Cinelerra 4.2 Video Editor Released

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Cinelerra 4.2 Video Editor Released

While OpenShot and PiTiVi are the two currently most talked about open-source non-linear video editing systems for Linux, that's not all there is out there. There's also Kdenlive, Kino, an open-source Lightworks is coming soon, and then perhaps the most advanced open-source video editor of them all: Cinelerra...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=ODY4NA

[Anssi]

There's a news entry and a list of changes in the official Cinelerra page:

http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php#news

[Temar]

I hope they fixed lots of bugs. Cinelerra is in desperate need of a lot of bug fixing. It's by far the most unstable software I ever used.

[shmerl]

Christopher Montgomery made his fixes too. See

http://wiki.xiph.org/A_Digital_Media_Primer_For_Geeks_%28episode_1%29/making#All_hail_Cinelerra.__You_better_hail.2C_or_Cinelerra_will_get_pissy_about_it.

I hope they merged these to the main project.

[oyvind]

When it doesn't crash, it's a great video editor.. You just gotta know what not to do and which video input formats you should avoid. And save often. Good to know new versions that target stability are still coming out.

[rogerdv]

Please, can you share what things you have found that shouldnt be done and what video formats are the best? So far I have just managed to create a simple title. all my attempts to load videos, insert transitions or something usually ends with a crash.

[oyvind]

Please, can you share what things you have found that shouldnt be done and what video formats are the best? So far I have just managed to create a simple title. all my attempts to load videos, insert transitions or something usually ends with a crash.

It's been a long time since I edited videos in Cinelerra, so some of the "dont's" are gone from my memory. It's was things like particular combinations of plugins, or some filters which were not usable at all due to instant crashing. I remember having most luck with .dv as input video format. And I only used .wav-files for audio (decoded before import into cinelerra clip library). I used the ffmpeg command line tool to convert any videos to DV (yuv420p, PAL) before I used them in Cinelerra. I know DV is a lossy formaat, but the original input material was much worse anyways, so it wasn't that important. Anyways, I found that DV input worked reliably in Cinelerra.

[yotambien]

Please, can you share what things you have found that shouldnt be done and what video formats are the best? So far I have just managed to create a simple title. all my attempts to load videos, insert transitions or something usually ends with a crash.

After many failed attempts in the past, I tried Cinelerra one more time...and it's a real beast of an editor. Previously, I couldn't get almost anything to work. Constant crashes, horrible performance, bugs everywhere and my own ignorance of the interface teamed up against me. This time I made a serious effort and [gasp!] I even read the fine manual and an assortment of tutorials I found on the web.

The first thing I recommend is compiling it from source. Debian packages from the multimedia repository just didn't work here. 4.1 binaries were buggy; you could load stuff on the timeline and have a go at the program, but not for too long. The 4.2 ones are simply broken, with GUI elements missing, imposibility to render anything, timeline operations don't work, and so on and so forth. So I compiled 4.2-cv and now everything it's cool. Not only it performs acceptable with this (very) limited system, but it seems quite stable so far.

The other thing is to feed it with material it likes, as oyvind said. DV is one of the well supported formats, but there's no need for it. Just remuxing your stuff to mp4 or mov should work unless you have some weird codec. But to get to this stage you have to have a good binary, which in my case it meant compiling the source.

[Anssi]

So I compiled 4.2-cv and now everything it's cool.

Where did you get 4.2-cv?

http://cinelerra.org/ git repository only contains 2.1CV (see e.g. Settings => Preferences => About or the console output).

The 4.2 version only seems to be available as a non-CV version from here:

http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php

[yotambien]

Where did you get 4.2-cv?

http://cinelerra.org/ git repository only contains 2.1CV (see e.g. Settings => Preferences => About or the console output).

The 4.2 version only seems to be available as a non-CV version from here:
http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php

You are absolutely right. There's no 4.2-cv. I wrongly assumed the CV version numbers were aligned with those from Heroin Virtual. Well, they are, but there's quite a lag between them. So what I compiled is a git snapshot of 2.1.5-cv, I guess. All good, but now that I know I'll have to try the newest official version : )