Blender As A Video Editor? It's Actually Really Good!

Blender, which is free and open source software, is one of the best programs for creating professional-quality 3D animations. Oddly enough, Blender has video editing capabilities built into it. So is Blender actually viable strictly as a video editor?
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[@dkosmari]

There's a general rule that applies to Blender: the user interface is there just as a courtesy for new users; you're supposed to learn the keyboard shortcuts you need often, and avoid the menus and buttons as much as possible. That's when Blender becomes a productivity beast. Most shortcuts are a single key press, and are shown in the menus; so use the menus once or twice, and try to memorize the shortcut key for the next time you need it. Once you start remembering the shortcuts, it all becomes natural and very efficient.

[@tonyramirez5707]

Ah, the UNIX way.

[@dkosmari]

@@tonyramirez5707 More like, the main users are also the programmers that created it. They wanted to maximize productivity, and they keyboard-driven commands do just that. Some of it even makes sense: B to start a box selection, G to grab, X/Y/Z to lock the movement to one or two axes, then type in the number (or drag with the mouse) then Enter.

[@aaoth4689]

blender is vim of 3d editors :D

[@MateuszPolkowski]

Meh… Why use the Blender GUI at all? Delete your desktop environment and use python to control it in Terminal. ;) I'm obviously joking. You are completely right, but saying something like that to a newcomer is kindda like telling your grandmother to install a browser using a terminal on GNU/Linux.

[@dkosmari]

@@MateuszPolkowski I was merely trying to explain why it hurts so much, so new users don't get discouraged. Heck, even navigating into menus can be annoying, because they close if your mouse slide a few pixels out of the menu. Almost everything feels like a bad UI design choice, until you realize it's actually supposed to be the "backup" interaction, and that seasoned Blender users don't use the menus and buttons.

[@jeremyleonbarlow]

24 FPS is the standard FPS for traditional motion picture film, which is fairly standard for animation.

[@0xva]

was going to comment the same

[@notimportant7682]

was also going to comment the same

[@RodrigoTakehara]

24 fps is also great for render times

[@_coeur_noir_]

24 fps is not weird, it's cinema editing. All other fps are the weird ones actually. 60fps on the big screen is plain ugly aka soap opera effect.

[@notimportant7682]

@@_coeur_noir_ if precedence is what matters then don't forget that the ntsc and pal standards are also not weird, such as the atrocious 29.97 fps. Also, I don't believe frame rate alone causes the soap opera effect. After all, hollywood would have eagerly standardized 60fps if film had been cheaper.

[@GamerX320]

Hey DT, something to make Blender work a bit easier for you: you can actually save a lot of those settings (like the end frames, the playback options, and the output settings) so that they are set by default whenever you open up Blender. It's under File > Defaults > Save Startup File. Open up Blender, set everything up how you need it to be, then save the start up file and it will always default to whatever you had set

[@lindamvungi8557]

Cool!

[@warrenography]

That's why I never have to kill the default cube, because mine default opens...empty! Phew. Clear conscience.

[@jeydison]

120Fps SLOOOOOOMOOOUW

[@zdtuttauniversity2715]

this is good advice

[@DJRussellBrian]

Thank you for the awesome tip

[@daedalus_00]

a couple things that may help with the slow renders: user preferences > addons turn on 'power sequencer' you'll get proxy settings and ffmpeg based multithreading user preferences > system > video sequencer there is an option to raise or limit the amount of RAM that the sequencer is allowed to use hope this helps you, or anybody that needs it. Have a great day!!

[@magnusanderson6681]

The biggest takeaway I am getting from this video is that Blender has terrible defaults lol

[@daedalus_00]

@@magnusanderson6681 yeah... you're not wrong, lol

[@notuxnobux]

@@magnusanderson6681 all video editors have bad defaults when it comes to performance

[@EwanMarshall]

@@magnusanderson6681 To be fair, it is setup for compositing short 3D animations by default.

