Wiki: Blender Video Sequence Editor

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manual-videosequencer.jpgBlender’s Video Sequence Editor (in short the “VSE”) is an old feature that has been used to edit Elephants Dream and also is used to edit in the Plumiferos project. After being almost forgotten for a time, the new focus made it take on as enthusiastic a development as the rest of Blender. Roger Wickes has written a section of the Wiki, in which he describes the use of the VSE in a very comprehensible way.

Roger Wickes writes:

One of the most significant and original features of Blender, the Video Sequence Editor, makes Blender a complete video production workstation, by allowing you to quickly and easily composite your animations and merge multiple scenes into a finished movie. This core functionality has finally been thoroughly documented in the Wiki.

It was a huge job that I totally underestimated, but completed because this entire subsystem is so rich and is a key component to Blender.

A very nice addition to the Wiki. Read it here.

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    • Cubedude04

      finally a good tutorial on the VSE Great job =D

    • Vassilios Boucer

      Great Job!
      Where can i found the Displace- Plug In and Animated Glow Plug In dll´s for Windows?

      Thanks!

    • Upham

      Well done Roger Wickes! I really appreciate the time and effort you put into this!

    • http://scottbenjamin.wordpress.com Scott Benjamin

      Well done!! I’ve been wanting to see something like this for a long time.

      Cheers

    • myselfhimself

      Hey big thanks for this long tutorial.

    • http://3d-synthesis.com ROUBAL

      Yes ! Great tutorial.

      We really needed it.

      Thanks a lot !

    • Renato Perini

      I noticed that this stuff is considered part of the “Manual” in the Wiki. Which manual? Is it possible to download it in PDF form?

      Thank you.
      Renato.

    • http://www.moditory.com [t0rc]

      Noticed that there is an acronym or word error at the top (SVE would be Sequence Video Editor; so one of them is wrong).

      Excellent point to post; the sequence editor really does have a lot of capabilities and it’s great to have some more information about it that will help everyone. Even for those who use it a lot and know what they’re doing it’s a good idea to read over material like this because you can usually find one or two tidbits that you didn’t know and occasionally you run over that little tip that completely changes the way you work.

      Keep up the good work BN!

    • http://mathiaspedersen.com MathiasPedersen

      @[t0rc]: Thanks for the heads-up. Corrected it.

    • Daniel

      Thank you, Roger Wickes!

    • Calvin

      I think the only thing it lacks is audio support (at least for us windows people.)

    • algerdino

      hmmmm interesting tutorial…….usefull

    • http://www.sprocketandlube.com javawocky

      Nice to see good clean docs for it at last. Having done some video editing in other packages, and worked with the editor in Blender, its close to being useful for everyday editing. Just needs a fast way to apply cross fades between strips easy editing of the sound strips to fade between cuts etc. And yes, you need to be able to edit sound on the strips themselves, with some kind of node editor/IPO window (like it does now in a seperate window with 0-100%)

    • http://mpan3.homeip.net mike pan

      Great work!

      “WARNING: This message is confidential and for its intended recipient only. If you have received this message in error, please report to your local health office and submit to a free brain wipe. Thank you.”

    • http://www.vernkassenaar.nl Joeri

      The Sequence editor is super. I had lots of fun with it, even exported EDL’s to our inhouse movie player. But,… I wish it was not called the Video Sequence Editor,… It sortof implies editing of video footage and it can’t do that (because of lack of audio support). It’s an Image Sequence Editor.
      Great work on the wiki. ( And it makes me proud robocop and wipeout are still in the plugin list )

    • Roger

      Everyone: Thanks for enjoying. I feel like a proud cook whose guests are full and happy. Speaking of happy, Happy Valentine’s Day! I certainly feel the love.

      @Renato: The entire user manual can be download by visiting Manual/Complete at any time, and then saving the page onto your hard disk. It will give you the up-to-the-minute version.

      @javawokey: The fast way to apply cross fades is to right click the first strip, shift-right-click the second overlapping strip, and then Add->Effect->Cross, for a grand total of five mouse clicks. Doesn’t get any faster than that! I’ll make sure that’s called out clearly.

      @Mike: glad I made ya laugh. I thought it was about time to interject some humor.

      @Joeri: I am not allowed to overcommit the developers, but they are working hard to include FFMPEG support in all platform versions with the 2.43 release, which will allow sound output as well as video to .avi and .mov file formats. I hear it is working on the Unix platforms, but alas, a lot of us use Windoze and there is some driver/codec issues. Then we should call it the Movie Editor. Wait, scratch that, I don’t want to have to change the wiki again!

    • JABayne

      Roger, where is this Manual/Complete link at? I cannot seem to locate it for some reason.

    • Roger

      The complete wiki manual is at http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Complete
      It was, as of Jan 10 2007, 1.6MB of text and 20MB of images. That was before I wrote the VSE which adds on a little more. Visit that page, wait for it…wait for it….and use your Browser’s File->Save As and save as a complete web page. I save mine in my C:\Blender\man\ folder, where man is for Manual.

      @Joeri: Your name is a blast from the past! Good to see you’re still around and like me, refuse to die or stop blendering. Your work lives on.

    • greboide

      amazing, i still think that the old manual had a more tutorial oriented method, but this one is very usefull as it shows every function in detail.

    • Roger

      @vassilos: I have uploaded my windows dll for animglow.dll here http://uploader.polorix.net//files/152/animglow.dll
      and the displacer.dll here http://uploader.polorix.net//files/152/displacer.dll

      I was not able to find either on the internet, and having had them for 10 years, forget where they came from. Enjoy!

