Thursday July 12

Editing is always hard to teach, I was a little nervous teaching it to adults in another language, with a program that I knew very little of. One plus side is that Cinelerra has an installation option to change the language to Portuguese. The students were impressed. It helped them feel more comfortable.

The class was in an open lab with other courses, so it wasn't the most ideal environment. It was loud and I have an accent. The first problem was converting file extensions. In my limited experience with Cinelerra I have noticed that it only works well with raw DV files or MPEG1. Two of the digital cameras had different extensions, .mov and .avi. I told them to use the media-convert.com to convert their files. I had used the connection at the university, so in my experience it didn't take as long. The connection here was incredibly slow so it didn't work as well. I ended up putting their files into iMove and converted them into raw DV.

The students worked in their groups and took turns working the controls. I was going to have them work on their own, but I noticed their confidence level was higher working with partners. Cinelerra has many bugs and many times their projects did funny things or they lost their files. I had to explain to them that this occurs not only in Linux, but with many professional editing packages. It was sort of good for them, because they had to go over the tools and processes several times.

Some unexpected errors I ran into were creating titles and exporting. After the class I played with it and got it to work. It doesn't work like Adobe or final cut. The exporting I had to set the project as either PAL or NTSC and it had to have audio. Otherwise, it kept giving me an error.