Robin Miller writes about capabilities of free video editing programs:

The people who scream, “How dare you use proprietary software to edit videos! Haven’t you ever heard of Cinelerra?” all have one thing in common: they’ve never tried to use Cinelerra to produce sophisticated video on a tight deadline. If they had, they’d know why dead-broke indy film kids would rather beg, borrow, or steal to get Final Cut Pro or one of its commercial competitors than use free-as-in-beer Cinelerra. But Cinelerra is improving, and it may be only another year or two before low-budget video and film producers start using it of their own free will, without anyone yelling at them.

He also mentions the problem with Xvid video codec. It works within the MPEG-4 framework, which is so patent-encumbered that today no one really knows who has “rights” to it. On the other hand, non-proprietary Theora encoder suffers from other important drawbacks:

Outside of Linux-land, hardly anyone uses it, and Theora encoding is in a sad state, especially for those computer users (estimated at 95%+) who prefer a GUI to command-line work. Not only that, the DirectShow filters for Theora don’t work correctly, so Windows-based video editing programs can’t render directly to Theora by using simple plugins the way they render to Xvid or QuickTime once you install the correct codecs for those formats.

Read the whole article.