About Lumiera

Lumiera is a Free-Open Source Non-Linear Editing (NLE) application in active development by the Lumiera community.

NLE's are video editing applications that work non-destructively (i.e. do not modify the source media) and can access and edit any portion of the project instantaneously.

Lumiera is designed to be an advanced NLE. It will have extensive technical and creative tools, and the architecture to expand its tool-sets. The application is developed to be highly modular, future-adaptable, and open.

Some select design elements from Lumiera include: advanced memory and media management, optimised & customizable GUI, innovative track grouping/nesting, and time code support.

NLE's can be demanding of hardware systems, and have specific requirements for the application functions and media handling. Lumiera is developed from the ground up, beginning with the core. It is designed so the core of the application is not tied to the GUI, and can operate independently.

The core consists of a backend (low-level) and proc-layer (mid-level). Because of the specialised requirements of NLE's, there is some interesting and sophisticated development at this level.

The GUI is the part most users will work with, and is in a state of constant design. Unlike some applications, the GUI for Lumiera isn't a pass-through, but contains many features itself. Specialised track nesting, marker/clip interaction, and "perspectives" that arrange GUI elements for specific video tasks.

There are many GNU/Linux applications for advanced media creation (GIMP, Blender & Ardour comes to mind), however there are very few video editing projects of a similar level.

This came to the attention of several CinelerraCV community members. While Cinelerra is the most advanced open-source NLE currently available, it has many design compromises, and is not developed in a community fashion.

To address many of these issues, originally a code-base re-write of Cinelerra was proposed, to be called Cinelerra3. Because of many unique design ideas by the developers, a new project was born, Lumiera.

Since then, Lumiera has gone through active design & planning, creation of project resources, and is now in active development of the core. Work has also been done on the GUI as can be seen in screenshots.

→ read more about the Project History