Ardour + Cinelerra + 4 Cams + Heavy Blues

Hi,

Here’s a Live in Studio Video featuring Ardour 5.5 and edited in Cinelerra.

Hi Gmaq, this performance is very cool, great uses of audio and video programs ( Ardour and Cinelerra) and editing

Damn you are good :slight_smile:

I always enjoy my dose of Zeppelin and your cover is especially good. You’ve managed to capture the “raw” live sound and the mix is still polished and well balanced. Great work. One unconventional choice you made is the bass is panned a bit to the left. Who says you can’t break the rules. I think it works :slight_smile:

Great performance! That’s the sweet spot: right after it stops being fun, and just before it gets easy :slight_smile:

I did some videos with Cinelerra a while back as well. It’s a complicated tool but it works fantastically once you learn how to operate it.

-Ben

Thanks guys!

@mhartzel
I don’t know about ‘good’ but the song structure itself is quite inspiring and has such a great feel and that quasi-classical jazzy turnaround is so memorable… When Jimmy Page wrote it he must have thought he had re-invented minor blues :). As a trio I often pan the split the bass and guitar L-R in recordings. I love that sound from the old days and it gives the instruments more dimension and definition.

@BenLoftis

Thanks, I’m sure you noticed the Harrison XT-BC plugin in the Ardour session inset :D. If people would just get over Cinelerra’s extremely odd interface and take 20 minutes to read the manual it would be a whole different story, but those are 2 big hurdles for people to overcome. I’ve tried and packaged all of the Linux NLE’s and when it comes down to actually producing something I find I always come back to Cinelerra.

Our videos are edited in “a major name-brand application”, and I’ve seen uncountable crashes and freezes when watching Mike edit and/or preview them. Cinelerra isn’t perfect, but the “grass isn’t any greener” in commercial-software land, from what I can tell.

No but the interface makes things much easier on occasion on the other side of things.

Honestly I use LIghtworks myself, and have been happy with it once I figured out how to work in it, but would really love to have something like Resolve available for cross platform video editing personally, so that i can work together with my coworkers instead of trying to get them to wrap their heads around Cinelerra.

          Seablade

Hi,

I half-heartedly looked at Lightworks, my great hope was Kdenlive, I actually have a cast-iron build of it on the old AV Linux 6 that I still use for certain things, their latest 16.0X ‘refactored’ versions unfortunately don’t work for me, perhaps it’s a video hardware or RT Kernel problem but the last few versions explode on contact when I hit play on the timeline monitor :/, other people seem to get along fine with it so who knows…

I should also mention that there an embarrassment of various forks of Cinelerra now, in truth all of them have improved exponentially since Cinelerra 2.2, the one I use is a heavily modded version called ‘Cinelerra-CVA’ by Paolo Rampino that is much more accepting of newer input formats (on an aging Q6600 Quad core I can directly handle up to 3 streams of 1080 HD H.264 MP4 without using any intermediate formats or proxies). It uses ffmpeg instead of libquicktime for decoding and if you look closely at my screenshot has a much nicer theme (in a Cinelerra context) which I made some very minor contributions to, but the BIG news is a very much revamped version Called ‘Cinelerra-GG 5.1’ which basically takes the best bits of all forks and has added significant new features and much improved video capture, decoding, exporting with ffmpeg and also provides packaging for all common distros as well as brand new documentation, as of this writing it has a current bug in the ffmpeg export which is why I use am currently still using ‘CVA’ but the next releazse will reportedly fix that issue.

The ‘CV’ (Community Version) of Cinelerra almost died completely a couple of years ago and let their domain lapse, the whole story is actually quite dramatic but I’ll spare you. The good news is there is life and new activity and a much improved website here: https://cinelerra-cv.org/

The KDENlive that came with AV Linux 2016 was unusable because it crashed before I could get anything done with it, but I installed a later version (it’s probably in Debian testing now so a simple apt-get install or upgrade will get it) and it’s usable again, at least for the limited amount of work I do with it.
The new UI has some quirks, but that doesn’t make it any worse than Cinelerra…

@ Gmaq great video, great performance and I enjoyed very much starting my day with a nice coffee and your sound! As I mentioned already in some other post i m a big fan of your drum- especially snare sound mixing :wink:

and good to know cinelerra is “back to life”. I edited some videos with it years ago and although i liked the flexibility i gave up on crashes etc… video on linux is not as evolved as sound somehow, i keep running into problems… Kdenlive became much more stable since 16.12 and is fun using it again on my machines (running manjaro linux). Lightworks needs proprietary video drivers (makes it unusable if you like to use realtime kernels…), Resolve has just the high end version on linux i dont have the money and space for :wink: , Blender is great but for just video editing a bit of an overkill and resource hungry… so I ll take a second look at cinelerra again like in 2010 :slight_smile: thanks again for sharing this!

@calimerox,

Thanks for the comments, If Kdenlive works for you that’s good, As I said if you want to try Cinelerra, wait for the next 5.1 release, it’s the most usable for modern formats.

@anahata

Hi, unfortunately the version of Kdenlive I’m talking about IS the very latest in Debian testing, hats off to you if it works, perhaps you are using different input formats than I am or have a different workflow, looking around the net it’s performance and reputation seem to be maddeningly variable (the same goes for Cinelerra of course). On the other hand I can use Cinelerra all day long and someone else can make it crash in 20 seconds… :).

I wonder if you’ve been playing that song for many years. You all make it look so easy. If I was trying to do it there would be a vein bulging on my forehead and my hair would be on fire.

Hi Craig,

Thanks for taking a look, actually that song was a recent addition but it just clicked, in my experience over the years if the band learns a new song and it doesn’t gel within a couple of takes it probably won’t stick, then there are the songs you desperately want to play and beat your head against over several rehearsals only to be utterly defeated in the end, that’s when I have the bulging forehead vein and what’s left of my hair on fire… we just don’t video record those ones :slight_smile: