Boston Linux Meeting Wednesday, March 17, 2004 (room 4-370):Movie Production with Linux & Cinelerra

[Christoph Doerbeck a242369]

I'll go ahead and answer what I can...

> I tried to use Cinelerra on Red Hat 9 a few months ago, and IIRC I
> found that it would crash extremely easily.  What distribution(s) do
> you run it on, and how reliable do you find it?

I am using RH9.  Initially it would crash a lot, but recovery is easy
and I found that by "behaving" nicely, the app crashes a lot less.
I have a summary page of hardware & software which you can
reference.  It'll be posted tomorrow.

> 
> When producing my own videos, I've found that the only CODEC supported
> by Adobe Premiere or Windows Movie Maker which produces good quality
> at reasonable file sizes is Windows Media 9.  Unfortunately, this
> pretty much means that the resulting movie can't be played on Linux...
> So two related questions to this one:
>

I will try to summarize (quote from their page) the broad feature set
of cinelerra, but my experience has thus far been limited to MPEG 2
and QuickTime (DV no compression).  By tooling the MPEG 2 parameters
you can significantly improve quality at the cost of compression.
I'll summarize some numbers tomorrow as well.
 
> FWIW, I use VideoLan Client for playback.  It plays most MPEG movies
> without problems, and I've even managed to play some quicktime and WMV
> files with it.  But only some of the CODECs are supported...

I prefer Xine & GXine.  I built RPMS for RH9 which I'd be happy to share.
Everything I'll be display tomorrow is in RPM format, so I can share
everything you see.  I use the VLC on windows since I've found that
MS media player doesn't work well with DVD VOB files.

Good points, I'll try to address them all....

PEOPLE!!! DON'T LET THE SNOW STOP YOU FROM COMING!!!
We'll make a movie out of parts of the meeting!!!
We need extra's.  (Some henchmen turning knobs and a guy with a wrench!)