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 ...

[Swamii]

Mirrordot, Coral Cache.

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?

[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: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 :(

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

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: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.

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.

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: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.

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: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: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.

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.

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.

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.