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For a detailed reference to Cinelerra, be sure to check out the Secrets of Cinelerra document.
When you start Cinelerra for the first time you should see four windows. The Program window at the bottom of the screen shows the timeline, with video and audio tracks. Time runs along the horizontal axis. Above this on the left is the Compositor window. In this window your masterpeice will take shape. To the right is the Viewer window. This is used for viewing clips and selecting which parts of the clips to put into your video. Finally on the bottom right is the Resources window. This shows all the original clips you have imported in, as well as resources like audio and video effects which are available to be used.
You can close any of the windows except the Program window to save screen space, and make them reappear using the Show items on the Window menu.
By now you should have a selection of video captures in Quicktime (.mov) format. If not, refer to the Kino tutorial. The first thing to do is find out the size and framerate of the video. You should have a program called qtinfo that comes with the Quicktime libraries. (See the Download section). To use it, type "qtinfo filename.mov", replacing "filename" with the name of one of your captured clips. You will see something like this:
File rain004.mov:
1 audio tracks.
2 channels, 16 bits, sample rate 48000, length 3027734 samples, compressor twos. supported.
1 video tracks.
720x576, depth 24, rate 25.000000, length 1577 frames, compressor dvc . supported.
Here we can see that the resolution of the video is 720 by 576 pixels, and the frame rate is 25 frames per second. Your numbers may differ, depending on whether you are working with PAL or NTSC.
Select Format from the Settings menu, and enter in the resolution and frame rate. These settings control how the finished video will come out. The Color-model seems to control the internal representation of the video. I leave this at RGBA-8 bit. The Aspect Ratio will normally be at 4:3, however my camera has a 16:9 mode, so I have selected 16:9. This only affects the way the video is displayed inside Cinelerra. The final video will have the size and shape you specify in the Width and Height boxes. In my case, it is the TV that stretches the image to the correct shape when I watch back on TV. This technique is called anamorphic compression, and improves the resolution of the image when watching a 16:9 video on a 16:9 TV.
Finally, you may need to resize your video track. The size of a video track affects how it is rendered by the compositor. Normally you will want the size of your main video track to be the same size as the finished video. To set the size, right-click on the video track in the Program window. A context menu will appear from which you can choose Resize Track. You may have to experiment with exactly where to click. Set the size in the resulting dialog box.
The first thing to do is to get your captured video into your Cinelerra project. Use Load Files from the File menu. The Insertion Strategy controls what happens to the files you are going to load. Select Create new resources only to add the files to the Media section of the Resources window. You can select multiple files by holding down the shift or control keys when clicking.
To view your imported video clips, drag them from the Resources window into the Viewer. You can then use the usual controls to play, rewind and fast-forward the clip. The scroll bar allows you to move the video to a point within the "active region". The active region can be changed by dragging the ends of the dark blue bar above the scroll bar. By changing the active region you can focus on a particular section of the clip, accurately select a particular frame, or enable quick movement from one end of the clip to another.
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