[@MateuszPolkowski]

@@magnusanderson6681 Haha. That is kindda true. I don't get why a new Blender instance always has a default cube. The light source and camera are fine, but literally every Blender tutorial starts with "Step one: open Blender. Step two: delete default cube." XD

[@friedrichdergroe9664]

Diving into Blender is like diving into an ocean of possibilities. You can, of course, render short animations to include with your videos. Or you can render the videos in planes, and have those planes spin, stretch, or do whatever you want. I will be exploring the chromakey feature shortly.

[@MikkoRantalainen]

And you can use HDR videos as textures for sculpted objects if you want. Blender actually always does tone mapping to get the colors back to usual 8 bit per color channel mode for the output.

[@fabiandrinksmilk6205]

I just now discovered the scene strip. You can add a whole scene as a clip into the video editor without having to render the video. You can have a scene for the video editor and a scene with a cool 3D animation you made and the output from the camera in the animation scene will be a clip in the video editor you can drag around. You can modify the animation in any way you'd like and it will automatically update the video editor.

[@P5YcHoKiLLa]

2:57 24fps -This is the standard for movies and TV shows, and it was determined to be the minimum speed needed to capture video while still maintaining realistic motion. Even if a film is shot at a higher frame rate, it's often produced and displayed at 24fps. Most feature films and TV shows are shot and viewed at 24 fps. i.e. It's an industry standard.

[@davidy22]

As someone who's been using blender for years, it's cool seeing someone acknowledge the existence of the VSE in blender. Usually people just tell me to get off the weird video editor stapled to the 3D program, or they're surprised the VSE even exists

[@galinageorgieva4735]

I love VSE, it's simple, it's easy(to me), it does the job well, but I fell for the bias of others, that you need to use the same VE as everyone else.. I guess I am the same sheep 😂

[@hostgrady]

Coming soon: The Emacs Video Editor is the Best Linux Editor

[@fossware]

Can’t say I’d be surprised to hear see that knowing Derek lol

[@fossware]

End of the day some weird people like Luke Smith just do everything including OBS’s usual work with minimal utils file ffmpeg

[@hostgrady]

@@fossware I don't think that's very odd since it is sorta the whole idea of the Unix philosophy. That being said, I do question how far some people go for "minimalism". There's definitely a line you shouldn't cross just to be minimalist

[@fossware]

@@hostgrady Can’t say anything bc everyone is different opinions and preferences. I personally prefer having all the options in the world right in my face and that’s why I use kde and mainly prefer qt apps.

[@FortSantiago]

Yes, you are right man, the EMAC-GRADY is coming your way!

[@jackkeifer]

A little hint about setting frame range - Press PgUp key to set the playhead automatically to the end of the video. Then Ctrl+End (or select Playback and click "Set End Frame" button). Then PgDn to bring play-head back to the beginning. Once you get the hang of it, you get great results with Blender video editing. Wonderful video DT!

[@mariolongtin8271]

Thank you!!

[@dalanxd]

Around 20:00 you had some trouble with strips alignment.... Remember: 1 - When grabing a strip (or handle), hold Ctrl to turn on SNAPPING ....... huge time saver + better precision 2 - When selecting handles, press Ctrl + B to make your mouse a selection box that only selects handles ...... amazing ...... you can select all handles from a cut and fine tune them with grab.

[@themroc8231]

24 frames a second has been the standard for motion pictures since the 1920's and the introduction of sound films.

[@MikkoRantalainen]

One great feature that Blender has is tracking objects in a video. You can capture handheld video and Blender can measure camera settings and object positions if you track e.g. a couple of corners of your desk and the corners of some other things in the video. Then you can position text in 3D world and the resulting text appears to be floating in the room where the original handheld recording was done. Of course, if you want to have stuff in the original video that goes over some of the text, you may still need to do some rotoscoping (in Blender, too) which is more or less manual process.

[@FilmSpook]

Thanks for this info, brother!! 👍🏾

[@2HInformatica]

Any example simplified tutorial about this?

[@MikkoRantalainen]

@@2HInformatica Maybe try video titled "A Beginner's Guide to Camera Tracking in Blender 4.0"?

[@davidyoder5890]

Hey Derek, I'm so glad you made this video! I watched your video a day or two before this one where you briefly spoke about video editors. You rattled off a list of OSS video editors and the whole time I was waiting for you to mention Blender! But then you said you were trying a new editor and the video would be released the following day. So glad this one didn't get overlooked!

