Right now, I am using blender to do video editing for a 1080p, 60fps video I took which lasts about 10 minutes and takes up about 50,000 frames. Blender is extremely slow; like it takes 1 minute to load me clicking on one frame of the video. The only thing thats there is the video and audio. Blender becomes unresponsive and it just loads for ever. Before you ask any questions about my computer, i’m using a Macbook Air which has 4GB of RAM and a 1.3GHz Intel Core i5 processor. It has Intel HD Graphics 5000 and is the 2013 model. Basically, it has plenty of RAM and a good processor to use blender. Before this video, I’ve made two other videos which were about 6 minutes each in the same resolution and frame rate, which weren’t more than 30k frames. All of the sudden, (in the same blender update) it becomes REALLY slow for everything. It isn’t my CPU because i’ve already made sure Blender was the only thing taking up any power and it doesn’t even use 1GiB of RAM.
I’m wondering: is 50,000 frames too much for blender? I have never edited this much video before and it is almost impossible to edit at all with how slow it is. One would think that 10 minutes of video is not that much…
This problem has not gradually got worse, It literally happened like this: I woke up one day to edit, opened my last save and noticed that it took unusually long to load so I just did a reset. After waiting for it to load again, it took a full minute to load after I attempted to click on one single frame to cut. If you need more information, please ask because I’m not sure what else to say. I know it isn’t my computer because my Mac is fast for everything else and this just happened out of ordinary. Before this, everything was instant.
Maybe that’s because of your file? Blender (or other editing software) can be very slow with some video formats.
Rioken -> Natron is not a video editing software, and to do this, it should be slower than Blender which is a not that bad video editing software.
With the right format (jpeg animation), I can edit realtime 2578x1080 videos.
I agree with VincentG here, Blender is not optimized to handle what I guess could be high bit rate, highly compressed h264. 1080 60fps is asking a lot, possibly even of your Mac Air to be frank. Why not transcode to Blender’s proxy system, its a simple case of selecting the strips and going to the Strip Properties Panel on the right of the timline, then Rebuilding the proxies. Assuming you have defined the scale and path for your proxies.
This is how “Proper” video editing software does it as well, only they tend to make proxies in the background so that you aren’t aware of it.
EDIT: Re-reading your post, if the large file loaded fine on an earlier version of the project , then try making a fresh project and import the footage again. Just in case your current project is somehow corrupt. Also try downloading an earlier version of Blender to make sure that there isn’t some new bug making the load slow.
if you do the proxy creation by exterlan tools (ffmpeg) you will get even more performance gain. on my linux box 1080p prores/dnxhd in quicktime containers runs noticeably faster than blenders internal jpeg proxies.
if you do the proxy creation by exterlan tools (ffmpeg) you will get even more performance gain.
on my linux box 1080p prores/dnxhd in quicktime containers runs noticeably faster than blenders internal jpeg proxies.
@themonster generally spoken: You’re right, practically you’re wrong because some people use it and it can produce proper i.e. PNGs and WAVs
Hi Whose Chaos,
I had problems using Blender as well especially with really long videos which is basically everything beyond 15000 frames I guess.
Generally I have to save the work after every step because blender uses to crash very often when I try to playback.
Which produces a lot of save-files, which grow bigger every time: For the last short video of a total of about 3 minutes, FullHD after (not continually) one month of work I produced 506 save files of which the first one is 510.6 kB, the last one is 922.2 kB of size.
But using proxies it loads very fast on my PC.
Memory: 18.6 GiB
Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz × 4
Available disk space: 113.0 GiB
Also before I want to “animate” I have to save and reload the saved file to be able to export properly (to PNG).
60fps I can imagine is pretty hard work for Blender, I guess decompressing the files a little using proxies could help.
I guess you also don’t always need the “Audio Scrubbing” and can turn that off, which makes things faster.
One other thing: disk speeds:
I guess your Macbook Air has a SSD hard disk which quite makes a difference to non-SSD hard disks!
Secondly you should always use a fast external hard disk for video editing, which in case of Macbook Air means minimum
a good, fast USB 3.0 device for FullHD, with an even faster thunderbolt hard disk it will be even more fun, but is not necessary.
Yeah but generally I also would like to ask to some developers who are willing to respond even Blender is not mainly a VSE:
How to optimize the workflow for longer video editing?
@zybil, you can not complain that blender is too slow editing video because is not a video editor, yes, you can edit video, and is awesome, but no complain about speed, jejeje
@whose chaos you have an option of split so many frames in small group or scenes, and do the editing, and then edit those small videos in one full track… can be an option
Considering that there’s been some articles stating the VSE is the best video editing tool that FOSS can provide right now, the only real option if you need something better (and without constraints like watermarks, limited output options, and non-commercial clauses) is to get your wallet out and pay for a commercial solution.
There is simply nothing out there that would allow for true, pro-level work for free, any enhancements the Blender VSE gets is to get it to where it can handle the editing of the open movie projects (which don’t have 50,000 frames).
…" is to get your wallet out and pay for a commercial solution".
I will just ask you guys out of curiousity…
When i am reading forums of my country (Ukraine and also russians forums) all of the users will say something like; "go there and download it for free, go on the torrent, download it, here is the hacked serial number, there is a crack, go on that link and you will find it, when hackers are planning to crash this version of Maya or that version of After effects "
But when i am reading english language forums is always something like "you have to pay, why is so expensive, omg i have to work whole year only to buy Element 3d and some others plugins for AE, Action Essentials.
You guys maybe will judging me i know its not fair and its some peoples hard work so they want us to buy it and maybe its illigal. But in my country its naturally to download it for free since its only a few can afford such expencsive software with our salaries 150 (one hundred fifty dollars per month) Thankfully i working in UK but anyway i still spending a lot of the time in my country…
I have Maya After Effect Element 3d Photoshop and many others programs i didnt paid nohing for this. But i prefer Blender.
I am asking you guys why would you pay? All of you such honest or just rich?
For one thing, paying for your software is the right thing to do (the companies spend a ton of money on R&D, development salaries, hardware, marketing, ect…). The truth is creating professional-quality software is not cheap (even Blender is only where it is today because the BF has spent hundreds of thousands of Euros over the last ten years financing paid development positions).
For another, discussion on cracks and illegal torrents is against the rules here and actively promoting and/or linking to it might get you banned.
because is not a video editor, yes, you can edit video, and is awesome, but no complain about speed, jejeje