This is part of my ongoing series comparing Main Actor with Cinelerra. In this article, I will run through the same exercise with Cinelerra that I did using Main Actor last week: I will produce a movie consisting of two clips and a fade transition. For background, installation instructions, etc, please refer to earlier articles in the series.

Cinelerra

To load clips into Cinelerra, click File / Load Files, and select some to load. Unlike Main Actor, Cinelerra does not provide thumbnails when browsing for clips, so your filenames will hopefully be good enough for you to recognize the clips you’re after. Note that in order to load the clips for use, you should change the “insertion strategy” to “create new resources only”. I have not played in depth with the other options, but by name they seem to allow you to autogenerate timelines from the clips that you select. If so, then it is a pretty arcane feature, perhaps one that should be hidden in advanced options. Certainly the way to load clips should be more obvious. On the plus side, Cinelerra seems to be able to cope with a wider array of file formats than Main Actor.

Once you click the green check icon, your clips will be loaded. The next trick is to find them! The “resources” window has a bizarre two-pane interface, with too-big icons on both sides; this generally means a lot of horizontal scrolling. Why the default is not smaller icons and vertical scrolling is beyond me. (You can right click and ask it to display as text; this is fine, but again better defaults would make a real difference.)

In any case, if you scroll to the right in the left pane, you’ll find “media” and “clips”. The former refers to the raw files; the latter to the edited segments that you have made from these. Like Main Actor, your raw files are not actually edited when you add or remove cut points; the application instead stores metadata about your clips. This means that in both cases project files are not self contained, but rely on your library of video clips remaining in the same places, at least for the interim of the project that you are working on.

So, let’s make clips from your media (we’ll adopt Cinelerra’s parlance from hereon in.) Click on the “media” icon in the “resources” window; click on one of your videos, and drag it to the “viewer” window.

The viewer behaves very similarly to the media player in Main Actor, so much so that it’s a safe bet that either one copied the other, or they both copied another program. The left and right arrow keys on your keyboard advance back and forward through the video; the [ and ] keys set the in and out cut points. There are also icons to fast forward, rewind, play, etc. Unfortunately on my setup, sound does not work in the viewer; also the play feature is pretty spasmodic (these afflictions also affect the “compositor”, which is the equivalent to Main Actor’s preview window.)

So, to make a clip, set in and out cut points ([ and ]), and then press “i” (there’s also an icon to do this that you’ll find if you move your cursor around and read the tooltips.) A dialog pops up and asks you to name your clip. This particular set of functionality is a major score over Main Actor, in that it is a great organizational tool. Or it would be, if not for one flaw: unfortunately, once you click the green check mark, the clip is displayed in the clips folder of the resources window without a thumbnail, unlike in the media folder, so your name really has to be descriptive.

For this exercise, rinse, lather, and repeat, so that you have two clips ready to sequence. Make sure that the mouse cursor icon is selected in the timeline window, and then simply drag your clip from resources and drop it where you want it to appear. You’ll notice that by default cinelerra’s track thumbnails are much better than Main Actor’s. Also, the undo feature is much more responsive. If you want to change the zoom setting, click on the “time” menu on the bottom left; it essentially lets you choose how long the visible timeline should be. Add the second clip by dragging it to the right of the first one, in the same track.

A brief tangent: there is some pretty bizarre behaviour associated with drag and drop editing. If I drag a clip to the second video track from the resources window, the first track is cut at the point that I drop the clip in at. If, however, I drag the clip to the same track, after the the end of the first clip, and then to the second track, everything works as expected. There may be some circuitous reasoning behind this, but, like a lot of other UI features in Cinelerra, I don’t find it to be obviously intuitive.

