Thanks. I had already spent some time on the blog, and I had stumbled on some of your YouTube videos. I just subscribed to your channel and looked at “Subclip example for VSE”. I’ll definitely try the “jump to cut” add-on today.
Here’s my story. Maybe what I was trying to acheive with VSE-scene-within-VSE-scene is best done some other way.
We needed a “quick product tour” video at the company where I work, to post on our new YouTube channel, so the obvious thing would be to get a sales guy to demo the product while we roll cameras. The sales guys are of course fully occupied selling (and usually out of the office), so it came down to me (computer programmer) as writer / on-screen talent / editor / 3d animator, and our IT guy (who’s also an accomplished photographer) as director / cinematographer / lighting director. It’s an interesting change from what I normally do all day, but it’s definitely a challenge.
I downloaded Blender 2.70 the Friday before last, and surprised myself by managing to rattle off a usable logo animation on the first afternoon. I had spent a day trying to learn Blender 2.40 (I think it was) some years back, and found it completely non-intuitive. This time, with 2.70, was much easier! It took a few more days to figure out rendering for a product model exported from SolidWorks (lots of re-texturing) and to come up with an animated title sequence. While I was using Blender for that, I had a look at the VSE, and particularly liked the multi-camera thing. We were thinking of using Adobe Premiere CC, but we’re giving Blender a chance, at least for our first 1-2 videos.
3pointEdit, here’s where it starts to look like the stuff on your YouTube channel.
We set up a cheap studio in a spare office, and spent a couple of hours yesterday rolling a couple of cameras, an audio recorder and a screen capture from the product itself (using ffmpeg / x11grab, which I had to tweak a bit to make it work over a LAN), while I struggled in agony to get my lines, if not right, then at least sort-of acceptable. A real broadcast personality would no doubt have done it in 1-2 takes, but I’m not that guy.
So today I’m looking at a timeline in VSE with tons of clips on it, which I have synchronized mostly by sound (the screen capture had no audio, so it’s painstakingly aligned by looking for changes on the screen in one of the camera feeds).
That part was really quick and easy for the audio tracks, so Premiere CC’s automatic audio alignment feature doesn’t seem like much of a time-saver. You just need something else to do while you’re waiting after checking “draw waveform” each time (such as typing what you’re reading now). Next time, just before I clap my hands I’ll say something like “time synchronization, instrument says 12:34:56”, so I can at least get the screen capture within a second (and probably more like 100ms) without so much effort, using the clap sounds.
The main pain to this point was that one of my cameras can’t record 1080p-30, instead recording 1080p-60, so I had to transcode it to an almost-lossless format with a frame-rate change, in order to line it up in Blender. I used ffmpeg for that, because I couldn’t figure out how to get Blender to skip every other frame for just one track.
Anyhow, now I have all these time-synchronized tracks, and I need to:
- isolate the parts that are going in the final video, which might be several clips from one video
- use the multi-camera selector to switch between cameras as necessary during each of those
- maybe use some transitions at those camera changes
- get all the thus-processed tracks onto a VSE sequence (this requirement is what prompted my post here)
- add my intro sequence, some overlaid animations and an exit sequence
- add transitions
- save video
I will look at whether “jump to cut” can do what I need. I read the “VSE scripts you can’t live without!” article on your blog, then installed “extra sequencer actions” and “jump to cut”. To get something out the door for review today, though, I think I’ll wind up animating each excerpt to MKV/HuffYUV/PCM, then setting up a video sequence to combine them. Once I learn some more, I hope to eliminate the need for giant lossless intermediate video files.
I also need to do something with the audio, but that’s another story. I’m hoping we don’t have to re-shoot. I should have used a shotgun microphone, I think, to get rid of echo and diminish fan noise from the product being demonstrated.