Sequencer Addon: Trim Videos before adding them to the Timeline (In and Outpoints)

Hi,

With this Addon you can easily set an In- and Outpoint for every movie clip in the file browser. Similiar to other NLEs (Somehow…)

Some parts of the sequencer extra actions addon’s code were used, so thanks to Turi Scandurra for the great work!

Usage:
You need to have a filebrowser and a sequencer timeline area visible on the screen.
In the sequencer Panel, klick the Set as Timeline button to tell the script that the current scene is your timeline scene.
Select one movie file in the filebrowser and click the Edit Range button in the Sequencer Panel. You will be taken into a new scene with only your selected clip in the timeline. Simply define the in- and outpoint by setting the scene’s start and end frame.
Now either klick on Get Back or klick on a file in the filebrowser and then on Edit Range again and so on…
The in and outpoints of your videos are stored in the new scenes, so if you want to delete them simply delete the scene named by your videos name.
If you have clicked in Get Back, you should be back at your timeline.
Klick on insert selected Video to insert the video that is selected in the filebrowser into the timeline at the current frame.
If you have defined In- and Outpoints, they will be applied. If you have not, the video will be inserted normally You can choose in which channel it will be inserted with the channel value.

With the custom screen enabled you can define screen layouts to change to if you click on Edit Range or Get Back. Simply put the name of the layout from the screen layout selector in the info header into the appropriate text field.

Known Issues:
The Paths are absolute, so if you move your video files to another place, the defined Ranges will be vanished.

I hope that this is a useful workaround for one of the biggest shortage of blender for video editing :wink:
Please test it and report problems.

Edit: New version, should work with audio and without.

Attachments

SunTools_1_2.zip (6.71 KB)

Hmmm, let me see… fixing the VSE 3 point edit problem. Will I have to change my handle :wink: ?

Used a strip with audio, the video trimmed but the audio didn’t (I guess you don’t handle the audio yet?).

Tried it with non audio strip and got this error, after I clicked the Insert Selected Video button:


BTW it’s really interesting to see someone try a new idea out for this problem, I had suggested trim, copy, paste, Carlos made an addon using trim, create meta, copy paste. All have their drawbacks I guess as the real functionality isn’t built in. This solution is pretty sweet though.

The copy paste approach lacks the ability to dupe f-curves for audio fades or color corrections etc.

Added a new version to the first post. It should work now.

Hey Sunboy I made a tutorial for the addon! Hope it’s ok.

@Sunboy: many thanx for this script!
Keep 'em coming! :slight_smile:

Is it just me or doesn’t this script also fail with the official 2.64 version?

Was that 2.64.1, wasn’t there a bug fix? Perhaps there are some API changes too.

Recent Blender crashes if you click the Edit Range button. According to GDB output this is some new bug in Blender so I posted a bug report. We will have to wait and see.

@3point: was there a 2.64.1 version? Don’t know as I compile the latest trunk daily.

@sunboy: thanx for looking into this.

Sorry I meant an “a” release, it seems the official download has show stoppers (maybe this is one)?

EDIT:

I can confirm that this script is not working on Win 32bit r51136

In the recent SVN the script should work again :slight_smile:

There was a Bug that the Colormanagement assigned the wrong color space to newly created scenes in the sequencer. Please also test the Compositing script, maybe that bug was related to the preview issues in some way.

Yes I seem to remember a reference to color management in the error message… I used r51136, what release should I look for?

The bug was fixed in r51168, so any newer release should hopefully work.

Thanks for the add-on. I got used to it quicker than I thought I would. I experimented with trying multiple in/outs on the same clip and that does not seem to be a capability. Unless of course I am overlooking something. If it is not available do you have plans to add that feature?

BTW, other VSE NLE type add-ons seem to play nice with yours so far with just experimenting…

Build #51192/Linux works fine

If you return to the scene that contains the clip you want to grab another shot from, set new start/end times and it will copy those (times) into your edit scene instead. The script is smart enough not to recreate another scene with another copy of the clip, it just re-uses the first version.

I gather that the script works by allowing you to select the shot you want from the File Browser, then sends that to it’s own scene. Then the user scrubs the timeline for the prefered in/out points and sets them as start/end times.
These start/end times are noted when you return to the master timeline/scene and another version of the strip is imported with these times applied.
So you aren’t duplicating media from that earlier scene, don’t do color correction there or anything, save it till you get to the master scene.

@3pE thanks,
Now that I have played with it some more, there doesn’t look there is any type of link to the created scene other than it will not make additional ones. Since there is no link back it doesn’t make sense to add additional scenes. The slip add-on does not work on the created scene strip btw, only the “master scene” strips.

I am curious to see how this all works out in my gig work flow over time.

The Slip function of the Seq Extras Addon can only alter Soft Cut handles, where the scene with the strip in it has absolute first and last frames. There just isn’t anything to slide. And you dont need to do that on the source side anyway.

3pointEdit has described how the script works very well.
If you click on edit range it creates a new scene that has an unique name which is associated with the selected file in the file browser. This file is added to the new scene’s timeline then. If you are back at your editing timeline and insert the file via the script, the script searches for the “range” scene which is associated with the selected file, adds the selected file as a strip to the timeline and then simply reads out the in and outpoints of the range scene and applies them to the newly created strip.

Thank you for the feedback :slight_smile:
If you click on edit range, the script does a check if a range editing scene for the selected file exists. If not, it creates the new scene, if yes, it skips the creation and simply switches to the appropriate scene.

So the movie strip in the edit range scene is in fact not related to the one you will add to the timeline in any way as the range is saven from the scene’s start and end frame. If you have set the start and endframe in the range scene to 30/70 for example and move the strip around to somewhere or even delete it, the strip you will create in your editing range will still have the 30/70 range.

So unfortunately I don’t plan to add multiple ranges for one file, simply because I see no way to handle this with blenders capabilities. Of cause it would be cool to have that feature as it’s provided by most NLEs, but that is not really possible at the moment.

What you can do is to set markers in the range timeline so you can change the range as quickly as needed.