Cinelerra is a video editing and track-based digital compositing program (an NLE, Non-Linear Editor) designed for Linux.

Because of UI limitations, Williams rewrote significant parts and released that as Cinelerra on August 12, 2002, while Broadcast2000 was withdrawn by Heroine Virtual in September 2001.

[1][2] Cinelerra became the first 64-bit media production application when it was rewritten to work with the AMD Opteron processor in June 2003 and was presented at SIGGRAPH 2004 in San Diego.

The user is by default presented with four windows (clockwise from lower left in picture at top right): Cinelerra uses its own widget toolkit Guicast (the Cinelerra GUI library), not conforming to the human interface guidelines of major Linux desktops such as GNOME and KDE.

Professional use was mostly promoted by Linux Media Arts, which sold an integrated hardware and software package for video production that includes Cinelerra.

[citation needed] At the National Association of Broadcasters' 2004 Electronic Media Show, Cinelerra received Bob Turner's "Making the Cut" award, given to "the best and most exciting post-production products seen at the convention".

[4] In December 2018 Libre Graphics World included Cinelerra in its comparison of the sustainability of video editors for Linux.

Since early 2015, Cinelerra.org has an open Git repository on Google Code for analysis and for input;[7] however, that platform is read-only since 2015-08-24.

HV has used SourceForge since the beginning (first source 2001-09-09), but does not react to bugs, patches and feature requests on that platform.

To distinguish between the different variants of the software, the releases made by Heroine Virtual are also called Cinelerra-HV.

Heroine Virtual at times contributes to discussions on the mailing lists, and incorporates many of the changes made in the repository.

Heroine Virtual posted the following message on their website describing the relationship: What you'll find here is the heroinewarrior version of Cinelerra.

As time passes and new students come and go from the Linux scene, new forks of Cinelerra emerge that are more suited to the community but not what Heroine Virtual Ltd. needs.

The fork was created by the main Cinelerra-CV developer (2012-2018) Einar Rünkaru in June 2008 and published in the middle of March 2010.

An implementation of PTS based timing enables to edit media with variable framerate and get rid of assumption that audio and video start simultaneously... Big plan is to get Cinelerra-CVE to the level where a user can mix (in Cinelerra) media from different origins, with different frame rates, resolutions, sample rates, color spaces and get the result he/she needs.

Lumiera is built from scratch, starting with the engine core, yet pursuing a similar vision and expanding on some of the ideas and approaches found in Cinelerra.

The project grew out of an effort to amend long standing problems present in the Cinelerra-CV code base at that time.

The goal of the Lumiera project is to build a free open-source nonlinear video editing and compositing application (NLE).

Cinelerra-GG, a separate variant of Cinelerra by William Morrow and Phyllis Smith, started with merged code from Cinelerra-HV and Cinelerra-CV but quickly grew.

An important issue is that Cinelerra-GG reduces reliance on system libraries by including them where practical, like ffmpeg and OpenEXR.

Cinelerra-GG is determined to get as close as possible to what can be expected from professional level video editing software (NLE) for the Linux platform.

Its software features include support for recent versions of ffmpeg, extensive color correction tools, Ultra HD up to 8K, more than 400 video- and audio effects, two interfaces for audio plug-ins (LADSPA, and LV2 such as Calf Studio Gear), multiple denoisers and motion stabilizers, multi-camera editing, proxies, smart folders media filtering, 8, 10 and 12 bit color spaces, advanced trim, live preview of resources, shared tracks, group edits, horizontal and/or vertical timeline split, rendering pre-configuration options, and the ability to save workspace layouts.

It has a ¨Sketcher" plug-in for free-hand drawing, supports creating HD Blu-ray, and DVDs, and some OpenCV plugins like FindObj.

Its hardware support is for jog-wheels ShuttlePRO V.2 and ShuttleXpress from Contour Design, multiple monitors, HiDPI, and hardware-supported decoding/encoding via VAAPI/VDPAU/CUDA.

Before 2021, it was supplied as a multi user program pre-packaged for eight different Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, OpenSuse, Slackware, Fedora, Centos, Mint), and FreeBSD.

Each monthly release has a significant number of changes resulting from discussions and exchanges of information on these platforms.