Cinelerra CV

About Cinelerra

This is an unofficial SVN repository and community home page for Cinelerra, the non-linear video editor and compositor for Linux. The official home page and the Sourceforge page are maintained by the original developer.

This site offers a collection of user contributed tutorials, some links, and a SVN repository. It is intended for developers and adventurous Linux users who want to contribute to the development of Cinelerra.

If you simply want to use Cinelerra, the manual or the tutorials are the first places you should go!

Why 2 versions of cinelerra?

There are two branches of Cinelerra - one can be found at heroine.com and the other here.

This website is primarily focussed on the cinelerra-CV (i.e. the community version of cinelerra) that is downloaded via svn.

Cinelerra is developed "upstream" by an entity (guy/girl/group) we'll call HV that is a sharing but not a community sort of entity. HV likes to work on its own copy of cinelerra on its own, releasing code on a periodical basis (every 6 months or so).

Some developers decided that it would be nice to develop in a community fashion, (public svn access) but did not really want to fork (which is seen as being nasty).

Basically we maintain a copy that is fairly similar to the official release, (i.e. we don't do code-tidying patches). But apply our bug fixes, compiler compliance fixes, and enhancements to the svn. We do try to send the patches upstream, (but it sucks having to apply a patch to two systems, but that's life!) Thus the CV has a number of features that the official version does not have.

In terms of stability, unlike other programs, the release that HV does, I would not describe as a "stable" release (personal opinion only). After HV's release there are often issues with HV's release in the forms of bugs / usability issues (HV only builds for Fedora, and his compiler, and for his personal needs.) Also not all of the enhancements we develop make it upstream (e.g. render to YUV pipe). So when there is a new release, one of the members, (j6t) merges HV's code with our code taking the enhancements from HV, and re-arranging the code to be more similar to HV's (whitespace, function naming, directory naming, slight changes in implementations etc.) After the merge, the svn is possibly a little unstable until all the issues with HV's newly added code are fixed (as users find bugs, and as time permits to fix them.)

I personally see the CV efforts as the community's attempt to stabalise HV's release, and also to add enhancement in a community fashion (where we can comment on each other's implementation of new plugins, etc.), (whist ensuring that we can merge with heroine's new releases). In actual fact, HV does keep track of us and at times say a few words here or there about our implementations (see for example [1] [2] and for 'Heroine Virtual' in the archives).

Given the above discussion, one might say that obtaining the SVN just before a merge is a stablised version, but then you'll likely run into issues of project description files not being forward compatible. Also, HV does find bugs that we didn't. And in some cases fix bugs that we point out, and don't get around to fixing. So what is stable is really up for question and for you to decide, but if you go with us and have an issue with the software, you'll likely get more communication with us than HV.

Pierre Dumuid (2006-05-10)
- information obtained from a video I downloaded of a talk Andraz Tori gave at Pixel conference, and a little time spent helping out here and there and sitting on the mailing list. An interview with the author from 2003 also provided valuable insight.

See the irc discussion at http://cvs.cinelerra.org/irclog/2005-11-05.html that led me to the video of Andraz Tori talking at Piksel 5 [Original (Hi Res) Video Link 368M] [Audio Extracted 11M].