I was wondering just how well Blender performs at the task of purely being a video editor? What are its limitations (or missing features) when compared to other video editing software? Are there add-ons which make it more comparable to other video editing software?
I only need a tool for combining a few movie clips together with sound and music, but I want to add transition effects, text and animated graphics or models superimposed onto the movie. It would be really nice to have the 3d modeling/rendering capability and a full suite of video editing tools all in one program. I haven’t had a chance to learn Blender’s video sequence editor but was really hoping it will show promise.
Would it be worth while to devote some time to learning the video sequence editor to accomplish this or should I seek other applications?
My render tower has swappable HDDs so I have configured Blender 2.7 + cuda to run on both Linux Ubuntu 16.04 and Windows 8.1 environments (depending on mood…).
There are no really good professional NLE editors on Linux with the exception of Davinci Resolve and Nuke Studio. Both full versions cost lots of money. But there is a free version of Resolve available for Windows and MacOS (sadly there is none for Linux).
There is also a Non Commercial version of Nuke Studio available (for all platforms), but some features are limited (resolution for example, max is HD) and you can only use it in an non-commercial context.
For Linux, Kdenlive is probably the best way to go. Flowblade looks promising too, much more Avid-like. But Kdenlive has really come a long way in the past few years and seems pretty solid for me when I’m booted into Linux.
If you already know other parts of Blender the investment to learn VSE is not so big, and it should work well for the things you want to do. I usually end up creating text in other programs, iirc the text-handling is very basic. There is one big limitation I run into alot, I cant do several things at the same time, for instance fade in and scale a clip (is this on rightclickselect?). Pretty easy to work around using meta clips once you get the hang of it
If you use something like handbreak to make sure all of your video coming into blender is at a fixed frame rate (keeps it in sync with the audio) it can do alright as a video editor, my brother has been playing around with vfx and the huge problem for us was fixing framerates.
Although I am quite sure that you can … I don’t. I use Final Cut Pro on my Mac.
It’s just my opinion, but I have learned how to use the various convenience features of FCP to let me “get into the groove” of editing and I have become very fluent with it … for material that does include CG as well as material that does not.
I am trying to use the blender video editor for a simple task: composing a slide show video, consisting of a series of photos. I need a video of a non-standard image size and blender is the only Linux editor I tried so far that allows me to set any custom dimensions (2800Ă—1050px specifically).
I learned to import individual images and set their duration and transitions. But is there a way to insert multiple images at once, setting equal duration and transitions for all of them?
I succeeded at importing an entire folder of images, but the result is one compact strip where each of the images represents one frame only.
Sorry for this newbie question, any hints will be greatly appreciated. Thank you!
You can use Blender purely as a video editor, but do keep in mind it wasn’t designed as such.
Pixel for pixel, frame for frame, it can match any video editor out there.
However, expect to spend a lot more time doing the simple stuff. For example you can’t just display some text over your video. Nah, that would be too simple. You have to make text objects, in 3d, set up their materials, animate them, render them using a render engine and composit them into the video.
If that sounds acceptable to you, go for it, if not, find another solution.
Today, there are a number of very fine open-source video editors. Both ShotCut and OpenShot come very highly recommended by many. Both are free, open-source and multi-platform. Both are used, or so I have been told, for professional work.
“A video editor is likely to be a tool that you will be using for many hours at a time.” The footage that you are working with may or may not be CG-sourced. Whatever tool you decide to use – even if that tool is Blender – it needs to be “a comfortable, familiar tool in your hands.”
So, I’d encourage you to “play the field.” Download both of the tools that I’ve mentioned (say …) and “kick the tires,” working both with Blender-produced footage and (say …) stuff from your phone. (And, of course, “give Blender its fair shake, as well!”)
Thanks for the tips! I’ll definitely check the alternatives you mention.
Does anybody know the answer to my particular question - is it possible to import a set of images at once, setting equal durations (longer than 1 frame) and transitions to all of them?
Thank you!
Add all the images at once. They will come in at 1 frame per image as you say.
Grab the right handle of the image strip and drag it out, so in this case I had 10 images, so I dragged it out 90 frames, overall length is now 100 frames.
Select this strip and add a Speed Control: SHIFT+A => Effect Strip => Speed Control.
Set the speed factor to 0.1 - the clip now runs at one tenth speed so each image last 10 frames.
Hope this helps you, just adjust vales for what you want. The only thing you need to work out is how long each image should last so you can do the maths to calculate overall strip length and speed factor.
Cheers, Clock.
Alternatively you will need to write a python script to do this.