[@FlameSilver]

I've been recommending Blender as a video editor for years now, did I write up on a forum about the experience. The last year it's performance has gotten a lot better as well, playback never used to be that smooth above 720p, which just makes it even better.

[@kentjensen4504]

24 frames per second is not weird. It's the frame rate that's been the norm almost since the beginning of cinema and still today, for both live action and animation movies.

[@d1namis]

It's actually a misconception. It usually comes from PAL, NTSC, SECAM era. There is no ONE standard for video. And 30/60FPS have more reasons to be default.

[@kentjensen4504]

@@d1namis I wasn't speaking of video. I was exlaining the origin of 24 fps and why it's not weird to have that as default with an app that's often used for SFX for film production. You're objecting to something I never said. So weird.

[@d1namis]

@@kentjensen4504 i'm pretty sure that i'm accurate at my point. Cinema was using 12,5 FPS on beginning, and film with sound was using 25. 24/24.3 is TV format from PAL, NTSC and SECAM era. 24 is rarely used in actual production, also it's more like a Black And White standard, cuz colored TV was using 29.7. also most TV and projector lamp have 50hz so everything that has same denominator was logical to use.

[@kentjensen4504]

@@d1namis Totally wrong. 24 was used in the cinema since long before sound because fewer frames per second created a noticeable flicker. Animation worked with 12 frames per second, so they would draw 12 images per second and shoot each image twice 12 x 2 = 24. Some animated scenes with very fast motion would still get the full 24 drawings per second. The other numbers of frames per second came later with television and video technology. In Europe, PAL would use 25 fps, which meant the total run time for movies would be 4% shorter. You could check this in old movie guides and compare with PAL video tapes or television transmissions: a movie listed as run time of 100 minutes in the Maltin movie guide, would last only 96 minutes here in Europe. For this reason, some European film productions, even if shot digitally, use 25 fps, but 24 fps is still the general standard, whether it’s shot on chemical film or digital recording media, whether it’s intended for cinema or television. Every movie you’ve ever seen by Hitchcock, Spielberg, Kubrick, Tarantino, Coppola or whichever famous director you pick, was shot with 24 fps. Every Marvel movie is 24 fps. Breaking Bad, Sex & the City, Sopranos, Game of Thrones, they’re all 24 fps. So almost every professional who will use Blender for adding 3D elements, do composites, or other things Blender can do, will be using 24 fps, so therefore it’s OBVIOUS to make 24 fps the default setting. I’m actually disappointed in Derek. He’s a classical musician, so I would expect him to be somewhat aware of film technology from before the plastic age of video cameras, computers and KZbin. 24 fps was known by ordinary people the world over, from using 24 fps Super 8 home movie cameras to 24 fps being mentioned in filmmaking documentaries and movies about filmmaking for decades. And “12,5 fps” never ever existed LOL

[@d1namis]

@@kentjensen4504 just take a good textbook, Disney actually was using 8 frames per second composing method for a long time in some of there projects. Dude you literally have no idea what you are talking about.

[@NomadFlow]

He says in the video here that Blender's playback was smooth. That's because Blender was making proxies in the background. 🙂 DistrbTube didn't notice that that was happening but you can see the progress bar for the proxies being made at 17mins 23mins in the video at the bottom of the Blender window.

[@blenderbuch]

I have seen that also. However, still beefy system as it chews the proxies away...

[@Rupedaddy]

Just watched this video. The only thing with those proxies is they take up a lot of space, naturally. And you have to remember to delete them if you're HD is running low on space.

