Coswell Productions

Cinelerra Hints for Rendering

  • If rendering your output to DV Stream for making a DVD, make sure your audio is around -20dB. If Cinelerra is crashing at a particular point during your rendering, try tweaking the audio at that point. Most likely the audio is either spiking or is set too low.
  • Always render your final video in chunks by using the “Create new file at each label” option. I use Ruby to generate the necessary XML to place labels at every three minute mark, then I paste them into the project file. Open the project file in your favorite text editor, and then in a console window, type as one line:

    ruby -e '0.upto(20) { |i| puts "<LABEL TIME=\"#{i * 180}\" TEXTSTR=\"\">" }'

    Copy the output and paste it into the <LABELS> section underneath of </VWINDOW_EDL>.
  • If you’re going to use the rendered videos on a Macintosh (say, in iMovie or ffmpegX), the best export format container is AVI, with DV for the video codec and Twos Complement for the audio codec.
  • My mencoder commands to join a group of exported .dv files together in MPEG-2 format, ready for NTSC DVD (6000kbps VBR video, 224kbps MPEG-2 audio)... High quality:

    mencoder -ovc lavc -oac lavc -of mpeg -mc 0 -mpegopts format=dvd -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:vrc_maxrate=9800:vbitrate=6000:vqmin=1:keyint=25:aspect=16/9:abitrate=224:acodec=mp2:vstrict=0:dc=10:trell:mbd=2:precmp=2:subcmp=2:cmp=2:dia=-10:predia=-10:cbp -vf harddup -ofps 30000/1001 -o output_file.mpg input_files_*.dv

    Low quality:

    mencoder -ovc lavc -oac lavc -of mpeg -mc 0 -mpegopts format=dvd -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:vrc_maxrate=9800:vbitrate=6000:vqmin=1:keyint=25:aspect=16/9:abitrate=224:acodec=mp2:vstrict=0 -vf harddup -ofps 30000/1001 -o output_file.mpg input_files_*.dv

See what else is here...