Back, once upon a time, last summer, I really liked how Blender 2.52’s Video Sequence Editor could be used as a video editor; I liked how the image came up in the preview and you could see what was going to be rendered as you played with your image and movie sequences, and how you could play audio too as you scrubbed back and forth
Now, in 2.55, all that seems to be gone.
No audio, not even with the audio un-muted, seems to play, not even with SDL enabled in user preferences.
And in the preview window of the Video Sequence Editor, there’s nothing but a white box. I have downloaded about 4 builds of Blender 2.55 and 2.56 from graphicall.org now, and NONE of them seem to be viable as a video editor. Am I doing something wrong? Could I be in the wrong OS?
(I am using Crunchbang Statler, 64 bit, which is based off of Debian and was originally based off of Ubuntu, but has now gone its separate way)
Anyway, here’s a screenshot of the Video Sequence Editor:
I feel your pain: been there done that. I could not possibly describe my embarrassment from a foss-based video editing workshop I taught last spring. Long story short, I was invited to teach a 4hr workshop at an educational conference held some 300 km from home. Arrived there about half an hour before the event to install Blender 2.5alpha. The 25++ workstations at the school computer lab were not new but the setup was promising: running Windoze XP with 512 MB. Guess what? Everything worked fine but there was no video preview -hence no video editing possible. I ended up installing 2.49b which of course worked smoothly. Considering that most of the participants were barely ICT-literate educators, it was a dreadful experience.
If it’s any consolation, I cannot use any beta versions for video editing on one of my home desktops because of the white video preview. Ironically enough, all alpha versions worked fine!
From what I gather, this problem is caused by unsupported versions of the video driver. There have been many complaints posted on a number of threads over the past few months. If you are lucky enough to find an updated video driver for your card then chances are that you can overcome this problem. If that doesn’t work then you might consider regressing to an earlier version, which might be buggy and have less features but which might actually work.
Audio shouldn’t be a problem though, especially on Linux. Which sound system are you using?
Although Blender is capable of video editing, I do my editing with Final Cut Pro.
In my workflow, Blender is an important producer of component materials, but I do not expect it or require it to produce the entire deliverable. Certainly it is capable of doing so.
To my way of thinking, the trick is to “find the best tool for the job for you, at this point in time.” Get used to it. Get productive with it.
@sundialsvc4, some of us living in the foss biosphere, use Blender for (almost) everything. I can only speak for myself though and I tell you that I’m a foss purist. Neeless to say that this makes life difficult in some respects but is a great advantage in others.
With the announcement of mango, there is great hope for improvements in the VSE area as well. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
Yeah, my video driver is ATI Radeon HD Series, and I used to install the video driver in Ubuntu (I use Linux)
But I stopped using the ATI video driver because its too much of a pain in the ass; every time Ubuntu updated the kernel, I had to go and redownload it and reinstall it and got sick of doing that.
The ATI video drivers are proprietary and seem to cause all kinds of conflicts with the system
@kwabena: it’s not just the kernel updates, it’s also the xserver updates!
A couple of days ago there was an xorg update or something, don’t remember exactly what, and kdm wouldn’t load after rebooting! Actually there was not graphics output whatsoever and I was unable to go to the console. Had to use a live cd to rm xorg.conf, reboot and reinstall the latest ati driver. Somewhat inconvenient but could be sorted in a couple minutes.
If you know the drill you can simply reinstall the latest driver after every update.
Btw, at first I hated ati but over the past year they release a driver update every month so eventually I guess I’m gonna join the fan club. My laptop uses Mobility Radeon HD 3400 and unless I install one of the latest ati drivers blender 2.5x won’t even load. I’d suggest to look for a driver for your card and give it a shot, it’s definately worth it. More info here: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspx
Just don’t upgrade unless you NEED to. I did the math one time: time spent upgrading could be a couple hours for anything (reboots, downloads, etc). Not counting any issues. If you upgrade each time a new driver/etc. comes out & there’s nothing wrong with your system then you could easily kill several days a month between OS updates, GPU updates, software updates, etc. I haven’t upgraded my ATI drivers since v8.12, about a year ago.
Couldn’t you have FCP installed on your mac laptop & Blender too? And on your desktop? I have my NLE installed on my desktop & my wife’s laptop so if we go somewhere I can plug the video camera in & capture where ever we are.
I’m editing in Blender 2.56 with ubuntu 10.10 and nvidia propietary drivers (no other way!, and thank to nvidia drivers i work correctly with 2 monitors) and everything is working fine for me. Even reading Full hd h264 directly from canon 5d (6 months ago it was a nightmare
I use custom proxies to get smooth workflow and usually i need to prerender (like precomp in ae) some metaclips not to collapse the playback…
And for happy transitions and effects now we have kdenlive
The only thing i can’t deal with linux is f%K&n$ apple pro res and r3d, so this is my limit without final cut and mac… (but i’m testing to grade with blender-gpu-nodes with 16 bit tiffs from red one and it’s delightful XDDD)
Happy friar is right: i never update until there is no choice, and kept some old custom-distros with all installed in live cds to avoid to suffer a hard-disk error + subsequent heart attack!!
Also blender 2.49 will remain installed (no one knows…)
Interesting approach guys but I tend to do the exact opposite, i.e. update on a daily basis and don’t have any problems with it. Something might brake during an update every now and then but if you know the drill you’ll be up and running in seconds. @Carlos: it’s good to see that your experience with VSE is also smooth.
When I say “edit anywhere”, i mean at a number of terminals. I have a Vista at home, and a variety of Macs and NT workstations to use at work. they attach to a WAN that I distribute my media from (sucked down to local drive) and edit from the .blend on the mini cloud
Blender does not need installing at any terminal, just a quick unpack! I avoid any issues with the work IT police.
Thats why I put up with so many bugs and pain when it doesnt work right. Portability is king for me.
Yep, ProRes will always prevent Blender from being a professional video editing application. That and the fact that Blender does not do sound correctly or make deliverables that are viewable by account like people.
And you accept the trade off: it doesn’t always work like you expect, or how it should. I keep blender on a USB key when I want to go somewhere but I hate that it doesn’t want to accept my relative path names no matter what I do, so I need to fix that if I upgrade the data files on my key. The issue you’re having is that you don’t want a set spec to work on & with video editing you need constants: you need codec’s, drivers, interfaces, etc. The Vista comp could have a mpeg-2 codec, the mac wouldn’t & NT has a broken one. There’s to many needed components to make it portable like Blender. Blender doesn’t need all those components because the few things it needs are built in to the program.
You should just go to one computer type & OS, that would solve pretty much all your problems. Unless you need something specific to one machine (IE FCP on Mac, some old program on NT, etc).
When the machine is use for work having the latest whatever isn’t worth the risk of breaking something you need.
Hi,
Googling around, this seems to be an ATI problem with drivers in Linux. I have an ATI Radeon 46xx card, and other posts complaining about the white screen also have ATI cards. I tried installing the ATI fglrx proprietary driver directly from the website, but then blender didn’t work at all. So I had to revert back to the original Xorg state. My oh my! what a pain.
It’s Quicktime… Apple’s done a lot to it since they’ve included it with itunes.