Hi Paris,
Since you have apparently assembled some of my previous posts about Linux video editing, I want to make a quick summary now that I have made a number of half hour to hour videos with both kdenlive and Cinelerra, running various versions of Ubuntu. My needs are actually simple, since I am only making a video from camcorder clips and adding titles, all of this for family consumption. If one has an older camcorder that records in dv format, using dvgrab with Kino is the way to go. My clips are in mpeg2 on a hard drive (JVC) camcorder, and Kino is problematic because of the time consuming trancoding (Kino only edits dv files).
The current versions of Cinelerra CV and kdenlive have terrible documentation. You can find a few tutorials online, but the user has to learn a lot of what is needed by the old fashioned technique of fooling around. When I first used them, they would crash (they both have crash protection, which you have to turn on in kdenlive), but after I got a handle on what I was doing, the crashes stopped, and I now can use both with complete confidence. (For example, if you drop certain audio effects onto a video track in kdenlive, as I did accidentally early on, you will get a crash. The code should prevent that but then you shouldn't be doing that, and after a short while, you won't.)
Cinelerra CV has one big advantage. It has four windows, and you can close any of three of them temporarily in order to gain screen space. This would be very useful if you needed to look at detail in clips, since the kdenlive clip/project video window is rather small, and not very configurable. SInce I know what I am running out of my camcorder, this is not a problem. The big disadvantage to Cinelerra CV is titling. The only way to do this I have found is to make a title in the Gimp (make it to the pixel dimensions of you video and save it -- it will then import as a clip into Cinelerra -- and there is a switch in Cinelerra configuration allowing you to set the import video length of a single frame -- otherwise it can be hard to find in the video track. Of course you can make snazzy titles in the Gimp, but it is a bit of a bother to go out of Cinelerra to make the titles. The Cinelerra transition effects are terrific, and easy (drag and drop) to insert between clips. By comparison, kdenlive has lots of transitions, but I could only find one or two really useful ones for my purposes.
Kdenlive is very easy and quick to use. The titler clip maker is very fast, and quite sufficient if you are only going to make text titles against a color background. (You can use the titler to put text on top of video if you want.) I found the rendering options in kdenlive very useful. Users should render a short video at a number of the offered resolutions to find the sweet spot for their eventual purposes. After rendering, DVDs are easily put together with DeVeDe, tovid, or whatever. For my purposes, rendering takes about three times the length of the project in kdenlive, and then the DVD burning depends a lot on the DVD authoring tool you use, and how you use it, but it is considerably shorter. (I have a new DVD burner that makes a substantial DVD in less time that I recall my old CD burner making a CD.) And so, for my immediate puposes, I am sticking with kdenlive, as it is slightly more convenient and fast for my purposes, but there are things to be said for both programs.
The current kdenlive (7.3 if my memory is right) is in the repositories for Ubuntu 9.04 and Kubuntu 9.04, and I have both running like a dream. This is the easy way to go. The current kdenlive will surely show up in the next Fedora, Suse, whatever, for those who prefer other distributions. As the depencies for kdenlive (and Cinelerra) are tricky, compiling them from source (which I have done) is a jagged path. Various websites will explain how to install kdenlive in Ubuntu 8.10, if one wishes to do that. I have a method that I could share if you are interested. It involves updating the kde background and then adding some repositories to the Ubuntu repositories before using apt-get. Before Ubuntu 8.10, it is probably not a good idea to try to run the current (or 7.0+) version of kdenlive in Ubuntu. The Akirad repository has a precompiled version of Cinelerra for Ubuntu 8.10 that I installed on one of my hard drives without a hitch. This is the version I have been using since I found it. The Akirad repository may well add a precompiled version for Ubuntu 9.04. It has some useful video tutorials for using Cinelerra, by the way.
Might I point out that I made a couple of videos with Cyberlink PowerDirector in Windows XP under pressure from my grandchildren to produce video of their last visits while I was getting my Linux video editing act together (I was using Kino at the time, but the transcoding of the mpeg2 files took too much time ...), but I now would use kdenlive in Ubuntu 9.04 by choice, and not just because I try to do everything in linux for my own reasons.
Last post on this, seriously.
Bob A