Cinelerra - The Wow started last night

I’ve finally gotten Cinelerra installed at home, and I am in love.

A couple of nights ago I finally got Cinelerra to compile on my Ubuntu Fiesty installation on my desktop. (The instructions I was following didn’t mention the gettext package as a requirement. I may email the author.) And after some file format confusion, I started playing around and going through the HV manual.

As I began to learn about and understand the interface, I realized just how powerful of an editor Cinelerra is.

I’m really looking forward to what they call “two-window editing.” I’ve never done editing like that before (except in the backwards implementation that is iMovie HD). It’ll be an adjustment from the straight-up timeline NLE I’ve been using (Vegas Video). But I was impressed with the two-window editing idea, really impressed with the keyboard shortcuts (especially the numpad-based shuttle controls), and I was also pleasantly surprised at how easy color correction was. I have some reservations about adding transitions (since I’m so accustomed to automatic crossfades when I drag one “edit” to overlap another). But I expect my editing workflow (and my output) to improve dramatically.

While I haven’t done anything “serious” with it yet, I’ve got a project for church that I’ll probably start in a couple of weeks. It’s good enough that I might just install Ubuntu on my MacBook just to play with it on a more powerful machine. I may even convert my desktop’s 300GB SATA drive to EXT3 (which is read/write under XP with the right driver), just so I’ll have room to do proper editing.