I first heard about Cinelerra a few years ago. The site looks the same since then (aside from a renewed copyright notice), and the app is still available for Linux. And it's free. At its heart is an editor (video & audio) and compositor. What kept me from using it? The specs recommend a dual 2.4 Ghz Opteron, 4 GB of RAM, and a 200 GB HD. Not exactly spare parts around my house.But Cinelerra is a complete studio solution rivaling Apple's Final Cut Studio. That dewop gets a workout with things like floating point compositing, realtime effects, 6-channel audio and more. Cinelerra is even built to run on a server farm. Imagine flash hard drives with more Opteron servers connected via Gigabit ethernet and all of a sudden you're talking about film-res editing for pennies on the dollar of commercial suites available.
I'm not saying it's better or worse mind you. And it's not for babies— expect a learning curve similar to Blender. As a bonus, you'll want to check out Heroine Warrior's QuickTime 4 Linux (through version 6 anyway). Don't forget Cinelerra's Twiki for added fun and documentation.
