First impression on multicamera editing

Introductions
1

Hi everyone,

I used Cinelerra back when I was a teenager, but I was completely overwhelmed by it at the time. Thank you so much for keeping this historic and important piece of software alive.

I recently switched from Flowblade to Cinelerra after Flowblade’s performance was very poor. Cinelerra, on the other hand, is great in performance! Here are first two videos created with Cinelerra (Concert recordings from a choral concert):

I used Mixer Windows for this and mixed two master tracks together from four camera angles. It was a little tricky, but in the end it worked out okay for me. A real drawback was that you couldn’t apply effects to the source tracks before mixing them together with Mixer windows. Unfortunately, the effects get lost during mixing (though maybe I did something wrong). That’s really time-consuming because you have different clips in the 1–2 master tracks and I had to figure out the right settings for each one (for me, it was mainly about color correction) and copy them correctly. I’ve read a lot about this now. One option would probably be nested clips (though my performance got a little bit worse again when I tried that (perhaps with proxy it would be better? I don’t know..)).

Another drawback was that pressing “Undo” would open all the mixer windows. But I think that was my fault, because I’ve since realized that you can disable the sources for the mixers, and then the mixer windows disappear completely.

To make a long story short: I’m still learning a lot. Next time, I’ll try using ganging mode and, just to be safe, grouping the video tracks with their corresponding audio tracks. That will be closer to flowblade’s workflow, I think.

I’d love any tips, of course. But above all, thank you so much again for all your hard work!!

Best regards,
Max

2

MaxPerl

Welcome again to Cinelerra. Beautiful music in your video and just a real nice and smooth video all around. Cinelerra is a little more difficult than it could be but a lot of it is due to times changing since its first appearance 26+ years ago.

3

Nice editing—well done.

For the first problem, you could try using nested assets:
Open the tracks separately, do all your editing, and apply any plugins you want. Then save the project without rendering it. Once you’ve obtained the EDLs for all the tracks, for example, name1.xml, name2.xml, name3.xme e name4.xml, Open a new project and import the 4 EDLs as “nested assets”: Load files → EDL startegy: nested and Load strategy: RES (crate new resources only).
That way, you’ll have every track with plugins and edits applied—these aren’t actual render files, but they behave exactly like them. It might work, but I’m not sure because I’ve never tried it.
(Nested Assets)