[@milo3733]

wow, the vse sure has come a long way. i remember just a year or so ago it was terribly unstable, not smooth at all, and even had inconsistencies between the preview and the render! good job to the blender devs also: you can click and drag left/right on any number input to smoothly change it, this is usually easier than typing in a number

[@zarkliazrael3079]

Edit -> Perference -> Navigation -> Zoom to mouse Position is a really good idea to to adjust the viewport

[@angeldelvax7219]

Having to change the settings for your audio-track for each clip is actually by design. Blender is after all a 3D software first. All the settings you have are for the object you're working on, not necessarily for the entire project. I do understand that this can get annoying ;) The rendering time is also fairly easy to explain. It renders the entire scene for every frame, that includes all the 3D information. If you don't have 3D objects or designs, the rendering engine still looks for them to know what to do. The file name isn't a random set of numbers either. It's the number of the first and last frame you rendered ;) Thanks for making this video! I never did much with the video editor, besides simple resolution changes or rendering just a few frames from as larger clip. Even when I render animations, I hardly ever use the video editor options. Good to know that it's really that easy ;)

[@PaperBenni]

21:59 you can actually use the s r g hotkeys inside the playback panel. They're in my opinion what the things that make blender feel like home. They work almost everywhere (along with the b and c hotkey and Ctrl + middle mouse) and are just Sooo far ahead on the competition in terms of speed and efficiency (unfortunately not in terms of being obvious if you don't know they're there). Another cool thing is that you can hold shift on any transformation and it will slow down the movement to allow for more precision without zooming in all the way. Blender is just such a joy to work with once you get the hang of it, every little detail has these optimisations that speed up the workflow in some way compared to most GUI toolkits. For example you can also use shift on any slider to make more precise adjustments.

[@MikkoRantalainen]

Also you can just slide pretty much all numerical inputs and the results get updated in real time. Every time you see a number input, it's actually a slider, too!

[@Rupedaddy]

The thing about the sliders is you can slide or directly edit multiple sliders at once. So, for the X and Y scale, you click one, drag straight to the other. Then you can let go and type values or you can slide them side-to-side. They'll adjust at the same time.

[@tintwotin]

On the render time, if your View Mode is set to Filmic, the render time will be slow and colours faded. So, always ensure that it is set to Standard. When starting Blender and selecting Video Editor in the welcome screen, this will be set correctly and also the export settings will be video friendly. On setting the range, in the View menu you'll find options to ex. set the range to rendered strips. On transforming strips in the preview, open the toolbar on the left and you'll find tools to transform directly in the preview.

[@Arjjacks]

You can set all audio waveforms to be on by default, it's in the overlays dropdown menu for the sequence panel itself. You can set the waveform display to be On instead of per strip. Don't know if there's an equivalent option for mono, though.

[@dialecticalmonist3405]

They label it "use strip option", rather than "per strip" as you said. "Per strip" is obviously more clear.

[@MadMinstrel]

The reason Blender renders slower, is that Blender is designed for *movies*. As in those things you watch at the cinema. That is to say, it is not meant to get you to your goal as quickly as possible, but it is meant to get you there at the highest possible quality. So what does that have to do with being slow? Well. If you haven't changed the defaults, it takes 64 samples of every pixel of every frame... which does nothing because you haven't added anything that would benefit from antialiasing. But it still does that. Also FFMPEG does a very slightly better compression job if it's run single threaded. So that's what Blender does. Wild, huh? Same reason it defaults to 24fps. It's the traditional framerate for cinema movies. It's also not *lacking* that ton of effects that other video editors might have, it's simply expecting you to build those effects yourself, whether using 3d, compositing, particle simulations, shaders or whatnot. It's a lot like Linux itself in that way. While this is not good news if you're just making a youtube video, again, it's exactly what you need when you're making a real movie.

[@MCgranat999]

This is very explanatory, yet concise. Thanks for the information!

[@SapphFire]

Samples only affect 3D rendering, not video rendering. The reason why it's slow is because it has no multi threading yet.

[@Reteo]

24 frames per second was originally a balance between clarity and cost; any slower, and the flicker from the projection would cause eyestrain, and any more, while clearer, would be more costly than it needed to be (film wasn't cheap). Even cartoons, while managing to cut (hand-drawing animation) costs further by operating at 12 frames per second, still presented the film in 24 fps, by simply showing each frame of the animation on two frames. Once digital film started becoming the norm, then the framerates increased, since there was no longer the cost of film to worry about. These days, the primary reason to use 24 frames per second is to achieve what is called the "Film Look," which is the distinctive softness you see in classic feature films that don't exist in today's high-framerate productions. Additionally, if you hold down the [Shift] key, the mouse will, if interacting with Blender, affect things much more slowly, allowing you to have more fine control over the timeline clip.

