CINELERRA

Free video editing on a Linux box.

30 years ago, we had a dream about making virtual heroine warriors. A way to make better media with cheaper hardware was the key. Editing video on a home computer was science fiction in those days, but today this humble piece of software is the typewriter of the 21st century.

Cinelerra provides a useful, fast & unique editing experience, but is not going to break any sales records or win engagement points. By modern standards, it's retro computing. It has a pure software rendering engine or GPU acceleration on supported hardware (NVidia), requires as few dependencies as possible, & has as few useless features as possible. It has the usual effects, most of the file formats, arbitrary resolutions & frame rates. In addition to editing, it makes a more efficient media player than typical editors.

It's been the author's daily driver for editing & watching media for over 25 years.

DOCUMENTATION

There is an ever growing VIDEO TUTORIAL SERIES by the author. This tends to emphasize the new oddball features which may not be around later.

There is a somewhat better maintained text USER MANUAL.

DOWNLOADS

There are many copies of Cinelerra with various tweeks, version numbers, & varying documentation, but this is the distribution they're all derived from. Cinelerra.org sometimes supported our work, but donations to other websites have never funded any development on it.

There are many dependancies. Don't be surprised if the source code requires some tweeks and the binary doesn't work. Downloads have no support or warranty.

SOURCE CODE tested on Ubuntu-24
64 bit BINARY tested on Ubuntu-16
Decompress and run ./cinelerra.sh in the bin/ directory.

NEWS

5/17/24 - Cinelerra 9 Previews for transitions & file dialogs. Color curves, revised chromakey HSV, lookahead stabilizer, improved title alignments, more keyframe features, swap channels on different tracks. Fewer bugs. More documentation.


10/23/22 - Cinelerra 8 GPU accelerated rendering. Faster GPU accelerated playback. Write output to command line ffmpeg.


10/21/21 - Cinelerra 7.4 Load a nested EDL without pasting it. Swap an asset for a nested EDL. Change the frame rate of a nested EDL. Transparency checkerboard. Change parameters of a single edit with text entry. Checks for recursive nested EDLs. Memory management bugfixes.


3/4/21 - Cinelerra 7.3 Bug fixes for running on a 4K monitor. Support for odd frame sizes in OpenGL. CR3 file format. Automatic histogram value.


11/10/19 - Cinelerra 7.2 A long awaited audio upgrade. New flanger, chorus, tremolo, & multiband compressor. Reverb got a full band pass filter. Compressor got VU meters & grid snapping. Pulseaudio support. Sample accurate keyframes for audio plugins. Better synchronization between the audio plugins & the playhead. Right click on an edit to get an info box. The ever present bug fixes.


1/22/19 - Cinelerra 7.1 Exporting of H.265 video in Quicktime. Seeking for MKV/WEBM files. More bugs fixed.


10/12/17 - Cinelerra 7 Optimized playback of large format video. H.265 decoding. Optimized screen capturing. Spherical camera blending. Eyedropper can show the maximum value. Interpolating CR2 images always white balances. Watch Secrets of Cinelerra.


11/16 - Cinelerra 6 Updated the h264 decoding. There are no longer picons in the asset window. Motion tracking got major optimizations. Resampling effects got new interfaces. Titler can load subtitle files.


11/11/15 - Cinelerra 4.6.1 Updated the x264 compressor library. Improved the mp3 decoding. Video scaling is now either nearest neighbor or bicubic, but never linear. Proxy editing got a start before discovering modern PCs can easily decode 4k.


9/8/14 - Cinelerra 4.6 Split pane editing. OpenGL supported on Intel HD. Titler improvements. Bugfixes.


10/31/13 - Cinelerra 4.5 Speed curves mainly for video & in degraded quality for audio. Some control over whether automation follows edits. Ability to transfer keyframes between audio and video tracks. Motion temporaries are stored in /tmp/m and /tmp/r files. Time Avg clears the accumulator on keyframes.


9/7/12 - Cinelerra 4.4 Faster startup and responsiveness. Audio oscilloscope. Histogram updates. Audio gap removal. Better recording from webcams. Better live audio processing. Introducing the Bright theme for outdoor use.


8/5/11 - Cinelerra 4.3 has dropped. Mainly, playing around with text to movie synthesis, lots of bug fixes. Turn your script into an instant movie with live updating and seeking, with text to movie.


10/15/10 - Cinelerra 4.2 has arrived. Mainly a bugfix & personal need release. Of main interest might be the "Edit->Align edits" feature, which aligns all the audio edits with the video.
Then there's the keyframe spanning feature, where highlighting a region with keyframe generation on causes effect tweeks to span all the keyframes.
Then there's the fact that all assets are opened in subprocesses so they don't bring down the entire program when they crash.


9/24/09 - Cinelerra 4.1 has arrived. We finally have nested sequences.

Harass the author


(C) 1997-2024 Starving, flat broke, usually unemployed Programmers
Hosted all these years by Sourceforge