Cinelerra is a complete audio and video production environment for Linux. It handles all your audio and video editing needs like recording, editing and playback. Apart from this, Cinelerra can even work as a photo retoucher.

Cinelerra is an effective replacement of Broadcast 2000, which provided editing videos only in UNIX box. Aiming to satisfy the increasing requirements of users Cinelerra was developed in mid 2000. It offered video editing along with allowing users to configure certain effects in much less time than Broadcast 2000.

Cinelerra package comes with a number of libraries needed to run it and some utilities for handling files. Generally, Cinelerra package contains Foreign language translations, Cinelerra executable, Cinelerra plugins, soundtest, mplexhi, mplexlo, and mpeg3toc. The compilers used in building Cinelerra binaries are free GNU compilers and very conservative optimization flags.

When Cinelerra starts, it displays four main windows – Viewer, Compositor, Program and Resources. At present Cinelerra supports the following file formats: - WAV, PCM, AIFF, Uncompressed Quicktime, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, TGA sequences and still images, AVI with MP3 audio, MPEG audio and video, AC3 audio and XML.

Cinelerra offers three main methods of editing – two screen editing, drag and drop editing and cut and paste editing. Cinelerra uses several concepts while editing. The Timeline is the place where all editing decisions are represented. The Active Region is the range of time, which is affected by editing commands on the Timeline. And finally, the editing decisions never affect source material – this is called non-destructive editing.