I’ll soon start working on an animated infographics video featuring vector elements and text, which have to enter and leave the screen in snappily animated ways.
In the past I’ve created this infographics animation using Apple Motion, a very affordable macOS alternative to After Effects.
But I’m back on Windows and I’m not planning to pay something like $ 20 per month for After Effects while I don’t create infographics animations very often.
Of course I’d love to use Blender for this as well. Would the VSE be the best choice for this, as it’s easy to work with 2D footage in the VSE?
In the past I’ve experimented with the VSE Transform Tools to bring Blender closer to After Effects, but I remember the preview quickly started to slow down after adding some effect strips.
At the Blender Conference of this year I attended a presentation about the VSE Power Sequencer add-on that will be part of Blender. Will that maybe solve the preview delays and make VSE Transform Tools work smoother? And is the Power Sequencer already integrated in Blender 2.81?
Or is it maybe smoother and more effective if I use the Import Images As Planes add-on to import all material as textured planes, then animate in Blender’s 3D space?
Any tips and suggestions are very welcome, thanks. This is an area of Blender I’m not very familiar with.
I don’t know the “power sequencer” thing. 2.80 VSE could stand some dev love, that’s for sure.
How it should work, is that animating on planes in 3D should give you more flexibility but be slower.
But I just recently did some playing around with video in the Eevee renderer and was pretty impressed with the speed. For straight, single channel video, there isn’t any significant performance hit for doing it in 3D (in Eevee rendering engine, not in Cycles), and for mixing video with alpha or whatever (gamma cross), Eevee might actually be faster than doing it in the VSE. (VSE really seems to chug with mixing like this.)
And there’s no reason to prefer Cycles to Eevee for this kind of work.
There are a few things you can do more easily in VSE (per-channnel time scaling comes to mind), but there are many many more things you can do more easily in 3D (like scaling or distortions.)
That said, I kind of dislike the images-as-planes addon. When you know what you’re doing, it saves you about two seconds per imported image. And for a lot of people, it prevents them from learning how to actually do things in Blender.
I would actually go as far as to make a huge maybe even 8k or 4k atlas with all the textures and vectors and just duplicate planes and edit uvs around to add new objects.
Thanks guys. Interesting. I’ll do some tests using Eevee.
For me the easiest part of the VSE approach would be to easily make images appear and disappear using the start and end time of a strip, in stead of keyframing visibility in the Graph Editor.
Yep, but keyframing start and end of visibility, then keyframing start and end of invisibility is more work than simply dragging the start or end of a VSE bar, especially when you’ve got about one hundred assets. That’s why I’d like to use the VSE if possible.
IMO it’s less work. It’s easier to hit ‘i’ on the frame you want than to try and jump around the timeline at the scale you need and drag some fiddly mouse handles. Even in the VSE, I keyframe alpha or use the knife instead of doing that. But I suppose it’s going to depend on how exact you want to be-- if you don’t care that much where a channel cuts in and out, maybe the mouse handles are easier for you.
That said, if you’re trying to mix a hundred channels, I suspect you’re trying to drive a screw in with a hammer because that’s what you know how to use.