For several years now, I have been following the Cinelerra project, and have tried doing some video editing with it. However, I have not really been able to make use of it. The first problem is the confusion surrounding all the formats/codecs. Then there is the problem of how to use the apparently necessary external programs (e.g. ffmpeg, etc.). Finally, I find the whole paradigm to be difficult to understand and to use.
I believe that some really good videos have been made using Cinelerra, but I have not seen any good tutorials on a complete workflowused to create them. I have seen some that use or create web videos (like .FLV). >From what little I have seen of Adobe's video editing software, the general >appearance of Cinelerra seems to mimic that a bit. I find Adobe's product to >be very unintuitive. I have been using various versions of Pinnacle Studio (for Windows, unfortunately) for many years now. It is one of the very few pieces of software that keep me hanging on to Windows (income tax software is the other), which I would really like to "ditch", especially before Windows 8 takes over the world! I find it to be VERY intuitive and easy to use (when it works), however, when it does not work, support is abysmal. They try, but their technical support people are too isolated from their engineering/software development people to be able to provide a solution. While I would really like to do some HD work with Cinelerra, I would like to start with see aworkflow for something relatively simple. I would normally start with a video clip in .AVI, .MOV or .MPG (720X480 NTSC either 4:3 or 16:9) with sound. I would like a very simple workflow that would allow me to import such clips, edit them by doing such simple things as colour correction, sharpening, pan-zoom, cutting out segments, then exporting a file in one of those formats with the original sound intact. I have looked at many of the tutorials (as well as for ffmpeg), but I have not really found anything that I could follow and that would work. I realize that it is at least partly because it is difficult for me to switch paradigms from Pinnacle to what I suspect is the Cinelerra approach: modelled on the Adobe. I have played with lots of other software in both Windows (e.g. Cyberlink and Nero) and LINUX (avidemux, kdenlive, etc.) but I have not found anything nearly as intuitive as Pinnacle Studio. I have also tried Avid Studio (now that Avid has purchased Pinnacle), which is a bit more like Adobe or Cinelerra. While it shares a much better colour correction capability with Cinelerra, it is useless for me as it crashes all the time and after nearly a year, the technical support people have been unable to figure out why (diagnostics appear to somewhere between non-existent to useless). After all that long-winded preamble, is there a good turorial that will tell me how to import NTSC 720X480 4:3 or 16:9 with sound (.MPG, .AVI, .MOV or .VOB=MPG), do that relatively simple editing outlined above, then export to any of those same formats with sound? I will worry about High Definition (1920X1080p) later, and also dealing with multiple tracks can wait till I figure out how to do something simpler. Thanks for any pointers. Murray
