Help redesign the Blender Video Sequence Editor!

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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The Blender Video Sequence Editor needs some love!

Blender is a solid foundation. With a bit of effort, I think the VSE could be made an excellent video editor. It starts with some VSE UI modernization, and bringing easy “packaging” of 2d compositing setups and 3d render scenes into “Effects” which can be configured and used from the VSE.

I’ve written up some starting ideas and goals here:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Jeske/MockupIdeaVideoEditing

And here is a quick visual guide and comparison of the VSE to Premiere.

blender vse vs primere.jpg1200×900 347 KB

Let’s see your mockups and hear your ideas!

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I would also recommend looking at or demo-ing Sony Vegas, which is one of the best laid out video editors in my opinion. It basically covers the fundamentals in both layout and options.

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Totally Agree… If you look at my Wiki document, I have several screenshot examples pulled from Sony Vegas.

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Just checked it out. Glad you have it as reference along with the other editors. If I have some time open later, I’ll see if I cant contribute in the form of a mock up or two.

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wish I knew more about the editing side of blender (and other software) to give decent feedback.

but if you actually get to building something and make your own build i’d love to test some things out.

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I agree, Vegas and Premiere have nice, functional industrial interfaces. However, given the choice I’d rather see the VSE’s performance issues addressed first. Alexandr Kuznetsov proposes just this in his Google Summer of Code project:

http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2013/alexku/31001

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Alexandr is working on the performance re-architecture of the VSE stuff as we speak. This post is about generating UI mockups and feature priority ideas to try to provide some inspirational and aspirational mockups. You can read more about Alexandr’s work here…

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:AlexK/Gsoc2013/scheduler
http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/soc-2013-dev/

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To me, the most useful feature for me would be updated snapping tool so that you could snap to the nearest clip… snapping to the nearest second / 10 frames is rarely useful :frowning:

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Avid and Final Cut Pro has been the standard almost in every professional production. So I would try to mimic their behaviour as much as possible. Premiere and Sony Vegas has nothing to do with Avid and Final Cut Pro so if you have to get ideas from a software do it from the big guys and not from minor softwares.

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Are you suggesting we should mimic them because they are popular, or because they have the best interfaces and feature sets? I’ve only used Vegas and Premiere so I can’t make a comparison, but I can say that popularity is probably the worst reason to copy anything.

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for me the main thing which would make me use the VSE more (although this is probably not just a UI enhancement) would be if I could zoom right into a WAV waveform and match my automations etc. to it.

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My experience with a range of NLEs is that the UI is tailored to it’s strengths. Avid is very intuitive for making and trimming cuts. Final Cut Pro 7 was great for adding and modifying media both on the timeline and in the bin. The NLE at my day job is maximised for metadata.

I think that you might want to consider what functionality to target, then work around that. Perhaps there are multi modes of working. Instead of lumping all possible workflows into one screen layout?

Also Blender was always just a string out tool with some great mods on top. My biggest gripe was the mixing of audio and video strips. This makes everything in Blender uniquely flexible but supremely confusing.

Anyway my key suggestions are and always have been:

  • Asset browser that retains metadata in a clip, like subclips or keywords (saved in/outpoints)
  • Somewhere to edit metadata for video media (source window)
  • Ability to set in / out points on both source and timeline
  • Ability to assign an edit type, Insert or Overwrite - Video / Audio or Video only or Audio only or Video / Audio split
  • Direct source to specific timeline tracks (Audio or Video targeted)
  • Associated Audio and Video media should, by default, be linked to each other on the timeline (with the ability unlink or link alternate associated media)
  • Ability to trim and slip media once it is on the timeline, with ripple and without.

These really should form the basis of any “editing” system. From here it would be a matter of assigning key strengths.

And i would second the suggestion that we strive for a strong UI that is Blender specific (theres some awesome flexibility there) but informed by what has gone before. Don’t forget that there are copyright issues with key editing concepts in NLEs too. Mostly held by Avid I believe.

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Also I still am not sure how nodes are supposed to be glued on top of the VSE? Everyone wants it but how do you translate time offsets and variable (linear progression) with node compositing, which is constructed in a static UI. eg. how do you deal with strips that have different start times but rely on each other for output?

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I’ll just toss out there that I have two bachelors from a major California university in the area of film production and digital media as well as an associates from a trade school here in Los Angeles that focused on film and vfx production. To get to the point, over the years I have had to use everything from final cut to avid to premier when it comes to video editing. Even with access to some of the most expensive video editing applications, which I was proficient enough in, I still found the work flow and layout of apps like Sony Vegas better.

So the moral of the story is that you cant base the best layout on what you perceive as the more popular application. This isnt to say that Final Cut is bad, in fact I quite liked it at the time and they have tried to make it more pretty over the years. I think ultimately though that layout and usability are more important that another apps color scheme and stream lined visuals. One problem with editors is that you are either given too much visual noise (buttons, toggles, information and cutter) or too little (sparse over simplified interfaces). Vegas Pro has in my mind the right balance which makes it easy enough for new comers yet not crippled to the point where experienced editors feel limited. Ultimately whatever is done should be familiar and intuitive, yet still have something uniquely Blender.

