Bradley A. Hare wrote:
Jason van Gumster wrote:
I can't be the only one who's done successful complex editing in
Cinelerra. I do fair amount of of work, professionally and
independently, and while I'll admit Cinelerra isn't perfect, it
certainly does the job for me on the projects I choose to use it on.
Could you describe these in a little more detail, e.g. source formats
project size, hardware config etc. ?? Some people seem to have better
luck than others with Cinelerra, knowing why would probably be
helpful for everyone - regardless of their current opinion.
Regards,
Brad Hare
If you just start up cinelerra open and say "I'm going to have some fun"
(or "learn some neat tricks to teach students") then you are likely
working in different ways all the time. You're finding new problems too
quickly and not persisting long enough to discover what triggers your
problems, to file a bug report and to design a work around. I think
this is a risk of working in a hypothetical way with cinelerra.
How to crash cinelerra tends to be pretty deterministic. And almost
everything has a work around. It is also very common (we see from mails
on this list) that the problem is in what the user is asking the program
to do. The world of video formats and NLEs is complex. Cinelerra
tends to let you feed invalid parameters to render engines. This means
you need to then learn what the parameters mean and their valid ranges.
There's a learning opportunity for students. But that depends on what
type of curriculum you have in mind - something you haven't mentioned.
Cinelerra is only fun to play with once you've learned its quirkiness by
completing a few projects and not before.
I have done some successful work with cinelerra. Only some at a
professional level and not much of great length or complexity. But I
have found in my experimental work that when the scale or complexity
increases I can work in pieces: use intermediate renders to lossless
formats, break the project into scenes (get out the paper and pen).
This has the advantage of making the compositor and background render
engine work more efficiently for previewing.
'Crashing through' with cinelerra was no more difficult than with
ardour. Ardour is another fantastic powerful program which suffers
random crashes, which harnesses really powerful formats and which has
new users who keep expecting things to be as simple as with, say,
Audacity. Audacity is to ardour as kino is to cinelerra (except
Audacity is way more mature than kino). Asking cinelerra to shift to
working with a single codec, and to limit its output formats is liking
asking ardour to become a loss based audio editor like audacity.
You've got to have some real determination plus an actual
non-hypothetical task to get useful behaviour from cinelerra. As plenty
of linux users have already learned this determination this isn't a
problem for many.
I have worked on cinelerra with dv2/avi source, with mpeg 2 taken from
dvds, and now I am mostly working with png and jpg list source material
(animation frames taken with a digital still camera and stitched
together with a script.) For intermediate renders I also work with a
lossless format which supports alpha channel in a Quicktime
container. As with most of the successful render output formats this
works well as an input format too. There's no point me listing
successful cinelerra final render formats - there are a thousand threads
already on those topics. Most of the successful render output formats
work well as input formats too.
I suspect you would need to be an effective user of cinelerra before you
could design an interesting/useful curriculum based on it.
all the best
Graham
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