Power Sequencer is a new open source add-on for Blender’s VSE. It’s designed by content creators, for content creators.
Blender isn’t the easiest video editor to learn or the fastest out of the box, but it’s probably the most stable you’ll find out there. And with this add-on, it becomes a lot more pleasant to work with:
Available features
Instant import: finds and imports all new videos, images and sound files in your project folder
Cut, trim and edit faster than ever in Blender with smart mouse-based tools
Instant fades and crossfades
Build better proxies with FFmpeg, using a Python script
Render HD videos for Youtube, Twitter and Facebook in one keyboard shortcut
And more! As someone who makes game creation tutorials with Blender professionally, I use Power Sequencer daily and keep improving it. It’s a Free, community-driven project, so you’re also welcome to modify it and to submit your own patches
The add-on kept making progress since the first post with the help of Daniel Oakey. I’m busy with work but it’s mostly ready for the 1.0 stable release now!
It’s possible but may not be worth it. I can’t think of use cases that you can’t solve efficiently with alternate tools. Do you have examples in mind? If you need to trim in one channel the mouse cut tools now handle that. Trimming in all channels as well is efficient with the tool.
In the rare case you’d have strips sandwiched, with many overlaid pictures for instance, like at the end of a project, and you could make use of a feature like this, chances are:
You’d be better off working with a few metastrips
Blender’s limited performances might make it hard to do work at all so you’re also better off avoiding this situation
There are a lot of small issues to take in account when creating tools like these, like the fact that you can safely move markers back if you trim the entire frame range but not if you target a specific selection, even if you may want that at times. Ripple edits would be hard to get right as well.
The last issue with box select is it’s built into Blender and I couldn’t get it to chain with custom features from the add-on, although Blender supports that in theory. If this can work there’s already code in place to find and cut strips instantly. But again the first step is always to start from the problems and figure out the most intuitive solutions.
Development is going well on version 1.1! Thanks to sudopluto we’ve got a much better proxy builder tool: it can report on the percent of videos built with FFMPEG, which is the first step to integrate it in Blender.
We are also working on multithreaded rendering! Some tools exist already but we’re trying to make a script that not only works, but that is maintainable, and that you could eventually run from within Blender.
Daniel also added a technology from the BBC that can automatically synchronize audio with your footage when you import it. It is going to need some testing but it’s quite promising, that’s something you won’t find in most nonlinear editors
As always, it’s all Free Software. Help is much welcome to work on new features, small tutorials, to help the project grow and keep going!
I just took a better look on it , and seems to be great ! Operators are really well crafted and thinked !
I’m not so fond of the mouse hovering ones, but in a totally subjective way, i can see their utility !
Great news for multithreaded rendering, did you take a look at MikeyCal’s script ?
Works like a charm !
Also great hearing about a auto sync tool ! would it work like external tools (say plural eye for example ?)
Would it be integrated into blender or as an external script ?
Great news for multithreaded rendering, did you take a look at MikeyCal’s script ?
Sure, wanted to contribute to it directly but… the code is huge and all procedural. It needs a complete rewrite to become maintainable. We’ve got a simpler script based on pulverize that we’re going to clean up and make future proof next.
Would it be integrated into blender or as an external script ?
It should all be integrated in Blender eventually, as time permits. All scripts work with a command line interface so you can call them from within Blender. Just gotta make sure you can safely cancel the operation anytime and you get proper progress reporting.
The speed at which we can do all that really depends on contributors. Video editing is only a small part of my work so…
Also great hearing about a auto sync tool ! would it work like external tools (say plural eye for example ?)
It’s available inside Blender. Gotta do some testing though and document it as it relies on an external tech and sizeable Python scripts/libs.
installed it, wonderful. I have a problem though: if I delete an effect (gamma cross), it deletes the refered strip also. I work around this problem by duplicating the strip before, then replace the empty slot. Question to Nathan: am I doing something wrong?
The port is in progress. There is a Pull Request open right now
on the repo. It might not be up to date as Razvan is doing the
work locally on his machine. That’s just to show people we’re on
it: