About Lumiera

Lumiera is a free open-source nonlinear editing and compositing application (NLE).

On the one hand, it must meet the rigours of a professional film and video production environment; on the other hand, it must be flexible enough to satisfy the needs of more modest single-user equipment. In other words, Lumiera will be scalable.

Two key factors were identified to achieve these ambitious goals:

The Lumiera project draws directly on the power of open-source by the major use of prevailing open-source technologies — do not re-invent the wheel, and use the knowledge base provided directly by programmers.

There is a serious lack of good video editors in the open-source community. Indeed, commercial video editors typically exhibit a spectrum of weaknesses; some are minor, but many are serious. Many of the design features of Lumiera are there to avoid the limitations of currently available video editors.

Lumiera’s design is a flexible, open architecture. Lumiera is composed of blocks connected together to form the application and process the data. Lumiera is a tool, offering reliability and flexibility to combine these components to build your editing session. Many of the building blocks are not reinvented by the Lumiera team, but are directly included into the application using the wealth of excellent technology already provided by the open-source community.

Lumiera is not confined to using only technology from the open-source community, but uses open-source community person-power: programmers, testers, video users, etc. In fact, the Lumiera open-source community of volunteers, is seen as being one of the more important aspects of the project.

→ read more about the Design and Vision

Lumiera was born from CinelerraCV. While Cinelerra is held in no small esteem by many, it does have a number of flaws. The stock of the Cinelerra code base was not developed by an open community; this was unfavourably viewed by many. Moreover, the quality of this code base is questionable at places, and the architecture was deemed not sufficiently extensible and future-proof. A number of users started a fork of Cinelerra, called “Cinelerra-3”, which quickly developed into a complete re-write of the code base. Major re-design finally resulted in the birth of an entirely new project to be called Lumiera. However, the origins of Lumiera are deeply rooted in the Cinelerra project.

Lumiera has grown since its emergence as a new project. Regular developer meetings, active open-source Community participation and stimulating communication over the net contribute to form a slowly but steadily maturing project.

→ read more about the Project History