[@thecakeredux]

I wish movies would stop with the "Film Look". Any faster shots are impossible to get visual information out of and everything else is just a constant stutter, it's a terrible experience that has ruined many a movie for me.

[@lukastemberger]

There are no high frame rate productions. The only time high frame rate is used is sports programming. Framerates higher than 30fps have that old interlaced soap opera look. A couple of times they tried to make 60fps movies and they looked absolutely horrible. The Hobbit and that Will Smith movie are pretty much the only examples and were both huge flops because they looked like home video.

[@thecakeredux]

@@lukastemberger I don't know if one could call The Hobbit a flop. While I hated the movies, they turned some 800mio budget into 3 billion at the box office. But besides that, even suggesting that the supposed "flop" happened due to the fps (48, not 60 by the way) it was recorded at is just ridiculous. Personally I can't wait for 120+fps movies, I really see no argument for multi-million Dollar productions being choppy and terrible to look at, with blurry action scenes and stuttering camera-pans, when every KZbin-clown's videos are crispy clear.

[@lukastemberger]

@@thecakeredux What you call crispy clean I call ugly and looking like a soap opera. And what you call choppy, I call a beautiful filmic style with gorgeous motion blur. Of course The Hobbit would be a commercial success. After LOTR, there was no chance people wouldn't want to see it. It's hugely inferior to LOTR though and one of the biggest reasons is that it was shot in 48fps, which made it look videoey and not filmic. This KZbin video for example is 60fps and you might like that, but the guy obviously knows nothing about filming, the shot is lit horribly, not color corrected and framed weirdly. I don't know what kind of standards you are aiming for, but that's something that needs to be fixed before even thinking about framerates. Especially in static footage. Of course, for screen recording 60fps is useful. But not for just talking heads.

[@thecakeredux]

​@@lukastemberger "one of the biggest reasons is that it was shot in 48fps" That is just plain wrong, I'm sorry. Also, sure, you can prefer something objectively worse, but that simply doesn't make it better. Your points about lighting and whatever else have absolutely no relation to the topic of fps, lighting and everything else being equal, more fluent video is more fluent video. And I have no idea why good video quality looks like a worse production to you, that's, frankly, stupid. Choppiness isn't motion blur, either. In fact, if you actually wanted good motion blur, you'd want more fps, too. This is just some snobbish bullshit nobody should listen to, get over yourself.

[@sneekylinux]

Have used Blender for some video editing over the years and must admit is fun, but if you really get into it it can be the go to program as there is so much to explore.

[@c99kfm]

Top menu of the bottom half, starts with an icon and then the "Sequencer", on the far right you'll find another icon called the "overlay" menu. Click on the downward-pointing (fold-out?) arrow next to it, and on the bottom you'll have the "display waveform" (for all clips) settings.

[@jozsefk9]

Great! Thanks. I didn't even notice there is anything in that corner of the screen :)

[@ThatGaijinFella]

This taught me more about video editing in Blender than any other video to date!

[@nexpro6985]

When you have set all your requirements for the video sequencer use file - defaults - save startup file This will preserve those settings when you next open Blender.

[@williamlazenby314]

Recently, I have been considering making KZbin videos and had a hard time choosing an editor (Linux is my daily driver). I have used Blender a lot for modeling for games. I never knew it had a decent editor built-in. Gonna definitely try it out!

[@JamieHamelSmith]

This was great! I use Blender for other tasks like modeling and 3D printing stuff; I knew the VSE was there; I knew it recently got a bunch of updates; I've never messed with it until today, thanks to your video. When you were showing the picture in picture, you could move and scale it (interactively) in the preview window. Just G to grab it and move it, and then S to scale it. Moving around the timeline, you can cause the clip being adjusted to snap by holding Ctrl (when you were trying to line up the ends of the audio and video) You can also invert this behavior with the "Magnet" icon toggle at the top of the sequence window. I'm looking forward to seeing the VSE continue to get updates as Blender continues on its recent path of improvement!

