nicer to look at then the current look. You CAN use gtk and not have to be tied to Gnome. It's nice that the fruit salad theme is gone, but I still think it's a bit harder to use then some of the pro tools like Final Cut Pro.

Re:Editing? What about capturing video?

[shoor]

As mentioned in another subthread, a good way to capture
is with mencoder (Part of MPlayer). You do need a tuner card,
(cards based on the bttv chipset have been around a long time,
that's what I've used.). The tricky part is what I call the
'incantations'. You have to compile your kernel with support
for bttv and sound. I've always created these as modules. Then,
you have to load the modules with the correct card type and
tuner type. Finally, when you invoke mencoder, it is a command
line tool, and the incantation to get that to work can be very
tricky. I found the documentation absolutely incomprehensible
on how to use it, but I did a web search and found where some
one, in a post, gave an example of how they invoked mencoder,
and starting from that, I was able to play around with it till I
got something that worked. I created a script that I called
mencoder from where I just specified the duration, the channel,
and the name of the file to save too, but what worked for me
in the US pulling in NTSC may not work for you, and anyway,
I'm not in a place where I have the script handy.

Typical Linux BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Installed and I get error loading libraries crap. I'm so tired of this.

Re:Typical Linux BS

[Anonymous Coward]

Tired of what? Did you pay for it? Are you a developer? Are you prepared to put time into building a dedicated video editing system?

No high end solution works out of the box, if you have a serious requirement for video editing, a day building a cinelerra system is __NOTHING__ compared to the license costs for (eg.) a commercial compositor.

I'm tired of people moaning about free software written by volunteers.

Re:Typical Linux BS

[Anonymous Coward]

You guy's are missing the fucking point. I want to edit movies, not build libraries. Never do I say I want something for free and then bitching about it because it dont work out of the box. I have been working on PC's for 17 years. My 1st Linux was redhat 5, and I'm using linux now. This is a huge problem with Linux apps. I'm just getting tired of spending time getting apps to work just to find out I don't like it. It's just a waste of time. This is not the way to make Linux mainstream.

Lots of potentail... Horrible interface

[Anonymous Coward]

Woo Hoo! More features for a product whose interface still blows! Has anyone though about doing a fork of Cinelerra that fixes the tragically bad interface?

Re:Editing? What about capturing video?

[Tyger]

If you have DV equipment, I believe Cinelerra supports direct capture. I don't use it myself as the video I work with is all computer generated, but I'm pretty sure it's there.

Errrm ... No.

[Qbertino]

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/). 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" both run on Linux. Flint even exclusively (http://www.autodesk.com/flint).

Then there is Blender, which has a sort-of NLE built in that's called 'Video Sequencer'. That's an OSS tool I trust to be usable without requireing a quad opteron -allthough I've never tested it.

I could go on, but I guess the point is driven Home: Cinelerra may be fine, but it is not the best Video NLE for Linux.

Re:Editing? What about capturing video?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Radeon 7200 vivo. It works great in Windows. So it'll work great in Linux with MEncoder, right?

well

[Anonymous Coward]

Then ask for a refund.

rpms here

[bach37]

http://heroinewarrior.com/download.php3 The download page has rpms. Any of the binary links are links to rpms.

Re:rpms here

[Rick Richardson]

FC4 rpm, not FC3.

USD-USD-USD-USD

[Conti]

I don't use commercial software on Linux. And I don't want to. You're talking about software which costs hundreds or thousands of dollars (I'm not talking about blender). Such software does not interest me, I only mind about free software. I hope Linux won't become as Windows, I mean tons of commercial software which you have to buy to do what you want to do.

Re:Easy question - does it do JPEG-MPEG conversion

[mangobrain]

You can load up multiple image files at once, and have it concatenate them onto the end of the current video track, ordered by filename. I used this to create a video out of a few hundred numbered PNGs created by a raytracer as part of some uni coursework. Cinelerra also proved more than adequate for adding captions, fades between the various sequences, title screens etc., as well as adding a soundtrack.

However, unless things have improved since I last used it, I'd say be *very* careful with your output encoding - quite a few of the output formats seemed terminally broken; many would create files that Xine couldn't play, and some would even create files that Cinelerra couldn't open itself.

