Hey Carlos thank you for coding this. I will definitely check it out!
My first reaction though is that jumping to start-end of a strip is currently accomplished through page up/page down in the VSE. Does your script offer anything more?
Will get back to you with feedback.
Carlos I’ve tested it and I really like it. This addon is very helpful for video editing and I recommend it.
The only feedback I can provide is that it’s probably gonna be more usable as a shortcut. I noticed that moving the mouse pointer to the N panel meant that I had to return back to the playhead which is causing delays if you need to do further adjustments. A lot of time is wasted moving back and forth in the VSE space and this is nothing a shortcut shouldn’t fix.
Again, a big thanx for coding this!
Carlos I’ve trying to use it for the last half our and here’s my feedback: #1. it’s unstable: you say that the strip should be selected but you don’t specify which strip. It usually copies only the video and not the audio --when the video strip is selected. If the audio strip is selected in crashes blender upon pressing the ‘copy source’ button. If both strips are selected pressing the copy source button also results in a royal crash. I’ve tested this with many different clips (container+vid/audio codec combos) so debugging should focus on copying the sources. There is something wrong there. #2. it’s behavior is somewhat weird. If the video strip is selected, copy source works, and paste source also works. There are two issues with that. First, a new strip is overlayed on top of existing strips -you say it’s a bug which should be fixed as it’s disorienting. However, it’s not a big deal and if one knows about this they can avoid clicking on it. The main problem is that when the source is pasted in the master scene (or wherever) the video strip corresponds to the source in/out marker points but the whole audio strip is copied i.e. untrimmed. As it typically occupies more VSE space, it makes working in the VSE difficult and eventually one needs to cut the audio strip which in a way defeats what you’re trying to avoid (namely cutting the strips in the container scenes).
After playing with this for a while I’ve come to realize that 3point’s edit workflow proposal is brilliant. If you can produce a script which materializes it, the speed of video editing in Blender will be increased by a factor of 10 -and that’s even a conservative estimation!
Looks like you’re on the right track so keep up the good work.
If you are trying to more than one strips (audio and video, ie) together you must make a META and then copy the meta… or, better if you work with a new scene that contains audio and video in the timeline…
I’m finetuning a script to create structured scenes from a footage folder and it works fine. Only you can’t avoid to work with a lot of scenes, cos every clip is in a new scene. Try it with meta or scenes and tell me.
The auto import sounds like a great idea. I guess meta clips are ok for copy/paste but are awkward for making split edits. That is, where the audio comes in before or after the edit point.
@3pointedit: ok. This sound issue may be solved with a button operator to extract audio from metastrips, working similar to unlink in FCP, do you think so?
@blendercomp: you can define keystrokes for jump prev & next:
The operators are called jumpprev and jumpnext. The other functions are not yet working with keystrokes…
I’m not a python guru (just a motivated apprentice) and any help checking the code will be great.
That is really well thought out Carlos, good work and great docs too! It’s a shame that we have to use the word scene so much as it gets confusing. Perhaps you could call them “Blender Scenes” and “Script Scenes”.
I have tested Jump cut again and now the trimmed copy paste is working (no strange tails). Thankyou!
I have quickly tried the other script (hipostasiator.py) but had trouble specifying the correct path? I built a footage “folder tree” as you suggest, but I couldn’t get Blender to recognise the structure and make scenes. I am using windows XP and notice that there is a “Windows error 3 The system cannot find the path specified”.
I am unsure about how I should select only a path (folder) without selecting footage?
Hey Carlos, I just tried the Jump to edit script again and found something interesting about your trimmed meta clips.
I made some footage (video and audio) into a Meta Clip then selected In and Out points.
I copied it into another sequence, then I wanted to edit the audio.
So I UnMeta-ed the strip. At this time the clip expanded back out to the original length of the source footage.
I guess that was because Blender applied the handle trims to the Meta not the original strip?
Im looking in other scripts like images_to_planes importer to find a way to select the folder in a file window… That script works in windows?
And for the audio-meta issue may you can:
duplicate the meta. shift+D and then press Y to move two channels away.
unmeta the new meta and remove video strip.
go into the first meta and mute sound. (select meta and press TAB, deselect all and press TAB to go back)
and recut the sound as you wish…
Now you can forget to copy and paste because “Load All Scenes” button get this working without using the clipboard (that usually gives me some seg faults)
Also i recomend not use cut strip command, it get’s you out of the “Conservative Experience” (to help later with sound, grade and cc)
I’ll try to make another button/operator to extract sound from scene-strips and paste all in a meta, considering IN and OUT in each strip. To work all sound in the master timeline.
Could you reverse engineer a sequence on the master timeline, allowing for shot grading in Comp Nodes? That is, could you generate a scene for node adjustment of a trimmed shot?
I guess there would be cyclic dependencies? Or could you gather the shot durations of the original media and port that to a grading scene? Then reload that graded shot into the master sequence?
Yes. You can do it, for example, copy the strip you want to nodegrade, import it in the image editor, feed to the nodes, check render composition and create the grade you want. Return back to the first scene and replace the strip with a scene strip of the new created scene. Then you render and get the node graded scene. Obviously this is a lot of clicks and will be fine to automatize…
If you grade the entire sequence and only uses a part (ie from 100 to 120 fr) in the master timeline, i suppose blender only render through nodes this 20 frames.
But the difference is that node images are feed by image datablocks, and sequencer are strips created on the fly, not linked to datablocks. Thats why i am looking to merge images_to_planes with the footage importer, and make an operator to instert the image datablock to the timeline. If all your clips are imported as image datablocks you are (in theory) able to load them in the timeline or in the node editor, you can view all of them in the image editor (and maybe use texture painting like a garbagge matte). Also you can imagine the 3dviewer like a clip viewer like in apple color, with a plane for each clip, with texture assigned to that clip, where you can order clips by similar colors or shot fields to grade.
Thats what i want to achieve with the Scene per Clip workflow. If you get the structure of the script you only need to load the image strip through nodes and replace in the timeline with the current scene. Then you set in and out, and reimport to the master timeline. It should work.
Now i need to test if all of this stuff is true… XDDD
with today’s SVN version I achieved to get this working with a lot of seg faults in between. Often blender trow an error window with “no camera” (non sense), but if you save and restart blender, it seems to start showing the linked scene (not rendered to file) graded with nodes in other scene, only for a while and when scrubbing it gets blanck again. I think it’s a bug related to proxies (not actually active but "in a way, working…) Far from stable, i suppose we must wait to see it working…
I just had a look at the Dynamic Paint tool, hmmm. http://www.miikahweb.com/en/tutorials/dynamic-paint-guide
I wonder if there is an easy way to create animated mattes with that? Perhaps by animating an object to smear over a plane. There’s another scene use - Matte shapes, I guess you could access the movie texture for a reference background too.
