Cinelerra is a she

When you follow the OSvideo blog and other sites on video, you will probably have noticed that video often is a predominantly male domain where guys like to revel in tech-talk about hardware, devices, or cunning code hacks. Thanks to Raffaella Traniello and the The Newbies’ front of Cinelerra we are reminded that our favorite editor Cinelerra is a SHE and she offers real possibilities for curious people of all ages and genders who are not immediately attracted to simplicity and things that just work.

They say Cinelerra is not a simple software for consumers but a very complex and powerful application, meant for skilled professionals and high quality digital audio and video editing.
However, if you are curious and like learning, if you think a simple software is boring, if you start from the bottom but you dream to fly high, if you feel attracted by unwelcoming clever things, if you need wide horizons to be happy, if you are looking for something challenging, we bet Cinelerra is the software for you.

The website about Cinelerra is built for humans who are not coders and are looking for some guidance through the wonderland of working with Cinelerra. A special welcome goes out to curious Grandmothers. The manual Cinelerra for Grandma’s contains basic HOWTOs for ‘very beginners’, which is a bit of an understatement: the site is indeed very accessible but also a great help to Linux geeks who are a bit more experienced in using Cinelerra and have forgotten how to render their projects for their friends microsoft windows computer.

By the way: this tutorial assumes Grandma uses Ubuntu Gutsy or Hardy. Although not a grandma myself, I do use Ubuntu Hardy and enjoy reading a manual which is obviously made with tender love and care for a software which is in need of some affection. Very positive is that Grandma’s manual emphasises the software as a tool to work on animation films from a makers perspective. Personally I had never even thought about working with Imagelists even though I have read my way through the extensive Secrets of Cinelerra manual and the Cinelerra CV manual, on which Grandma’s manual is based. A big thank you to everybody who was involved in writing this enjoyable documentation.

Posted on: Tuesday, January 13, 2009 by: in category: Editing software, Manuals