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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."
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..
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
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
It may want a dual opteron, however it has built in support to cluster machines to render video.
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
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
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.
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.
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)
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
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.
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 )
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.
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:a
l 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.Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
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.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
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.
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".
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:
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?