Ok, so first off my apologies to the entire community for being so brazen and grumpy for the last week. I had spent over 5 hours preparing the video and audio for progbox.vid episode 0.3, and the fact that I was being hampered by a piece of video editing software, on my favorite distro, was just sheer pain. Kdenlive, is a great package, but the current version in Ubuntu Hardy Heron, does have some issues that need resolving. Before people try to give me any more advice on this, I’m done. At the moment Kdenlive is out of the picture. Let me tell you about my new friend.
I was so frustrated, and so enthusiastic about doing episode 3, and indeed progbox.vid in general, that I was even looking at purchasing something like Adobe Premiere, though how I would have afforded it, I’ll never know. I tried so many different alternatives, though the one that kept coming back to me was Cinelerra. I have heard so many negative reports about it, but just occasionally you get a positive report that just wipes all the others clean. I’m hoping this is going to be one of those.
When I first started using Cinelerra, I was put off by the look of the interface. It was dated and old. I also tried importing a few video clips and got very different results. One played just fine, the other played at about 2 frames per second. I was not impressed. So I ditched it once again and went back to banging my head against kdenlive.
Sunday afternoon, it just got the better of me. I loaded up Cinelerra, and started working with the clips I knew worked. Now there are comments floating around that the Cinelerra interface is less than easy to use. Whilst I agree it does have it’s problems, once you have read a few bits in the manual and taken the time to use it, and indeed experiment, it’s really not so bad. I mean if you went out and bought Adobe Premiere, you’d surely spend the time to get to know the package, after all you’ve just shelled out £700 for it. In fact Cinelerra is just down right awesome. Sometimes, because something is free, we just don’t give it the chance it deserves.
Yeh, I admit it I was scared of the unknown. I knew kdenlive, it had been good for making the first two episodes and the promo video, but I needed to stop being stubborn and move on. So, episode 0.3 is done. It’s currently awaiting moderation by my beta team, and then it’ll be live.
My top tips for Cinelerra
- Mouse Madness
Remember to learn how to use the different mouse buttons for trimming. Each has a different function.
- Track Weapons
Take care on arming and disarming tracks, it looks like a pain to begin with, but it’ll save your life. Cinelerra likes to help you, and if it thinks a video and an audio track are synced, it’ll move them together. IF you don’t want this, just disarm the track you don’t want to move.
- Make Room
Keep a spare audio track handy. For some reason, when dragging in some audio tracks, Cinelerra likes to double them up. Always drag into a new audio track first, then you can delete the second instance.
- Format Wars
Use MOV, DV or OGG video formats and you’ll be fine.
- Mr Scientist
Experiment with the tools. There is nothing wrong with taking a few hours to make a few test video clips.
So in short, I totally rate Cinelerra as the best video editing app on Linux. The feature set is powerful, the effects are plentiful and the general usage is a dream. Yes it took me a little while to get to grips with but now I say with great confidence,
Video editing on Linux isn’t a myth, it isn’t false hope, it’s here.
I hope you can all forgive my rash comments and remarks. Linux still hasn’t ever let me down, sometimes it just takes a week or so to rise to the occasion 
I also hear Cinelerra is being rewritten from the ground up.