    • tom

      Roger,

      would you be willing to do the release notes for the sequencer for the upcoming release?

      here are copies of the cvs logs

      http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Release_Notes/Notes243/Sequencer

      just pointing to the relevant sections in the docs of the wiki would work as well,

      LetterRip

    • Roger

      @greboide: Yes, I actually cringe when people call my writing a tutorial; we (all wiki authors) are trying very hard to avoid making the wiki a series of tutorials; we want the UM to be organized by Blender functionality with the purpose of explaining how to use the software to get the job done, in full detail, with examples, not skipping menu items or seldom-used functions, but not so much that we follow one line of thinking or one path (and thereby exclude others).

      The original manual, by the way, has been converted to HTML and is the tutorial for the VSE. Yes, it is/was a tutorial, as it crosses functional lines and walks you through the process from start to finish. I love it, and it can be found here: http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Tutorials#Video_Sequence_Editing

    • Roger

      @tom: I actually referenced all those notes when writing the wiki and incorporated user-oriented features mentioned therein to the best of my ability. So, I am afraid I really don’t have anything to add to the release notes. I cannot go inside the cvs versions and tell what was changed and why; really only the programmer can. Since the VSE was completely undocumented in the wiki before I started, I cannot even really say what has changed since 2.42; I had to start from scratch, develop an outline, go through each menu exhaustively, develop all examples, figure a lot out and remember a lot. I even went back to Ton’s original tut to remember metastrips. I could not use the original tut as a starting point, since it was too tutorialish. Functionally, to me as a user, it looks very much the same as five years ago. But I know that internally it was a basic rewrite that started as a cleanup and grew from there. To me, release notes are from the internal viewpoint as to what has changed and why, limitations and workarounds, goals for next release, variable and library changes, etc., and I am clueless as to all of that. I am just a simple user who reports what happens, not how or why it does internally.

    • tom

      Roger,

      actually release notes are mini user docs that are something small enough to give the gist of how to use new tools without going into complete documentation.

      I’ll see if I can summarize the CVS log stuff, then and then just point to the new docs.

      LetterRip

    • Roger

      @greboide: Good! all of us wiki authors are trying very hard to make the User Manual ( http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Manual ) different from the reference manual ( http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Reference ) and different from the tutorials ( http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Tutorials ). The original tut taught me and thousands others, and is on the tutorial pages. It has a special place in my heart because it starts with a little thing and just builds and builds and builds and at the end your head is spinning in awe with what you see, and you know that you understand it because you built it. You might say it got me hooked on compositing and special effects.

      We are trying to keep the User Manual more than a listing of functions (that’s what a reference manual is for) but less than a tutorial, orgainzing our writing around Blender functions, but from the standpoint of the user (what does it do for me, why should I read this section, when should I use it, how do I get it to do what I want…) without getting into any technical details (those go in the reference if I want to look “under the hood”), and without starting off with “Open a blender window and delete the cube…”. (tutorial). We are also trying to be very technically accurate and complete, so Users can understand the power they have with this tool, see an example or two of what this function can accomplish, and go on to work productively. I actually cringe when people say “great tutorial” about something in the user manual, because it may mean we overstepped our boundaries.

      @Tom: sorry, yes, perhaps using the CVS log would be best. I cannot even say what functionally changed from 2.42, unless I physically went back to the old version and did a side-by-side comparision (yuk). Even then, I dont know if we had release notes for sequencer 2.42 changes, so I am not sure with which baseline to start with. To me, the current release notes were good clues to what changed (windows update when scrubbin) and under the hood, and new features (like the color generator). I agree we should get to the “box panel release notes summary” for the version upgrade so people can quickly see what has changed.

      THAT being said though, this 2.43 release is a huge amount of changes across the whole Blender functionality spectrum; every section of the wiki is affected, and we are struggling just on the User Manual side to get it all documented and reviewed. See Wiki_Tasks for an idea on just how far behind we are.

    • Peter Schlaile

      @Tom: just updated the release wiki. Hopefully that’s ok. (Could someone maybe add some instructive screenshots, maybe of the N-keys dialogs. I’m not really good at this…)

      Greetings,
      Peter

    • http://indiworks.wordpress.com/ indiworks

      i also just wanted to thank the author for the sequence editor wiki documentation, it looks really good and makes you want to work with it. i’ll try my best now to finish my animations in blender instead of final cut – i had tried this before but… being able to produce a whole project completely in just one application would be really great.

    • blenderizer

      the tut is not that good if i still cant figure out how to add the video, the directions are NOT clear enough

    • David

      So why doesn’t the sound show up in the finished movie?? I put in a movie clip and a wav file on the timeline. I can play and hear the sound in the editor just fine. I hit the ANIM button, and it creates a MOV file for me, but there is no audio in it. What gives?

      Luckily I have Sony Vegas to do all this, but still it would be nice to try out short clips in the VSE… sigh.

    • Ryan Neily

      No sound in my video sequence editor is the state of affairs when I try editing in VSE. I can load, edit and play back video strips in VSE. However, though I can load .wav files and they do show up as strips they do not make any sound. One is supposed to be able to hear the audio to edit it right? How do I access this functionality?

      Thanks for any illumination,
      Ryan

    • zslevi

      “No sound in my video sequence editor is the state of affairs when I try editing in VSE.”

      You have to click on the loudspeaker button on the timeline panel to enable sound. (And don’t forget to click the “do sequence” button on the render panel.)

    • http://profiles.google.com/techtonik anatoly techtonik

      Doc links are broken. The proper one seems to be http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.5/Manual/Sequencer

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart Veldhuizen

      Updated, thanks!