Video editing and capturing can get quite expensive – especially if you decided to purchase the most popular commercial grade software to produce high quality videos, films and movies.
Cinelerra is a free video editing suite for GNU/Linux which lets you capture, compose and edit videos. It also has a video compositing engine which allows you to do operations like matting and keying.
Aside from letting you capture straight from your video camera, it also allows you to use a lot of video effects. You can even shoot on green screen and overlay another background – just like what they do with expensive software in high-end editing suites.
It supports WMV, FLV, DVD, H.264, and MPEG-4 so it is compatible with the most common file formats. 
It also supports OpenGL shaders on graphic cards made by nVidia, and can even preview effects in real-time without the need to render them. Impressively, highest supported resolution is 4096 x 4096.
Besides being a non-linear video editing software, it can also be a compositing software so you get to have all your editing needs in one software. It can be seen as a great free alternative to Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut and Adobe After Effects.
- Compositing + editing
- Still image panning
- VU meters
- Unlimited tracks
- 16 bit YUV compositing
- floating point compositing
- Background rendering on clusters
- Free form editing
- Firewire, MJPEG, bttv video I/O
- Firewire, OSS, Alsa audio I/O
- Batch capturing
- Batch rendering
- SMP utilization
- Realtime effects
- Quicktime, AVI, MPEG, and image sequence I/O
- OpenEXR images
- OGG Vorbis audio
- 64 bit internal audio representation
- Headroom monitoring
- LADSPA plugins
- Bezier masks
- Track routing like a real console
- Track nudge for audio and video
- Reverse audio and video in realtime
- Bidirectional, variable speed scrubbing
- Different overlay modes
- Nested sequences
Assorted Features
Cinelerra is not community approved, so there isn’t any support from the developer. However, there is another version of Cinelerra called CV (Community Version) and it basically is the same with the original software but with support and contributions from the community.
Cinelerra Tutorials — The Source from Evan Roth on Vimeo.
Related Links:
Cinelerra CV Community Homepage
Official Cinelerra Homepage
This work is licensed under a GNU General Public License.