Lumiera
The new emerging NLE for GNU/Linux

  1. How can I try Lumiera?

    Sorry, you can’t yet. Lumiera is still in the early stages of development.
    The core team decided to build the engine and infrastructure bottom-up, while the UI is developed to match the capabilities of the core.

  2. What is the meaning of the name »Lumiera«?

    In 2008, as the separation from Cinelerra-CV project became clear, there was a collaborative selection and vote in the community, which at that time was largely the Cinelerra-CV community. The name alludes to the Lumière brothers and evokes the memory of the fist century of film art, while also expressing the connection to the name »Cinelerra«

  3. Is Lumiera a fork of Cinelerra?

    No. Lumiera is built from scratch. Not a single line of Cinelerra code is now used in Lumiera. The project grew out of an effort to amend long standing problems present in the Cinelerra-CV code base at that time. Lumiera would be unthinkable without Cinelerra as point of reference, considering both its strengths and weaknesses. The actual technology however is built ground-up, using contemporary methods, always keeping in mind the high degree of flexibility required to handle common professional data formats.

  4. OMG. Why yet another rewrite? Can’t you guys just join another project?

    May we ask back why the “other guys” don’t just join the Lumiera project?

    Seriously. Our project has specific roots, and it has a distinct focus (professional editing, film making). Other projects have different goals and different value systems. We choose methods and solutions deemed adequate to reach our ambitious goals, yet we do not want to spend our life time working with methods we deem inadequate or pursuing goals we consider not worth pursuing.

  5. Will Lumiera use Nodes?

    The Lumiera Render Engine uses Nodes and asynchronous pull-processing at its core.
    [More about the Design and Vision…]
     But we are rather sceptical towards the “everything nodes” metaphor as principle for UI organisation. This approach is great for individual compositing or FX tasks, yet tends to be challenging when it comes to handling a large scale editing project.

    Rather, we attempt to reconcile properties of nodes and classical layering: in Lumiera, everything is a Placement.

  6. When will Lumiera be usable for basic tasks?

    This is difficult to say. We are ambitious and have a clear vision, yet we choose not to make a “big up-front design” — and thus we can not provide a predetermined schedule or even a guess. We have built a set of core components thus far and achieved some partial integration, but there is still a lot of advanced stuff to work out. And our developer team is small.
    [You can follow progress on our regular Development News updates.]

  7. Is this project dead? I don’t see any progress?

    Rest assured, we’re constantly working on this project. Look at the Git repositories if in doubt. But regarding the GUI, your observation is correct: Work on the GUI has stalled, since we don’t have a dedicated GUI developer right now, and the other devs are focussed primarily at the engine core.
    [See also project activity and statistics on Openhub.net]

  8. Why the hell did you pick GTK??

    Lumiera’s native interface will be written in GTK, although other interfaces will be possible. Basically the GUI is a plug-in. We picked GTK, because, in the early days, Joel Holdsworth joined the team. Joel was an experienced Inkscape / GTK developer; he contributed a tremendous amount of knowledge and a huge load of code. Later, the project successfully switched to GTK-3, and we are confident that GTK provides us both with a clean programming model and the necessary degree of freedom required to build and maintain that kind of elaborate user interface we aspire to provide.

  9. Will there be a Windows version?

    Windows isn’t an Unix flavour, indeed, its internal workings are quite different. When it comes to system level programming, there is no such thing as OS neutral programming. Either, we’d have to introduce an abstraction layer (which costs performance), or we’d have to develop a different back-end for Windows.

    That being said — we’ll focus on other topics first. Thus it depends on Someone™ to do that work.

  10. Do you rely on hardware acceleration?

    Hardware acceleration has lots of potential, but it also has lots of potential for vendor lock-in. Since the start of our project, the situation has improved significantly. But anyway, we choose a different approach. Our core organises the rendering and manages the data (buffer, cache) and the metadata (data type descriptions). The application will provide preview rendering and frame caching. But the actual processing will always be delegated to some suitable library and not developed in-project.

    Deliberately, Lumiera avoids to lock into a single technology.