Media onto Tracks - Cinelerra - The Forgotten Guide

Set up Clean Tracks Following our guide to place one video strip and one audio strip into a blank project, first delete the existing tracks. Make sure all the tracks are "armed" - that is, each of the "Arm track" icons next to the track are highlighted. Until a track is armed, you are mostly unable to edit that track. But arming a set of tracks allows you to edit all of the tracks which are armed. Now go to the Tracks menu and select Delete tracks. Now you should have no tracks. Click on the Video menu and choose Add track. Click on the Audio menu and choose Add track. If you have more than one audio channel, keep adding audio tracks until you have one for each channel.

Place Media on Tracks
In the main Program window, click the Rewind button to set the insertion point at the beginning of the tracks. All of the tracks should now be armed. Right-click on your video content in the Media box (in the Resources window) and click Paste. Right-click on your audio content in the Media box and click Paste. Check that the audio and video tracks end at the same place. You may need to scroll the window to see this. If they do not end at the same time (or at least within a frame or two) then something is wrong with your framerate. If you hover your mouse over the tracks on the timeline and hold Shift while mouse scrolling, you will zoom in and out on the timeline. This will allow you to zoom out and view the entire clip on the timeline or zoom in to view individual frames on the timeline.

Previewing Tracks
Now your video and audio should be laid in their respective tracks and some output should be showing in the Compositor window. Save your project, then click Play to see your video play. Don't be surprised if Cinelerra cannot play the video fast enough. The program is a CPU hog and if you don't have a super-fast computer, it may have trouble keeping up. Audio may appear to be slightly out of sync, but if it ends at the same time as the video, it's probably OK, Cinelerra just isn't playing it very well during preview. When you create your output video, it should be fine.