Radio Tux has published my interview with the core developers and contributors to the Lumiera project now. I conducted the interview at FROSCON 2009 a couple of weeks ago. Lumiera is a Free and Open Source video editing application project for GNU/Linux developed originally by the CinelerraCV community. It was born as a rewrite of the Cinelerra codebase called Cinelerra3 but it is now an independent project with its own name.

Lumiera Collage
Poster of ideas in the Lumiera logo contest

The lumiera project is insofar an amazing project, as it involves a lot of artists and videomakers. Also there seem to be quite a few women involved. So we do see the free and open source community evolving and including different people with various backgrounds. What a great news! Lumiera shows that people do not want to be limited by proprietary video editing software. I am looking myself for a good open source video suite for years and I believe Lumiera can be a good alternative in the future. Actually there is not a version to test yet. There have been code aditions to other projects.

Why I do think Lumiera will be successful, is because the project lead focuses on building a broad community of contributors and they do not focus on short-term success, but rather long-term goals. When they had to decide what logo they should use for lumiera, they put up a forum, a wiki page and a voting system and let the community decide as a whole. And I like what came out. Cool way to do it.

Lumiera Logo
Lumiera Logo after community contest

The interview is pretty interesting. It is a bit more than half an hour. I was also very happy to hear that Lumiera will focus on speed and usability for people with less powerful and expensive hardware. These are exactly the goals of LXDE and Freifunk, which I am happy to support as well. Lumiera folks just incorporate the idea of empowering people. I am looking forward to what comes out of this exciting project.

Die Nicht-Lineare Videoschnittsoftware Lumiera ist gewissermaßen ein Fork von Cinerella. Warum es zu diesem Fork kam, wie der Name und das Logo für das Projekt entstand und warum die Community, die sich mittels Wiki und Mailinglisten organisiert, jetzt schon eine große ist, obwohl die Software noch nicht veröffentlich ist versucht unser Moderator Mario Behling im Gespräch mit Developern und anderen am Projekt beteiligten Leuten zu klären. (blog.radiotux.de/2009/09/02/interview-ueber-lumiera/)

Special thanks to Sirko and Thomas “der genial vom Thema abschweifende” Steinbrecher for giving me the opportunity to conduct the interview and for always keeping us up to date about the FOSS community over the years with radio tux!

Links

* Lumiera project lumiera.org
* Lumiera wiki pipapo.org/pipawiki/Lumiera
* On Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinelerra#Lumiera_rewrite
* Radio Tux blog.radiotux.de