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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..
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.
Is someone tooting their own horn? Or is this really the best software for A/V production?
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
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.
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.
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 )
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.
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?
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?
--
make install -not war
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.
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.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
I prefer small, unmarked bills.
We are the Borg...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Yet many coders love vi, or Emacs. You will probably have a hard time understanding why. That's your loss.