Cinelerra

Cinelerra

Cinelerra
Developer(s)	Heroine Virtual / Cinelerra community
Stable release	4.3 / August 06, 2011
Written in	C++
Operating system	Linux, Mac OS X (with X Window System)
Type	Video editing software
License	GNU General Public License
Website	proprietary or community version

Cinelerra is a professional video editing and compositing software. It is designed for the GNU/Linux operating system. It is produced by Heroine Virtual, and is free software distributed under the GNU General Public License. Cinelerra also includes a video compositing engine, allowing the user to perform advanced compositing operations such as keying and mattes.

Cinelerra was first released August 1, 2002, and was based in part on an earlier product known as Broadcast 2000. Broadcast 2000 was withdrawn by Heroine Virtual in September 2001.

Notable features

Cinelerra includes support for very high-fidelity audio and video: it processes audio using 64 bits of precision, and can work in both RGBA and YUVA color spaces, using floating-point and 16-bit integer representations, respectively. It is resolution and frame rate-independent, meaning that it can support video of any speed and size. The application has a wide range of features.

Cinelerra interface

Cinelerra 2.1 being used to edit footage in a video project.

Cinelerra's interface is similar to that of other nonlinear video-editing systems, such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, and Avid Media Composer. However, because it includes a compositing engine, it may also be likened to compositing software such as Adobe After Effects, Smoke on Linux or Shake. The user is presented with four screens:

1. The timeline, which gives the user a time-based view of all video and audio tracks in the project, as well as keyframe data for e.g. camera movement, effects, or opacity;
2. the viewer, which gives the user a method of "scrubbing" through footage;
3. the resource window, which presents the user with a view of all audio and video resources in the project, as well as available audio and video effects and transitions; and
4. the compositor, which presents the user with a view of the final project as it would look when rendered. The compositor is interactive in that it allows the user to adjust the positions of video objects; it also updates in response to user input.

Cinelerra's interface is frequently criticized because it does not conform to either GNOME or KDE Human interface guidelines.^{[citation needed]}

Cinelerra usage and awards

Cinelerra has gained ground among some Linux enthusiasts looking for a native video editing system. Professional use is mostly promoted by Linux Media Arts, which sells an integrated hardware and software package for video production that includes Cinelerra.

At the National Association of Broadcasters' 2004 Electronic Media Show, Cinelerra was awarded Bob Turner's "Making the Cut" award. The award is given to "the best and most exciting postproduction products seen at the convention".

The Community Version

Heroine Virtual generates a new release of Cinelerra semi-annually, available as source code only. Any bugs and usability issues found and resolved by the community that are submitted to Heroine Virtual often result in no immediate response, and it is not until a new release that there is any indication that Heroine Virtual has incorporated these changes. Because of both the latency in development and the distribution-specific nature of the release, a group of free and open-source software developers created their own version of Cinelerra referred to as Cinelerra-CV (where CV stands for Community Version).

Cinelerra-CV allows the community to contribute to an open repository where changes to the code are accessible to everyone. Mailing lists and an IRC channel exist where more experienced users and developers can provide support to less experienced users, and developers can hold technical discussions. Cinelerra-CV is also packaged for a wider range of distributions. It also has a different compilation system: system libraries are used extensively, and the autoconf/automake tools are used to configure the compilation system.

Although Cinelerra-CV may technically be called a fork, the relationship between Heroine Virtual and Cinelerra-CV is rather friendly. Heroine Virtual at times contributes to discussions on the mailing lists, and incorporates many of the changes made in the repository. Heroine Virtual posted the following message on their website describing the relationship:

What you'll find here is the heroinewarrior version of Cinelerra. This is the version that supports what we need to do at Heroine Virtual Ltd. and is the same tree that was started in 1997. As time passes and new students come and go from the Linux scene, new forks of Cinelerra emerge that are more suited to the community but not what Heroine Virtual Ltd. needs. Today you'll probably find the cinelerra.org fork more useful.

They allow certain parts of our fork into their fork while contributing anything they want while we allow certain parts of their fork into our fork while contributing anything we want".

