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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..
Is someone tooting their own horn? Or is this really the best software for A/V production?
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
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
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.
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?
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.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
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.