Cinelerra Linux video editor - Movie studio in a Linux Box

Heroine Virtual Ltd. presents an advanced content creation system for Linux. Cinelerra takes what normally is a boring server operating system - studied in computer science classrooms, hidden in back offices - and turns it into a 50,000 watt flamethrower of multimedia editing power.

That's right kids. Unlike most of the Linux solutions out there, Cinelerra requires no emulation of proprietary operating systems, no commercial add-ons, no banner advertizements, no corporate dependancies, no terrorists, just a boring old Linux box.

Cinelerra does primarily 3 main things: capturing, compositing, and editing audio and video with sample level accuracy. It's a seemless integration of audio, video, and still photos rarely experienced on a web server.

If you want to make movies, you just want to defy the establishment, you want the same kind of compositing and editing suite that the big boys use, on the world's most efficient UNIX operating system, it's time for Cinelerra.

What you'll find here is the heroinewarrior version of Cinelerra. This is the version that supports what we need to do at Heroine Virtual Ltd. and is the same tree that was started in 1997. As time passes and new students come and go from the Linux scene, new forks of Cinelerra emerge that are more suited to the community. Today you'll probably find the cinelerra.org fork more useful.

They moderate what parts of our fork get into their fork while contributing anything they want while we moderate what parts of their fork get into our fork while putting in anything we want, which makes it pretty much even.

In probably the last move by multi billion dollar corporations to open up the best of the best technology to flat broke programmers, H.264 was standardized in Quicktime 7. Now Cinelerra can encode and decode video in razor sharp, ultra low bitrate H.264 with playback on Win and Mac commercial players and your favorite Linux players. This is one of the highest quality video codecs around, making HDTV distribution over the internet almost practical.

EXTREME NUMBER CRUNCHING
Video processing takes too long to do on a single computer. In fact no matter how fast the computer, no matter how much tediously hand optimized assembly language is behind it, it's Gaul awful slow. Every video program has a clustered rendering system of some kind and Cinelerra is no exception.

The biggest difference between this renderfarm and normal renderfarms is you don't need to pay for node licenses. You can keep installing nodes without paying for either the operating system or the application.

Then of course, you don't want to wait for effects to render before finding the result of your tweeking, so now there's background renderfarm. Set a location on the timeline to background render on the renderfarm and watch it play back on your desktop with unseen masses of servers behind it.

Finally, there's batch rendering. Schedule a bunch of edit decision lists to compress. Schedule several different compression formats for the same edit decision list. Let it run over night to keep your apartment warm and in the morning they'll all be finished.

Video rendering is a good way to take advantage of the latest CPU power instead of just running benchmarks. It can take all your terrahertz Opterons for a ride. No terrahertz Opterons? Go to India and get one. Background renderfarm makes Indian technology practical today.

HAVE SOME ALSA WITH YOUR TACO
Cinelerra does the ALSA 6 channel audio thing. Combined with unlimited tracks, non destructive editing, realtime effects, it's the ultimate audio experience. Play mp3's, rip CD's, encode MPEG-4. Load audio separately from video or paste it in. Such audio integration with video is really hard to get.

Now in most of the computer world, if the audio goes over the limit you have no option but to attenuate it until it stays under the limit. But sometimes you want it over the limit for extra loudness and that's what Cinelerra's headroom extended meters can do. Never guess how far over the limit you are. Audio can be routed through effects and mixes just as if you had real connectors and cables. Just drag and drop effects and play. Route audio tracks through each other. Mute and solo tracks. A context sensitive menu lets you share effects between tracks.

Now imagine a laptop which didn't need dongles to run anything. Imagine not having to phone in and wait a week to renew licenses every week. If that doesn't make you nihilistic, consider this. Liz Phairoine, the only heroine winning the bread in Illinois, married a film editor.

WATER TIGHT FLOATING POINT
Store and retrieve images in unprecidented fidelity with new floating point imaging and file formats. Access OpenEXR in floating point, the official file format of Lucasfilm. Access CR2 images from Canon EOS digital cameras in floating point. Adjust color levels without losing information. Never have to guess how far out of range the colors are. Save high dynamic range intermediates for multiple steps without losing data.

DO THE DEW-OPP
The answer is yes. Cinelerra is more stable in a 64 bit operating system than a 32 bit operating system. The reason is intermediate address calculations start screwing up at around 512MB on a 32 bit system. Multiplying and adding small registers can wrap around even 512MB numbers and that's what we're especially seeing with memory intensive floating point images.

Fortunately Cinelerra and Linux are now fully functional on the dew-opp. The dual Opteron, that is. This is improvement you can feel. Floating point image calculations finish in a snap. Never cower in fear over 2 gig virtual set sizes again. Cinelerra's floating point imaging is the application your dew-opp has been looking for.

RECOMMENDED SYSTEM
Now Cinelerra is by no means a lightweight program. You'll need something slightly less sexy than an Ipod to run it most effectively. Running in 32 bit mode is not recommended. We found this dual dual core Opteron with 128 bit, interleaved memory to be years ahead of anything else. It compresses MPEG-4 HDTV in realtime. The key is separate memory busses for each processor. Be aware most cheap motherboards share the memory bus of one processor with both processors.

Dual Opteron 275
4 * 1 Gig Registered PC3200 RAM
500 GB SATA drive
Tyan S2885 motherboard
Gigabit Ethernet

ASSORTED FEATURES
16 bit YUV compositing
64 bit internal audio representation
Background rendering on clusters
Batch capturing
Batch rendering
Bezier masks
Bidirectional, variable speed scrubbing
Compositing + editing
Different overlay modes
Firewire, MJPEG, bttv video I/O
Firewire, OSS, Alsa audio I/O
floating point compositing
Free form editing
Headroom monitoring
LADSPA plugins
OGG Vorbis audio
OpenEXR images
Quicktime, AVI, MPEG, and image sequence I/O
Realtime effects
Reverse audio and video in realtime
SMP utilization
Still image panning
Track nudge for audio and video
Track routing like a real console
Unlimited tracks
VU meters

AUDIO EFFECTS
Compressor
Delay
Denoise
Despike
Parametric EQ
Freeverb
Gain
Heroine College Concert Hall
Invert
LADSPA compatibility
Loop
Pitch shift
Reverse
Spectrogram
Synthesizer
Time based interpolate

VIDEO EFFECTS
HDTV Standards conversion
Various Effect TV plugins
Blur
Brightness/Contrast
Chroma Key
Color balance
Decimate
Deinterlace
Delay
Denoise
Difference Key
Downsample
Flip
Freeze
Gradient
Histogram
Hue/Saturation
Inverse Telecine
Invert
Linearize raw images
Linear/Radial/Zoom Blur
Loop
Motion Tracking
Oil Painting
Overlay
Perspective
Polar
Reverse
Rotate
Scale
Sharpen
Shift Interlace
Swap channels
Threshold
Time Average
Time based interpolate
Title
Translate
Scopes
Unsharp Mask
Wave
Whirl/Pinch
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The above is from the home page of the Cinelerra program - http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3

Cinelerra is one of the few well-featured Linux video editors we know about. We didn't have the willpower to attempt to attempt to remove all the naff jokes and hyperbole so, here it is...Bob C.