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How can I try Lumiera?
Sorry, you can’t yet. Lumiera is still in the early stages of development.
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Is Lumiera a fork of Cinelerra?
No. Lumiera is a complete rewrite. Not a single line of Cinelerra code is now used in Lumiera. The project was first called Cinelerra-3 because it was born in the Cinelerra Community.
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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 didn’t start from scratch. Lumiera would be unthinkable without Cinelerra as point of reference. Initially, we attempted to overhaul Cinelerra to cope with the long standing notorious problems. Our first in-depth analysis showed us, that we’d need to rework pretty much each and every component of Cinelerra, for one reason or the other. Thus our effort turned into a “Cinelerra done right” style project.
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When will Lumiera be usable for basic tasks?
It’s very difficult to say. It depends on a lot of things. We are really ambitious, which means we care for a lot of advanced stuff up front, so there’s a lot of work to do at the back. And our developer team is small.
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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.
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Will Lumiera be using guicast (the Cinelerra GUI library)?
We won’t' use Guicast. Lumiera’s native interface will be written in GTK, although other interfaces will be possible. Basically the GUI is a plug-in.
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Why the hell did you pick GTK?? Toolkit [your favorite here] is so much better!
We picked GTK, because, in the early days, Joel Holdsworth joined the team. Joel was an experienced Inkscape / GTK developer; he contributed a huge load of code. Please don’t underestimate the amount of work necessary for any non-trivial GUI
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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.
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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 (2007), 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). But the actual processing will always be delegated to some suitable library.
This approach has the downside to require much more “organisational” stuff to implement up front, but it promises to be really future-proof.