Rajiv

Compiling Production ready Nonlinear Editor

Blender itself boast one of the finest compositors as well as a full fledged NLE which happens to be surprisingly steady even for long form edits. But many users who come from Premiere and Avid background find blender’s non-traditional work-flow a bit tedious, though it is still your best bet when you have to edit in one of those big formats like OpenEXR and others. Believe me, there is nothing like Blender or even Cinelerra when it comes to the big formats and pure 64 bit editing on a multiprocessor ready machine loaded with 8gb of ram. (I am exaggerating a bit, but it is also true in one sense)

Blender is rapidly becoming the darling of open-source community. All credits goes to Ton, a Zen like mature Jedi Master who also happens to be a born leader. On the other hand, Cinelerra has not seen the flocking that blender has experienced over the years inspite of the great sacrifices committed by Heroine Warrior to get this master piece to the world of open-source. Nevertheless I have worked on it and it is quite stable and versatile. Some of its effects as better than what Adobe Premiere and even what AfterEffects has to offer, for example it has an excellent De-interlace filter and excellent color-correcter that works in floating point and grants instant white balance. It has instant save and almost total recover in the case of a crash. It has a motion tracker and animated spline or vector mask like the one in afterfx (though not as advance) add background rendering and built in support for a rendering farm crunching 2K and 4K resolution in pure 32bit floating point color space and you have at your fingertip the power to match and finish any film in any format you could imagine. The problem is that Cinelerra inspite of its potential and proven record (by in-house production houses) has not attracted the right kind of OpenSource enthusiasts and its developments has stagnated over the years. If only it can attracts good coders, these little things that it lacks can easily be enhanced to match the industry standards.

The lack of Capture cards (though you can write your own drivers for one and Aja Kona supports Linux directly as Industry greats like Flame, Smoke and others rely primarily on Linux and Aja for their video needs, thus Kona can be made to run on Linux as done by some independent production companies and doing so has its advantage as Kona transforms Cinelerra into a pure 64bit HD crunching machine. To top that Blackmagic Decklink now has  Linux drivers and has promised a superb capture and playback utility and to quote them “With Media Express 2.0 on Linux, it’s possible to build a very powerful and low cost creative workstation for broadcasters and post production customers who want to take advantage of the emerging creative tools on the Linux platform.” ) On the other hand for not so fancy user such as us, Cinelerra is not so intuitive when it comes to capture videos and so most Linux users depend on Kino for DV and DV-Grab for Hdv capture. This is not a problem as Kino has an excellent capture module and almost matches Scenalyzer Live in its capability’s and also provides an excellent color correcter and one can in no time quickly assemble a rough edit.
Infact you can assemble a rough edit faster than what you can do in Avid or Finalcutpro. Once you are satisfied with your rough edit, the files can then be imported into Cinelerra for fine-tuning and audio splicing.

Any way lets not waste our time and quickly compile our own latest builds. (I am using Fedora 10)

Follow the Steps 1 to 3 as shown in Compiling production ready Blender 3D and Cinelerra nonlinear video editor in Fedora

Step4

In the terminal type

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mkdir Cinelerra

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Step5

Continue in the terminal by typing cd Cinelerra navigating to the newly created directory Cinelerra  and get the latest build on to your system by typing as follows:

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cd Cinelerra

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and

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git clone git://git.cinelerra.org/j6t/cinelerra.git cinelerra
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Step6

You will notice that it has created a directory cinelerra under the present Cinelerra directory. Now its time to navigate into it by typing:

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cd cinelerra

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and run

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./autogen.sh

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Step7

This is a crucial step so do it right. Once inside the cinelerra directory, type the following, or simply copy and past there and hit enter to run.

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./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-opengl CFLAGS='-O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops -march=native -mtune=native -mmmx -msse -msse2 -msse3 -mssse3 -mfpmath=sse'
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Step8

Once it has configured the make file, without any errors, it is time to compile this Beast
(also note that the -j8 works best for quad processors and -j3 for dual. You don’t need this option on a single processor machine so you may simply type ‘make’ but if your are one of those who has the latest quadcore’s do the following.)

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make -j8
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Step9

Allow make to complete its job, (hopefully without any errors)and once done, Its time to install this Baby
Type these in the terminal and press enter

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sudo make install
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or
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su
(your password)
make install
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This will install Cinelerra on the disk and an Icon will appear on Application Sound and Video Menu

Step10

Type this and enter (need to be done only once)

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ldconfig
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Step11

Do this to remove the nag before you start Cinelerra but it is not necessary.

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su

(your password)

echo "0x7fffffff" > /proc/sys/kernel/shmmax

exit

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If you want to remove the above message permanently, so the following:
sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

and at the end of this file add these following lines

kernel/shmmax=0x7fffffff

Save the file, close the text editor and then type sudo sysctl -p
It should now hopefully be permanently gone.

In Cinelerra navigate to Settings, Go to Preferences and in Playback Audio Driver select ESound and set port to 7007

In the Video Driver section on the bottom chose X11-XV or if you happen to do a lot of masking and perspective  jobs, try X11-OpenGL. Usually X11-XV works well for most of your needs.

That’s it. Enjoy video editing.

PleaseNote: Also you will greatly benefit by using this utility “IMG2LIST – Cinelerra List Generator” in conjunction to Blenders output. My regards goes to Claudio “Malefico” Andaur for this wonderful utility.