David,
Thank you for your assistance. I was pretty sure that some people were
using Cinelerra to do real production work. I decided to give it
"another whirl" today. I removed the version I had installed and
started following the tutorial "Cinelerra Basics in 10 steps",
http://www.g-raffa.eu/Cinelerra/HOWTO/basics.html and the version that
seems to get installed is 1.2.2-0.3~ppa1~oneiric1 according to
Synaptic; I don't see how to tell which it is any other way.
I then created the .bcast folder by doing:
wget http://www.g-raffa.eu/Cinelerra/HOWTO/Cinelerra_rc-NTSC.tar.gz &&
tar xvf Cinelerra_rc-NTSC.tar.gz && mv
NTSCCinelerraSettings/Cinelerra_rc .bcast/Cinelerra_rc && rm
Cinelerra_rc-NTSC.tar.gz
and extracting the stuff to my home folder.
I decided that I would try to work on a video I am preparing from a
concert I recorded using three cameras and two audio recorders. I
started with an interim HD .mp4 1920X1080 file which, according to
ffmpeg has the following metadata:
Metadata:
major_brand : mp42
minor_version : 1
compatible_brands: mp42isom
creation_time : 2012-01-04 13:17:17
Duration: 01:02:09.12, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 12197 kb/s
Stream #0.0(eng): Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 1920x1080 [PAR 1:1 DAR
16:9], 11999 kb/s, 29.97 fps, 29.97 tbr, 30k tbn, 30k tbc
Metadata:
creation_time : 2012-01-04 13:17:17
Stream #0.1(eng): Audio: aac, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 191 kb/s
Metadata:
creation_time : 2012-01-04 13:17:17
Stream #0.2(eng): Data: mp4s / 0x7334706D, 4320 kb/s
Stream #0.3(eng): Data: mp4s / 0x7334706D, 3840 kb/s
Playing it in VLC, it says essentially the same thing: codecs: Video
- MPEG-4 Video (mp4v); Audio -- MPEG AAC Audio (mp4a).
Anyway, if I try to load that file into Cinelerra, it dies instantly
with no error or warning messages.
It obviously does not like the format! I don't know to what I should
convert it or how.
Are there other settings that I should change from whatever gets set
up by the .bcast I used from the tutorial?
I decided to just play around with a regular .mpg file, which I can at
least load. I am not sure what to do next, especially when I go to
Render it after some extremely simple edits. I am pretty sure that the
suggestion "OGG Theora/Vorbis" is NOT what I want. I tried Windows
.AVI, simply because that seemed to be the easiest to render both the
video and audio, but I don't think that would be what I want if I were
trying to create HD video with audio at either 1080p or even 720p.
The resulting video was HUGE, and would not play in VLC Player. In
Gnome Player, it says the codec is yuv2. I will have to wait to see if
it can be opened with anything in Windows.
I am not sure what to try next. Any hints?
Thanks,
Murray
--- On *Wed, 1/11/12, David Armstrong /<bod...@netspace.net.au>/*wrote:
From: David Armstrong <bod...@netspace.net.au>
Subject: Re: [CinCV] Easy to understand work flows with Cinelerra
To: cinelerra@skolelinux.no
Received: Wednesday, January 11, 2012, 1:50 AM
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
