Application: Cinelerra

Okay I know not really the mainstream type of application, but this one is so neat, I just had to mention it.

It's a video editing system similar (but not the same) to programs such as Adobe Premiere, or Pinnacle Studio, or Finalcut Studio, etc. Unlike the aforementioned titles Cinelerra is open source. We were able to make an amazing video with it, and it didn't really cost us much.

This is something we really didn't expect to find. My boss even made a green screen to film himself on. If you go to the main site and select the hi-speed option, you'll see the video in flash at the top of the page. We were able to add all kinds of compositing and effects into the video. All in all it turned out looking very professional, and we didn't need windows to do it.

One caveat with the program is that, it is a work in progress. So it's not too stable, but as long as you save often it's not that much of an issue. I never had it crash during a render, only when I was setting up the edit. One thing about this though you start craving multi-processor boxes. My uncle had just told about building a dual AMD64 box just prior to this little endeavour, and man was I jealous ;-)

Anyways that's all for Cinelerra

-NT