The versioning of Cinelerra-CV follows that of Heroine Virtual. After Heroine Virtual produces a release, Cinelerra-CV examines the changes introduced by the new version and merges them into their version. CV is appended to the end of the version number to indicate the community version. (For example, after the 2.1 merger the CV version is labeled 2.1CV.)

Lumiera rewrite

In the beginning of April 2008, the Cinelerra community announced a complete rewrite of the current community version, named as Lumiera. It was born as a rewrite of the Cinelerra codebase called Cinelerra3 but soon was separated into an independent project with its own name. Lumiera is still in an early stage of development, but has been making continuous progress (as of 5/2011) and now has a binary Debian build of the development preview available.

History

Date	Releases
August 6, 2011	Cinelerra 4.3 released. Can't open up video files greater than 2gb in size now, has green frames and dropped frames in hd video h264 or x264 frames dropped. This poses problems for Canon 5DM2 and 7D 1920x1080 clips at 24frames.
October 15, 2010	Mainly a bugfix & personal need release. "Edit->Align edits" feature, which aligns all the audio edits with the video. Keyframe spanning feature, where highlighting a region with keyframe generation on causes effect tweeks to span all the keyframes. All assets are now opened in subprocesses so they don't bring down the entire program when they crash. Cannot drag and drop edit clips anymore, feature removed here and future versions.
September 24, 2009	Cinelerra 4.1 released. Main feature is nested sequences. The Viewer window does not display video clips, Bug fixed in next version at the expense of another feature removed.
August 8, 2008	Cinelerra 4.0 released. Since all versions 2.0 onward 10bit (useful for prof. Cinepaint) and 16bit RGB(A),YUV(A) have been removed and replaced with RGB YUV Float instead.
September 7, 2006	Cinelerra 2.1 merged into a community SVN version. (The first use of git and a multi-person merge)
July 2, 2006	Cinelerra 2.1 released
September 29, 2005	Cinelerra 2.0 merged into a community SVN version.
September 12, 2005	Cinelerra 2.0 released H.264 encoding and MPEG-4 audio encoding. Import MPEG video directly.
January 18, 2005	Cinelerra 1.2.2 merged into a community CVS version.
January 10, 2005	Cinelerra 1.2.2 released
August 16, 2004	Cinelerra 1.2.1 merged into a community CVS version. Special enhancements were added to this version Eg. H264 Kod. Cineon used at NAB under Fedora 1,2 and BSD 5, this could handle 4k film 4096x4096 if graphics card permits. Fast frame rate in excess of 210 frames per second at 720x480 29.97, while bringing in live HD video in the timeline from a video camera. video4linux driver Zoran chip.
August 8, 2004	Cinelerra 1.2.1 released Quicktime 2.0.4 updated. Enter the world of floating point imaging in this release. It's not just a more accurate colorspace, it's a totally new way of thinking about color. Finally, Cinelerra is officially more stable in 64 bit mode than 32 bit mode.
May 11, 2004	Cinelerra 1.2.0 released Cinelerra has a massive number of small changes. Quicktime finally decodes Sorenson and compressed headers.
February 17, 2004 Stable version is on workstation dual Opteron 2.2ghz 4gb Ram	Cinelerra 1.1.9 merged into a community CVS version.
February 11, 2004	Cinelerra 1.1.9 released This is a landmark since it's probably the first time more code was submitted from the community than internally.
October 5, 2003	Cinelerra 1.1.7 merged into a community CVS version.
August 11, 2003	Cinelerra 1.1.7 released
May 12, 2003	Cinelerra 1.1.6 released
April 29, 2003	Cinelerra 1.1.5 code "forked" into a community CVS version.
August 1, 2002	Cinelerra 1.0.0 released

See also

• Comparison of video editing software
• Kdenlive
• PiTiVi

External links

• Official website.
• Cinelerra community version, http://cinelerra.org/ .
• Cinelerra for Grandma, http://www.g-raffa.eu/Cinelerra/HOWTO/index.html .
• Cinelerra: Rough and ready video editor, Linux.com, http://www.linux.com/feature/46259 .
• MainActor vs. Cinelerra: simple editing, Flavor8, http://flavor8.com/index.php/2006/08/05/mainactor-vs-cinelerra-simple-editing-part-2/ .