Cinelerra

From MITVWiki

Cinelerra has an advantage because it can handle true "progressive" HD. It is used by many production studios.

The Cinelerra-CV version from cvs.cinelerra.org has a surrounding community and some quite decent documentation. It is also a lot easier to install, and probably works better for most users. I would still recommend using a package from your distribution if it is up to date, as there are quite a lot of dependencies (Gentoo's packages have proved to be very good).

The key difference between Cinelerra and many of the commercial editors is that Cinelerra hides much less from the user, exposing much of the inner workings to direct interaction. This can be harder to use, but does make it tremendously powerful, and for some operations blistering fast.

Cinelerra does benefit from higher end hardware. An OpenGL graphics card will make playback a lot smoother, as will a decent amount of RAM and a fast hard drive (or better still a RAID array. Linux software RAID rocks!). An Athlon XP2200 with an Nvidia FX5200 graphics card and 768MB RAM is perfectly adequate though.