Heard about vi and Emacs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Heard about vi and Emacs? Those are something as mundane as text editors. Not "word processors", but text editors. Yet they take quite a while getting used to. If you accidentally get into vi, you will not get out again until somebody tells you how.

Yet many coders love vi, or Emacs. You will probably have a hard time understanding why. That's your loss.

Debian for PPC packages are available..

[Anonymous Coward]

...of version 1.2.2 of the cvs.cinelerra.org branch, with apt source.

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

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

Just one question

[Anonymous Coward]

Can one actually download it and actually reasonably expect it to build properly now? That's been a major turnoff for me, where Cinalerra is concerned. 8,271,963,239 dependencies to resolve, and once you've fulfilled every one, actual coding errors break the build.

I used to really like cinelerra until one day I decided to nuke it and download the latest and greatest. Big mistake.

This is not a troll, I'm just venting. I'm looking forward to checking out the new version! :)

Re:whiner whiner whiner

[Anonymous Coward]

So you actually mean best free NLE video editor in Linux, not the best overall. Please, be more clear.

By the way, what's so wrong with actually buying something that outperforms the free alternative?

(I used Cinelerra on a 1GHz machine with half a gig of RAM, and it was damned near unusable. I used MainActor on said machine, and it worked very nicely.)

Getting source to compile slackware 10.1 on 64 bit

[shoor]

I downloaded the source to my system (64 bit
Athlon 3000) running the official Slackware 10.1.

After doing configure, all the Makefiles in the
mjpegtools-1.6.3-rc1 subdirectories had
CFLAGS and CXXFlags etc with k8 in them. I had
to by hand, go through those subdirectories
editing the Makefiles, searching for 'k8' and
removing the option. After that, I was able
to do a 'make' and 'make install'. The thing
came up with its nice windows and all. Not
that I've actually tried to do anything with it
yet, but, in case anyone wants to compile from
source, thought I'd pass this on.

The future of Linux Audio Video

[Anonymous Coward]

What I hate are programs that try to do everything. Which works great until a new format comes out, but to support it you need a whole different version of the software, which works completely differently than the old version.

What I expect to see is a format framework under Linux that is totally independant of the formats and independent of the video and audio players. This way I can be using a video player or an audio player or an editor of some sort and easily add a new format, or conversely add a new video player and everything that I already have supported on my system is fully supported by the player.

When I add the new formats they should all automatically appear in every relevant dropdown. Any video format that is supported should automatically play when a file that contains them is loaded by a player.

There should be command line tools on top of this audio/video layer that allows me to convert and transform the data any way I want.

And when I try to play a video format that isn't installed on my system a help system should come up and guide me through installing the proper format.

To reiterate. There should be a plug in format layer. The plug ins should be tiny and register with a middle layer their availability and capability. The middle layer should provide access to the formats in a standard way and on top of this layer are the command line tools and the audio/video players/editors. You can even have compatibility layers so that you can emulate the ffmpeg or mplayer or mencoder command line interfaces, but underneath it's all standard across all of them.

This 3 layer system would break apart the capabilities and behaviors of the system into easily tested and maintained layers that could even be maintained by seperate groups.

I challenge all these seperate groups of individuals working on open source software to set aside your differences and to implement this system for Linux and convert all existing tools to use these layers.

Re:iMovie and iDVD

[Sinner]

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.

Debian users - alien works

[KayosIII]

I had difficulty building from source - I think it will only work with GCC-3.4 as GCC-4.0 did not like some of the semantics used. GCC-3.3 does not support the build target for some of the files....

Anyways I decided to give the redhat binaries a go... I converted them using alien. They installed without a hitch... And I haven't had any difficulties running them yet...

Here's my take on the Cinelerra situation...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://panela.blog-city.com/cinelerra_forking_and_ competition_redux.htm

cinelerra is for editing

[Anonymous Coward]

Cinelerra is a program for editing. Cut & paste clip video & sound in severals tracks in order to do a movie or film.

Cinelerra isnt for postprodution althougt you can export the video in several codecs Its more suitable for edit in raw mode.

Avidemux, transcode, mencoder are for postprodution.
Yes. You can cut & paste pieces of video with any of then but they are not program for real editing.

Re:whiner whiner whiner

[Conti]

I won't buy any commercial software because it's contrary to my "philosophy" of computing. Cinelerra on a 2GHz and 1Go RAM works perfectly fine. You need at least such a config to create relatively complex videos.