Blender as a video editor.

Support Basics & Interface
1

Hi guys
I’ve just started experimenting with using blender as a video editor. I’ve found some nice tutorials.

A few queries though.
I know I need to update my GPU to take advantage of GPU rendering. Does this apply to video editing too or is it just the 3d models?
It’s taking a very long time to render videos. 4 or 5 times longer than movie maker was taking. I appreciate I’m now doing something much more complex with multiple layers but any speed tipa would be much appreciated.

Finally any addona you guys recommend?

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There are many neat addons for the VSE. For basic editing with clips and meta data try http://easy-logging.net
For animating scale, motion and rotation you must get https://github.com/kgeogeo/VSE_Transform_Tools

You can draft your edit in proxy mode (Blender can generate low res versions of your media first) then render out at high res.
If working with highly compressed media then yes blender won’t go fast (as it is not optimised for all that decompression stuff). If you have lots of layers it can go slow. In fact one of the best ways to make blender slow to a crawl is by scaling your media. Remember that the VSE does this automatically, that is it fits (squeezes) any imagery to fit the current project dimensions. Also this is exacerbated by anti aliasing in the project scene settings. The tip is to make sure that your project is the same dimensions as the source media.

And the VSE cannot leverage the video processing card (all GPU sorry), OpenGL can be used but its a bit of a hack as it is not an integrated render option in the scene settings.

EDIT: I just checked and you can render via OpenGL and get audio muxing, not sure how much faster it is though?

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Thanks for the info man I’ve taken a quick look and they both look useful especially the VSE transform tools.

I’ve been tring to add text in the VSE and annoyingly I can only find a way to add single line text so if i want multiline I have to do it manually. Is there a way to get the text to wrap?

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If you use the 3d scene to create text then you can define a paragraph box to type into. The subtitle tool in latest blender isn’t really designed to do lower third supers.