Blender Special Effects

Hello. My name is Rick and I really like Blender.
My Blender use started with version 2.48 and have moved over to 2.5x to 2.7x.
I want to use Blender for editing video and add effects.
May I get some oppinion on how well Blender does this?
I will go to the web and have a look.
Thanks.

Blenders vse is quite capable and the compositor is very powerful, however it is more complicated to use than other apps. Please have a look at my YouTube channel for some examples as well as tutorials. Especially my short called Dream Big.

Thanks, I am holding on to Kdenlive and Openshot.Those have a familiar style that I like. Do you recommend any books that teach VSE? I did see one that was on compositing.

I liked Dream Big. Cool stuff. Did you use the built in transitions or make your own.
I think of putting video on planes and making other planes as wipes, in theory. :slight_smile:

I said I was going to hold on to Kdenlive, but Blender has other features that can be a big help. I may end up using Blender more.

You make anything a mask effect by adding a mask modifier to the strip you want to transition. Either create an animated mask in the UV editor or the movie Clip editor OR use another strip in the VSE timeline. But no, I don’t recall using any special transition effects.

You are right that adding images to planes can be very powerful, sadly Blender is no Nuke so you cannot send compositing instructions to the 3D view. You can do a lot but you must set up all alphas for keying first before mapping to a plane.

Here is my animated mask tutorial.

And this is the tutorial (example) using masks in the VSE

Excellent.
I saw a TV show where the an explosion and a fire effect was used. This effect must have taken about an hour to do and cost about 50 bucks to make. I think that they must have had a really low budget. With enough imagination can Blender do industrial grade effects?

Great.
I have a lot to learn and relearn.

I do not know if my replies are being seen.
Thanks for the tutorials.
I have a lot to learn and relearn.

Thanks, theres lots to learn and Blender CAN be made to achieve anything, it just takes a bit longer. Remember that After Effects and Nuke have a lot of paid for plug ins to help you create this stuff.

A while back there was an article or maybe a TV show or something that talked about the use of plug-ins. They were weighing the pluses and minuses of plug-ins versus manual way of doing things. This might have been in the 90’s to early 2000’s when I saw this.

Cost benefit depends upon delivery schedule. Although I can turn around simple stuff for TV news in a day as required, to do this I take time setting up Blender to be streamlined to a specific task. One way to do that is by modifying the start up file. And having a bunch of ‘free’ addons makes some tasks much easier.

I am using two monitors. It is going to be a big help.
I believe there appear to be 3 ways to work.
The first is to use the manual way through the UI.
The second is plug-ins and the third is scripting.
Maybe there is also a combination of the three.
This is my speculation at least.

Often the addons in Blender are single use, as they are often developed by users to address some tool shortcoming. So they can be a bit limited. I guess it depends on what tasks you would need to do the most often. eg. chromakeying presets can be setup with group nodes for fast efficient keying.

Thanks again. I have been working with some small video files. I have been learning how to do fade and wipe.

Learning how to Chroma Key, I went the Kdenlive and Open Shot route and now back to Blender. The first two are easy to do. I bet Blender may give more options for a reason. It is more complex but probably necessary.
I am on the track to see how VSE and the Compositor work together. Compositor -> VSE or VSE -> Compositor. Some one put Image ( node: Image as sequence) then connected it to Composite (node). All this feels familiar.

Basically Compositor > VSE.

Set up a scene as a Clip source. Call it same as source clip then add the clip as an input to the compositor. Perform keying in this scene. Make sure to turn on compositor in scene prefs and delete anything in the 3D view.

Create another scene to edit in the VSE. Add the clip scene and turn on alpha over as the blend type for this strip in its properties.

Place it over any background.

What Blender version do you consider stable? I have 2.74 and 2.75.