Comments on: MainActor vs Cinelerra — Simple Editing, Part 2

By: Gour

Gour — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:38:29 +0000

Then enjoy investing your time in proprietary MA which is simply killed by its owner

Sincerely,
Gour

By: Alexander Ewering

Alexander Ewering — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:03:54 +0000

The typical “open source” case. Unpolished software with a wealth of unfinished features, unintuitive interfaces that have been designed for programmers instead of users, crashing all the time, etc…

And then the typical open source zealots’ “But closed-source is a trap” stuff, where I unfortunately have to say that I’ve seen many more OPEN SOURCE projects, rather than proprietary projects, suddenly being “discontinued”.

And no, all that “But it is open source so you can continue it!” blabla unfortunately doesn’t count. 0.0001% of people on this planet can code enough for continuing a project like an NLE, and much less on Linux. So, that point is moot.

PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE FOREVER!

By: Gour

Gour — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 20:03:54 +0000

Hi!

Where to go to get help getting Cinelerra up and running?

Join cinelerra mailing list or visit #cinelerra channel on Freenode.

Sincerely,
Gour

By: Edwin

Edwin — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 19:56:25 +0000

Where to go to get help getting Cinelerra up and running?

Have the need to get set up to do video production and saw so many positive reports related to Linspire and Cinelerra that I set out and put together a box consisting of:

BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC 320 MB PCIe w/ Dual Link Graphics Card
Asus M2N4-SLI Socket AM2 Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ Socket AM2 Box CPU
2 Gigs of memory
50 Gig ATA serial HD drive

Instaled Linspire and all the updates.
Loaded Cinelerra through the CNR.
Cinelerra opens up but it will not open up any files and display them.
One short mpeg movie clip loaded but the only thing visible was the sound waves.
The play button would sequence through but no sound or video.
Opening up other mpeg’s causes Cinelerra to just close.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Edwin
Sarasota, FL

By: Reuben

Reuben — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 16:39:04 +0000

Just a comment on “installation process” – this WAS installed via package management, which you’d notice if you’d read part i. Perhaps the packages were broken? In any case, “out of the box” these problems exist.

By: Gour

Gour — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 10:11:21 +0000

Hi!

I agree that Cinelerra is superiour product and today I am very happy that I decided to go with Cinelerra and gave up MainActor ’cause it was not possible to use it under amd64 and support said they wouldn’t produce one either.

Now, when MainActor is abandoned, it shows it is always better to support open-source applications where one can inspect code, or, at least, get some free support on mailing lists, irc etc.

otoh, Mainconcept even killed very useful forums and from that act it was clear they won’t stay behind the product for long time.

Sincerely,
Gour

By: alxarch

alxarch — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 09:17:37 +0000

so long and thanks for all the fishes i should add…
when is the world going to understand that using proprietary software is dangerous practice, since you don’t know when yr favorite app is just going to just disappear PUFF! into thin air?
I think it’s more frustrating than a hang during rendering to suddenly find out that a program that you paid for is just not supported anymore by those who sell it.
anyway, cinelerra is way better than MainActor was. It’s capabilities are production oriented however. there are simple solutions to the problems mentioned in this article and many of the problems mentioned here just don’t exist if the installation procces is correct (which is hard to get wrong if you stick to package management since package management is almost idiot-proof). That said RTFM is a nessecity here as is with all serious multimedia apps (try playing around with AvidFreeDV in windows without watching any tuts:P). Having a good grasp of what is digital video and how it works, what is a codec etc sure helps a lot. So if u are planning to just edit out your summer holiday footage stick with Kino its simple and yet powerful for simple jobs. If you plan to make a documentary, short movie, or even some effects-filled whistling Hollywood movie then you should start by actually understanding digital video to a degree and then enter the world of professional movie editing with cinelerra (it’s a world of pain and frustration if you don’t know what u are doing, trust me but it pays out in the end).

By: Jacob Allen

Jacob Allen — Thu, 31 May 2007 21:12:48 +0000

The article makes a pretty good read, personally I prefer Cinelerra over MainActor not because of the price but for the stability alone. As you pointed out the issue came with Rendering and I agree it’s the most annoying thing about the program since it’s not as easy to use with some of the other video tools if they can’t even use Quicktime DV. Aside from rendering I still found Cinelerra to be much more stable and barely experienced any crashes ( again rendering issue notwithstanding ). Although it could do with some improvements and those that edit DV footage will know how god damn slow playback is when you don’t pre-render the footage first.
Still I’m having a great experience with the software and I hope it further success and more improvements down the road