I'm just now warming up to cinelerra and kino on linux for my major video editing (no, not home movies. short independent productions) Coming from the major Adobe suite on windows and having used abd become very familiar with Final Cut studio on the Mac, I'm having a hard time with Cinelerra's interface. I'm knocking it out by hand by hovering around and guessing what each key and button does. But I have a bunch of questions that I want to throw out there one at a time.

First one is with the windows. Is there a way to get the floating windows into one giant interface? The window borders are so big that the space they take up could be used for something else.

Second is just a general question. How many people here actually use cinelerra avidly? Have you overcome problems with it crashing when you render a project? I've rendered a few test clips and had it crash each time. Any tips for the new guy?

no, afaik not. But you can choose ->windows->standard positions (translated). Then the windows are arranged in a (more or less) useful way, so they are bit less awkward to work with.

I don't have numbers, but if you're doing a poll, count me in

I'm having more luck with rendering, but have lots of sudden crashes on trivial actions (like pulling a clip in the viewer etc.). I got used to save my project very frequently.

What kind of videos did you use as input (container format/codecs) and what did you render to ?
I use almost exclusivly videos in quicktime containers (input and output) with cinelerra, this seems to have the highest chance of producing useful output and the smallest crash chance for me.

That windows trick helped a lot. Thanks for the tip.

I mostly try and use Raw DV. But for the test render all I did was take 2 jpegs and test the chroma key feature and render a 6 second "video" of the still image and it crashed. Should have been simple one would think. The crash thing still worries and bugs me. I don't want to spend hours upon hours saving and editing and saving and when I go to render the final product it crashes and is unable to render the project. It just seems like a waste of time to me. That's mostly what worries me. I don't want to invest my time learning cinelerra if it's not going to produce anything.

I'm not doing an official poll with that question, but I see cinelerra mentioned a lot on forums by people who don't use it. Honestly, with how bad it looks and acts by default, I would never mention it to a linux n00b. I'd mention kino or kdenlive. I just wanted to see if the number of people who actually use cinelerra match up to the number of people who mention its use in linux.

So what formats have you guys found to be better to edit with? By better, I mean faster while still retaining the quality.