Cinelerra can edit video in the "TV" resolutions (PAL and NTSC) of yore on typical affordable hardware. An old laptop will do, if the screen isn't too small.
But new cameras, real cameras, not cell phones, tend to record HD video. That's 1280x720 or 1920x1080, two or four times as many pixels as good old "SD". Fairly new computers can play that in a video player, but what about Cinelerra? On my 2x2 CPU 2 GHz Opteron computer, browsing HDV and DSLR footage in Cinelerra is a bit unresponsive. Forward playback at normal speed can be smooth without dropped frames, at the very best. "Scrubbing" (dragging back and forth on the timeline) is pretty sluggish. Backward playback gives a very low framerate, and doulbe speed forward is jerky, too. I'll call my user experience, as described above, "minimum": * Forward playback without dropped frames * "Scrubbing" at least 2 frames per second, with less than 0.5 second lag * Backward playback somewhat working Here is what I would consider nice and snappy: * Forward playback without dropped frames, even accross edits * Double speed forward playback at full framerate (at least!) * Normal speed backward playback without skipping frames * Double speed backward with smooth movement (no jumps or jerks) * Seeking/scrubbing with at least half the native framerate * Full rate forward playback of _two_ layered video tracks * Full rate forward playback with one effect applied. DV satisfies "nice and snappy", whereas the HD formats of my cameras barely qualifies for "minimum". The AVCHD performance is not even minimum. (Yes, Cinelerra built from Monty's git handles AVCHD :-) Conclusion: For a good user experience and workflow on current, affordable hardware, Cinelerra will need some kind of proxy format to deal with AVCHD, HDV and DSLRs' h.264 footage. I write "proxy", not "intermediate", because I think the final rendering should use the original video files as its source. The rendering goes only forward, and can take its sweet time. Editing goes back and forth at the user's whim. It should be fast and responsive, always! If you feel that you have something to add, go ahead! :-) -- Herman Robak _______________________________________________ Cinelerra mailing list [email protected] https://init.linpro.no/mailman/skolelinux.no/listinfo/cinelerra
