Difficulty Using Scenes in Blender VSE

Support Compositing and Post Processing
1

Apologies in advance that this is somewhat hard to explain…!

I want to make a video using the VSE. As I want to have multiple video clips, each with their own motion tracking, effects, node setups etc, I thought the best way to do this, would be to have a separate scene for each clip, and then to use a “master” scene, with the output of the other scenes being used as scene strips for input on the VSE.

I can setup the individual clips/scenes, and view them in the VSE preview window, but the preview only appears as the “solid” view, and without the background clip, so if I haven’t added any objects to the scene, it remains blank. Rendering a frame with f12 does however produce the expected result.

Can anyone tell me how I can see the background clip within the VSE preview, or suggest a better way of achieving this workflow? I understand that I could have a separate project for each clip, rendering them separately and using a final project for the combination and VSE aspect, but would prefer to keep it all in one place.

EDIT: was being slightly dumb. Changing the view to rendered gets the video to show up, but this is obviously very slow compared to a video (or proxy) with solid objects.

2

I think you nailed it ! I’ve tried to work like this but it’s a bit clumsy. I think a disk cache for VSE was added in last blender release (or 2.9) maybe that can help to have previews dynamically rendered. But it’s more aimed at previewing effects or slow codecs, I don’t know if that would work in your case. Proxy sound like a good option too.

3

Ah, that’s a real shame. Looks like rendering and reimporting to VSE will be my only option. I’ve used proxies to speed things up, but really wanted to keep it all integrated. Thanks anyway!