[PlanetCCRMA] Jack and Cinelerra

[Joseph Dell'Orfano]

Well, I do have to agree that starting off with cinelerra is not easy.
In fact, for simple home video editing, kino appears to be the tool of
choice. I must take issue with the argument against open source
software, however. I was able to figure out cinelerra with the help of
the user community and the developers. This is simply a different
paradigm compared with commercial software. For example, with
PlanetCCRMA I have a fully functional recording studio and video editing
studio. The equivalent commercial software would've literally cost
thousands of dollars. On the other hand, commercial video editing pretty
much worked out of the box for me, although with even more crashes than
I currently get!

My advice regarding linux video editing at this time is that it is
probably still in the realm of the hobbyist, although the tools are
exceptionally powerful compared with commercial products for home use.

That being said, I think that Heroine Virtual actually has reasonable
documentation. You can get a copy at
http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra/cinelerra.html

Here is a link to a general tutorial about capturing and editing video.
This one recommends using kino for DV capture and cinelerra for editing,
a combination that I have found to be very useful.
http://www.robfisher.net/video/

Here is a link to the public CVS branch of cinelerra
http://cvs.cinelerra.org/. There are more links to documentation here as
well.

These are a good start for just starting out with cinelerra. These were
all sites that I found when I was frustrated with how the program
worked. (I have been working with it for almost 2 years now.) 

1. To get DV from your DV camera, plug into firewire and use Kino. This
will allow you to control the camera with your computer via the kino
interface. This allows you to capture video. Kino will break this up
into scenes if you like. I generally have it make a scene at every
camera cut.

2. Save the video files in quicktime format from kino. This is the only
format which I have found works well with cinelerra. This is a raw video
format, so there is no loss of quality from the camera through kino into
cinelerra.

3. Load the files into cinelerra and edit them on the timeline as you
see fit. (I guess this is the part that has everyone flummoxed!) 

4. Cinelerra will render files as mpgs in addition to many other
formats. To make an actual DVD is actually not a user friendly
proposition, although there are several excellent tools being developed.
DVDauthor is the command line utility to actually author a DVD. This has
more menu options than anything I have seen available commercially for
home use. There is a gui frontend for this called Q-DVDauthor which
works well enough for me. (http://qdvdauthor.sourceforge.net/)

Again, this is not an easy process to start off with. However, with a
lot of patience, you get a very powerful video editing suite. For
general home use, Kino is more than enough, though.

-Joe D


On Sat, 2005-08-06 at 11:00 -0700, Brad Fuller wrote:
> Mark Knecht wrote:
> 
> > My son and I tried to make sense of Cinelerra about a year ago. It
> > drove us nuts and seemed to demonstrate exactly why Open Source
> > Software doesn't win against market driven products you pay for. The
> > documentation was, at least at the time, almost nil, and it seemed to
> > us that nothing did what you would assume from using other program
> > like this under Windows. We couldn't figure it out at all.
> >
> you're not alone. I was also confused by it's interface. Seemed to take 
> over and I couldn't really figure it out.
> I gave up.
> 
-- 
Joseph Dell'Orfano <fullgo@dellorfano.net>