trythil wrote:http://www.heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3
I don't have any good examples of what can be done with it, though.
I've done all my videos with Cinelerra (two finished and posted, one in progress now - read my journal!). Under Linux, there aren't that many other choices. Overall, I like it with reservations. It is a royal bitch to install - I had no success with binary packages (maybe they would work better if I were running Debian or an RPM-based distribution instead of Slackware...) and to compile from source, I had to hack a bunch of things that broke. I don't think you can expect to install from source unless you speak C and Make fluently, and at least pidgin Intel assembly language. It's a resource hog, as well, although I've gotten results on a system *far* below the "recommended" specs (I'm using a dual Celeron 433). The recommendations are for someone who wants editing to be truly sexy; if you're patient and humble you can work on a much cheaper machine. Since the rendering is off-line, the quality of output is just as good on a slow machine, it just takes longer.
Since I have no experience of Premiere or any other Windows software, I can't really comment on how it compares. Just in absolute terms, I like it. The interface is polished and pretty intuitive. It does pretty much all I expect from a nonlinear editor. Versatility in terms of input and output formats could be better, but that is partly because I disabled most of them to make the build and install easier. Unlike much other open-source video software, Cinelerra comes with pretty much everything you need in the package, so you don't have to take a worldwide tour of offshore data havens to find libRandomVideoGlueSoftware. Cinelerra is based on Broadcast2000, which had good capture support, but I haven't used Cinelerra's capture so I can only guess that it should also be good.
Because of codec problems, I haven't used Cinelerra for my final renders to MPEG-2. I've had it render to a sequence of PNG files, and then used a custom script, netpbm, and transcode, to assemble them into MPEG-2 and encode and multiplex in the audio. Note that the versions of my videos on the Web are MPEG-1, and in some cases have quality problems from the low bitrate; that shouldn't be blamed on Cinelerra, it's the fault of the codec in transcode.