First Steps with Cinelerra

I've finally had an excuse to play with Cinelerra (CinelerraCV 2.1) and my first foray into video editing. The footage I was working from was of the band's rehearsal on Wednesday and the ASF footage was poor quality as expected but something to play with. First up I needed to convert to ASF into something Cinelerra would work with. After many aborted attempts at finding a pair of moderately unencumbered video and audio codecs that worked together in a container I gave up and created separate video and audio streams and imported them separately.

ffmpeg -i input.asf -vcodec copy -an output.mov
ffmpeg -i input.asf -acodec mp2 -vn output.mp2

The first command copies the video stream out of the ASF container into a Quicktime container. The codec happened to be Microsoft's MPEG4 version (I don't know what the difference between this and standard MPEG4 is) and the second takes the audio and encodes it as an MP2 (because mp3 is patent encumbered and vorbis only worked for stereo streams). These were imported into cinelerra and dumped on a timeline where they seemed to be as in sync as I could tell from the awful footage.

Previously I've always assumed that editing footage from a single camera would be very limiting but in fact by panning and zooming from a static wide angle film I was able to get some modest interest into the final video. The quality, again, let me down -- zooming an already poor 320x240 video to 200% to give a different view really isn't going to look good -- but as a potential way of working with, say, an HD video source from a Canon HF10 it could well be workable.

All in all as an experiment it was quite successful. The final video is 12 minutes long and it took perhaps two or three hours to put together with around 100 key frames. Not bad for a first attempt. I'll admit that Cinelerra isn't the most intuitive and easy to get to grips with piece of software but if you think about things and keep focussed you can pick it up and it gets much easier.

Dare I say I think I'm in danger of picking up a new hobby?