screen capture using Cinelerra

Unfortunately, capturing video live into Cinelerra CVS is broken, as of 1/21/2009. However! I tested it out and Cinelerra CAN capture screen activity directly to the timeline! This is a really nice feature.

The basic steps are:
1) go into Preferences -> Recording
2) select the destination File Format and whether you want to capture audio, video or both
3) set Audio In prefs (TwosComplement and keep your sample rate low!)
4) set Video In prefs (MPEG4 worked for me)
5) set Record Driver to Screencapture (set size of captured frame here and FPS)
6) apply your changes
7) press "r" for record and you'll see the Cinelerra Video In box popup with the active display
8) click the record button, which is the red, round button next to Transport: and you'll start recording as noted by the Position
9) click the stop button, which is the white square button next to Transport:
10) select your insertion strategy (I left mine at "Paste at insertion point"
11) click the green checkmark or just hit enter to accept and paste your captured video

If you click the "Monitor Video" radio button, you'll see the part of the screen to be captured.  If you have dual monitors, note that you can pan the area of the desktop that you can record by click-dragging the desktop area within the "Monitor Video" window.  I stumbled upon that undocumented feature.

The resolution of captured video is proportionate to the speed of your system overall. Thus, faster CPU, high-speed memory and striped hard drives help get you screen captures that are larger in resolution and smoother in playback. But there are other things than hardware upgrades that you can change in Cinelerra in order to increase the relative smoothness of your video capture. By "relative smoothness", I mean decreasing video frame drops and clipped audio samples.

For better performance, do the following:
- record using a lower audio sample rate (22Khz or below)
- record to an uncompressed video format. RGB/RGBA works well for me. I do this because compressed video formats like MPEG4 tend to hog CPU power and thus contribute to video frame drops. Your final output will most likely be a compressed format, so the uncompressed format will only be an intermediary that you will discard. Be careful with uncompressed formats, though! Five minutes of video sucked up about a gigabyte of disk! :)
- limit your mouse movements while recording. Try to use keyboard shortcuts to open, close and move windows

Here's a video of the process: