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Heroine Virtual

Video editing software

Cinelerra is a video editing and track-based digital compositing program (an NLE, Non-Linear Editor) designed for Linux. It is a free software distributed under the open source GNU General Public License. In addition to editing, it supports advanced composition operations such as keying and mattes, including a title generator, many effects to edit video and audio, keyframe automation, and many other professional functions depending on the variant.2 Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0

Last updated Oct 21, 2026.

Overview

1996Founded1

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Cinelerra is a video editing and track-based digital compositing program (an NLE, Non-Linear Editor) designed for Linux. It is a free software distributed under the open source GNU General Public License. In addition to editing, it supports advanced composition operations such as keying and mattes, including a title generator, many effects to edit video and audio, keyframe automation, and many other professional functions depending on the variant. It processes audio in 64 floating-point form. Video is processed in RGBA or YUVA color spaces, in 16-bit integer or floating-point form. It is resolution and image refresh rate independent. The HV & GG variants support up to 8K video. The GG variant can also create DVDs and Blu-rays.2

The story

History

In 1996 Adam Williams of Heroine Virtual, lead developer of Cinelerra, released a Unix audio editor called Broadcast 1.0 which could handle 2G audio files. In 1997 Broadcast 2.0 was released, still audio only but unlimited tracks. 1999 saw Broadcast2000, which included video. Around 2001 Broadcast 2000 supported MPEG-2, VOB and Quicktimemovies. See the History of Cinelerra versions section for more detail.

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Williams rewrote significant parts and released that as Cinelerra on August 12, 2002, while Broadcast2000 was withdrawn by Heroine Virtual in September 2001. 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. Since then, many versions have been released.

The original version is still being produced by Williams. There have been several spin-offs made by the open source community, Cinelerra-GG and Cinelerra-CVE (a fork of Cinelerra-CV) are presently under active development. For a complete overview of versions, see the Variants section below. Even though the different variants look the same, there are considerable functional differences between them.[1]

An overview of the different variants that released more than one version:

History of Cinelerra versions

Events from the original creator Heroine Virtual have been indicated with Broadcast/Broadcast2000 and HV, those of the "community version" with CV, and those of the GG Infinity variant with GG.

From Wikipedia’s article on Heroine Virtual, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3

Timeline

  1. 1996Founded Founded1

Sources

The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.

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