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In Vegas there’s this feature where if you overlap two strips in the same channel, they automatically get crossfaded. It’s one of the features i miss most in the Blender VSE.

http://www.storyguide.net/studios/V11Snap29.PNG

http://www.storyguide.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/transition1.png

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Agree. Vegas and also Acid for that matter are really fast and intuitive to work with. Worth mentioning is how easy it is to drag the handles on the clip and create fade-in-outs.

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Yeah, now that you mentioned grabbing the handles, the Blender VSE doesn’t seem to have a Cyclic option for movie strips, or at least i wasn’t able to find it. If you want to have a looping video you can only do it by duplicating multiple instances of that strip instead of just grabbing it by the side and stretching to where you want the loop to end.

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I often create fades that are dissimilar on each side or top to bottom. I can see the value of such a drag to dissolve, but prefer a simple fade value on the strip as a curve in the timeline. This speaks to the notion of vertical vs horizontal transitions. Currently Blender just uses vertical stacking.

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I guess blender’s vse doesn’t have enough functions other than the addons, to worry about visual button clutter. But I’m all for user editable button docks.

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Thanks folks, this is exactly the type of SPECIFIC detailed feature and usage feedback I want to hear. Keep it up!!

I’m going to keep my comments brief, but know that I’ve read and noted everything mentioned here on my personal todo. Eventually I’ll work it into a plan on the wiki.

  1. on the topic of Avid vs Final-Cut vs Sony-Vegas … It’s clear all of them have strengths and weaknesses. Blender VSE isn’t going to become a “clone” of any of them. However, they have all been heavily used for VSE for a long time now, and there is probably at least one feature/UI element to glean from each one of them. The best way to help is for users experienced with these tools to share their FAVORITE and LEAST-FAVORITE things about those packages… (just like some of you have already done)

  2. @3PointEdit - thanks for the super-detailed list. I’m curious, where do these tools normally store metadata? Are there any particular solutions you are happy with and unhappy with there? What about multi-user metadata?

  3. “Compositing, 3d and the VSE” -> This is clearly pivotal to a great VSE. Node setups already have keyframing attribute values, so they do handle time variance. What we need is a way to package a blender scene, with compositing and/or 3d, into a “reusable effect scene”. When we do this, we should be able to…

a) … export any compositing animatable attributes as the “external control” for the scene (possibly through drivers). For example, for a Vignetting effect, there might be “color”, “radius”, and “falloff”. Once this is packaged, these attributes could be keyframed directly in the VSE. In the future we could even allow node-setups to have “custom” python-coded UI widgets for their attributes… like an Audio VU meter, etc.

b) …configure/export external video-inputs to the scene (much like composing node video inputs)… these might be used directly in 2d compositing, or they might be placed on a 3d texture on a 3d object… For example, a page-flip transition can be a scene with a 3d book page flip, with two video sources mapped to the pages.

c) …configure/export external “3d logic / driver / scripting variables”, such as text for a titling animation… This could be used either directly to feed a field creating the 3d text-object creation… or it could be used by some new types of modifiers or python script to do per-letter object creation and animation

d) Then we allow the VSE to control speed/time of the effect clip. By setting the effect duration, you are slowing down or speeding up time with respect to the “effect scene” (which has some challenges) An IPO curve can even give you variable time control of the “effect scene” right from with the VSE and a graph editor (or a new VSE customized graph editor). (Ohh and we need an asset browser)

This heavily leverages all of what Blender already is, and my hope is this will be easier to code than you might think. In a sense blender already has all of these features independently. What is needed is some encapsulating and glue UI to wrap scenes up nicely into the VSE. Then we can use all of blender’s power to create effects for the VSE. At the same time, the user can “go pro” on an effect scene at any time, directly opening and altering it’s details to get whatever effect he wants.

There are some loose ends for sure. Here are some brainstorm thoughts about them…

  1. time-scaling issues… There will be situations where an effect shouldn’t be stretched, but repeated, or just “length controlled” (aka, show the first N seconds of the 50 second effect available). These are pretty easy to handle. There may be more complicated issues… fortunately, users will always have the answer to “go in and edit the effect directly”

  2. Effect animations may want to often take in “lists” of things. The simplest list is just the list of characters in a text-title. If the animator wants to cause the letters to swirl around in a cloud before finally coming to rest together… This can be done in Python, but AFAIK there is no way to handle this automatically for any text input by an animator. Ideally we would come up with some kind of “input array” modifier or logic-tool… which would allow you to take a list of characters, list of objects, list of images, list of videos, etc… make an aniamtion for one of them, and then define some way to repeat/shift/randomize/alter the animation for the entire list.

That’s all I have for now. If you have thoughts about this compositor/3d/VSE integration topic, I’d love to hear them!