Timeline, second clip dragged from resources:

Timeline, second clip dragged from same track:

Anyway, back to the movie; we now have two clips in one video track, one after the other. All that remains is to apply a transition. To do this, go back to the resources window, and click on “video transitions”. (Incidentally, just like Main Actor, Cinelerra puts both media files and effects in the same window; as I already complained about in the last article, this adds more clicking around to the editing process than is theoretically necessary.) Cinelerra does not have as many effects or transitions as Main Actor, and they are represented by kindergarten level icons, unlike Main Actor’s animation previews. Nevertheless, the essentials are present, so it is workable. Select the “dissolve” transition, and drag it to the join of the two clips on the timeline.

The current frame is indicated by the vertical white line; you can drag this forward and back on the timeline bar using your mouse, and the preview will be displayed in the compositor window. Frame forward and back, strangely, are mapped to the “1″ and “4″ keys on the numpad (but not on the main number row!), respectively. This allows you to preview the transition, or effect, frame by frame.

You can somewhat adjust an effect’s parameters by right clicking on it, and selecting “show” from the menu (perhaps “effect properties” would be a more appropriate description); unfortunately, on the dissolve transition, the only thing editable appears to be the length that it lasts. I couldn’t even find a way to begin the transition earlier in the first clip; instead, the effect seems to just ignore the first clip’s out point and fade in the second for the duration that you set.

Finally all that remains is to export your movie. Select file / render to see the render dialog. Cinelerra appears to support many more codecs than Main Actor; however, it also appears to support them much less well. E.g., select MPG Video, and then try to change the audio settings; it’ll tell you that “this format does not support audio”. Huh?? For another fun time, try selecting “Quicktime for Linux” — this crashes Cinelerra completely (I guess I needed to have something else installed, but it would have been nice if the application had caught that.) In fact, the only codec I found that didn’t completely hose the application was Ogg Theora / Vorbis.

Rendering starts at the current frame selected in the timeline, which I didn’t realize until the render had started (while rendering, it displays the frame being output in the compositor). Rendering seems to take longer than in Main Actor, but to be fair it using was a different codec, so the comparison is not valid.

I managed to lock the application up by attempting to overwrite an existing file, after which the backup of my project would no longer load. So, I gave up. I was basically unsuccessful at producing an exported video. I could RTFM on this and find the right codecs, install them, and then try again, but the way this particular part of the application behaved was enough of a let-down that I have lost the inclination to do so.

Stability, Overall Ease of Use

In terms of stability, Cinelerra has come a long way. When I first used it, a couple years back, it would crash regularly, and seemingly randomly. The only crashes I encountered while writing this article were during the rendering phase, which I found frustrating; no doubt, if I had all of the required codecs installed, this would be smoother sailing, but it should be the application’s job to detect that rather than mine. Just like Main Actor, it keeps a backup of what you were doing, which you can always revert to; however, too many times when I tried this, the application would lock up with a busy icon, meaning that I had to kill it and try again. And, as mentioned above, loading the backup will sometimes cause the same crash. Cinelerra, in short, is not production quality.

As for ease of use, it again plays second fiddle to Main Actor. A quirky interface is fine, as long as it is intuitive, and there are many good things about the way the application works. However, there are an equally large number of frankly puzzling defaults. If the development team were to put some effort into just the defaults, the usability of the application would increase dramatically. Once you have struggled through the initial learning curve, it is potentially a very productive environment. I can do the described simple editing exercise a lot faster in Cinelerra that in Main Actor; and the application as a whole is more responsive. I expect that if quality continues to increase at the same rate that it has been that it will be a very viable platform in the next couple of years. Equally, the MainConcept developers have a lot to learn from Cinelerra.

Next time…

The match is unfortunately already complete; Cinelerra is currently unconscious and bleeding on the floor, while Main Actor is smirking to the crowd. However, Cinelerra does offer a wealth of features, and I will do at least some more side-by-side comparisons to explore some of these.

All In Series

1. MainActor vs Cinelerra -- Background
2. MainActor vs Cinelerra -- Installing
3. MainActor vs Cinelerra -- UI, First Impressions
4. MainActor vs Cinelerra -- Simple Editing, Part 1
5. MainActor vs Cinelerra -- Simple Editing, Part 2

Related Comments (9)