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Recently I had cause to edit a bit of a home video and I use iMovie to do what I wanted at the time. I enjoyed the experience but found myself wanting to have a bit more flexibility and control than iMovie offered. I have been a member here for a while and occasionally keep checking in on what blender is doing, so I remembered that it has a video editing capability - so thought I would check it out.

There seems to be a lot of flexibility available but I am at a bit of a loss where to start. I found a few videos but they are hard to reference when trying to do something and even just knowing where to look and how to manipulate the workspace is a bit tricky. A lot of my other searches seem to pull up info that was very out of date so that is confusing.

So are there any good resources / sites to get going in figuring out how to use the video editor? Ones that don’t really assume you know what your are doing first? :slight_smile:

I did find blendervelvets.org/ which seems to offer a good start - does any one have experience of it?

For reference I am running on a Mac. The video I will be wanting to edit will either be from a Nikon DSLR or an iPhone 6 (not mixed in the same project as one is at 24fps and the other 60fps).

I am going to want to do things like add overlays, sync music to the action, edit audio volumes in the clips, fade in/out sounds, cross fade clips, add titles stuff like that. At least for now once I get that down I can get a bit more adventurous.

Any advice, gotchas, or tips and tricks would be appreciated!

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This tutorial might be a good place to start. They also have some related tutorials near the bottom of that page.

3

Check out my youtube (in sig below) channel I have quiet a few VSE tutorials for different use cases.

First most important tip is tip generate proxies of your h264 footage. The heavily compressed video can cause issues on playback in Blender.
Check out the latest tutorial about this from the Gooseberry project.

You may need a gooseberry build but most of this relates to recent stable builds as well.

Also try to keep the scene size identical to the source vision, this increases performance (no resizing needed) and improves picture quality (scaling makes images soft).

4

Thank you for the replies that is some good info.

I am sorry I didn’t understand what you were saying here, do you mean the playback window at the same resolution as the source video?

Cheeers

5

And, for whatever it’s worth, I use Final Cut Pro. (Actually, quite an old version now.)

I’m not saying that you can’t use VSE, nor that VSE has not become “in fact, very good.” It’s just that I don’t.

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If you really want to use the VSE for editing I strongly recommend using this addon http://www.easy-logging.net
Log all of your footage with metadata and cut it into your scene just like a real NLE