Murray,
Here is a brief reply from my experiences as a user of Cinelerra.
First up, I have been using it solidly for about 4 years. I produce
mainly short videos for the web of athletics, but also concerts, events
and a bit of corporate. Some concerts run to over two hours, but most
pieces are 4 to 8 minutes for the web. I started out with SD (PAL
25fps), but now work mainly with with 720p HD. I chose 720p as it is
significant step up in output quality from SD, progressive being
suitable for sports, and not over-taxing my current PC config (I
struggle a bit with 1080p in current set up).
I picked up Cinelerra because of cost. What I saved on hardware and
software (for a Mac and FCP), I bought video equipment. Everytime I
think about switching to mac, I have a good lie down then spend the
money on video equipment. Adobe Premier (or Production suite), be it on
PC or mac, is also expensive. Latest FCP X is down in price, and mac
hardware appears to be getting cheaper, but there is still a gap between
buying and me building my own PC and installing linux.
As a an IT worker, I am familiar with linux and command line
interfacing. As such, the technical aspects of it don't faze me much,
and a few times that has saved my bacon. For anyone with a phobia about
computer technicalities, Cinelerra might be somewhat frustrating. But
having said that, the recent CV version has become much more stable to
an extent that maybe the issues of a few years back have subsided.
As my requirements border on the professional (deadlines, quality,
timeliness etc.), I have found Cinelerra to satisfies my requirements.
There are many things I take for granted that I might not appreciate. I
use multi video and audio tracks all the time, have multi-camera
situations, graphic overlays, colour correction, timer overlays, audio
mixing etc etc. There may be things I do that I can't do on the big two
(FCP and Premiere), but as I don't know those products intimately, I
can't compare. Even after 4 years, I keep finding new things about
Cinelerra.
I have dabbled a bit with Kino, Kdenlive and Open Shot, but there are
key elements that do not meet my demands - either missing or I don't
know how to extract from those programs. I do use dvgrab (part of Kino)
to capture from tape and Kdenlive sometimes for transcoding into a codec
best suited for Cinelerra. But now with DTE, dvgrab not used as much.
FFMPEG is a good companion to shape things for inputs, as well if some
peculiar output is required.
Good references are "Cinelerra for Grandma" and "Newbies Front" (by
Rafaella @ http://www.g-raffa.eu/Cinelerra/), plus some really good
tutorials on youTube. It took me some time to get into the groove with
Cinelerra, but I stay with it as it still does the job, is powerful
(which can get you into trouble), I am familiar with it, and I would
rather invest in video equipment with any spare coin. It is easy for a
newbie to stuff things up , but being a craft there are no guarantees
with anything in life.
If money was no object, I would have dived into mac and FCP years ago.
I don't know if I would have been better or worse off (can't run a
parallel universe test on myself), but I don't complain too much as I
keep getting my videos out as needed.
Must finish up, as I have a large puddle of videos to edit!
cheers
David
On 11/01/12 13:04, Murray Strome wrote:
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