[@21stcenturybohemian]

It defaults to 24fps because it stopped being a 3D modeler years ago and became a start-to-finish film animation and compositing suite, and film is shot at 24fps. If you want your video to be cinematic, that is where you set it. If you want it to look like cheesy "TV video", set it to 30 or 60. Do recall the controversy when "The Hobbit" was shot at 48fps, and people hated the way it looked. It is buttery smooth because it is building and using proxies automatically.

[@MaeBlythe]

Thank you so much for making this! I was thinking of using Blender as a video editor but I had heard about the audio desync issues. It was so cool this video popped up in my feed just as I was thinking about it!

[@gavinpenrose]

A great video, a couple of things that may help that don't seem to be in your work flow ..... Speed of imported file will automatically adjust your fps Press home with the mouse in the bottom window it shows all your clips at once When moving clips with G , press shift as well and it will help you fine tune the position If there's a setting you change everytime, you can change your default start up menu so all things are as you like on start up When you cut with K , have your mouse on the side of the time line you want to delete, and once you've pressed K , the side you want to delete will be highlighted, just press X and it will delete that bit If you want to change 2 values to the same number like you did with scale, you can click and drag your mouse down through the values you want to change and release and type in say .3 and bit will apply to all using shift+K will give you a still frame cut that you can extend out

[@user-xc7uo6md3n]

Hey bro, needed a hand. I forgot how to lock the green frame tab center so I can zoom into smaller frames without it flying to the sides. Your help would mean alot, thanks.

[@gavinpenrose]

@@user-xc7uo6md3n i hover the cursor in the timeline, press number pad zero and that centers the tab to view (as long as its paused) then keep my finger on the + button and it zooms in exactly on the centre pretty quickly, for doing this i use the + button but for general zoom in a little or out a little i use the mouse wheel

[@user-xc7uo6md3n]

@@gavinpenrose thanks heaps for the fast response bro! Didn't know above the + shortcut. I can't believe I forgot how to do that lmao

[@gavinpenrose]

@@user-xc7uo6md3n Yeah, i think there's still 100 shortcuts i don't yet know about :DDD but i use Blenders VSE for all my editing it's a very under estimated video editer

[@user-xc7uo6md3n]

@@gavinpenrose I only know like 3 shortcuts 🤓, what would be the best video editing software in your opinion?

[@DiThi]

Use middle mouse click to pan, much better than with the tiny scroll bar. After you added the text, press S to scale it. That way you don't need to zoom in. It uses the current frame as a scale origin. In all numerical inputs you can drag from the center to increase or decrease it, and it goes slower if you hold shift for more precision. You can also input math expressions (e.g. 2*3 inputs a 5). You can move and transform the active strip on the video preview by using the standard keys G R S (grab, rotate, scale). You can animate basically ALL numerical values with Blender's standard animation tools. Click the dot on the right to insert keyframe. Yellow is keyframe, green is animated but not currently on a keyframe, orange is modified keyframe (it reverts to the old keyframe if you move the timeline without changing it). Use left and right arrow keys to move one frame forwards or backwards. Use up and down to jump to a next/previous keyframe of a selected object/strip. Animation tools have many features, UIs and stuff, but with just the stuff I explained here should be plenty for most simple stuff, it uses bezier interpolation by default. Edit: The animation editors (particularly the F-curve editor) DOES belong to the video editor if you want more control on the animations.

[@SaddamHussain-we9ec]

after years of procrastination and having watch later playlist filled, today I decided to give it a go, I hope I would be consistent in future, right now it seems I'm the worst at editing, I hope I'd become better. by the way your video was good, liked n subscribed.

[@zdtuttauniversity2715]

I've been modeling in blender for over a year, and had no idea about all this video sequencer stuff.. thank you for sharing! Cheers, :D

[@omermagen824]

I use the sequencer quite a bit and its honestly awesome once you get used to it. Being familiar with blender is of course very helpful, because there are some of mechanics that are carried throughout the whole system, like keyframes, which are incredibly useful in video editing. Basically almost any parameter is keyframeable which allows you to make creative decisions you might not be able to do in other software. It can be a bit annoying though. For example if you do a fade in/out on a clip, it basically just keyframes the opacity. Now if you drag the ends to stim the keyframes stay where they were so the fade will not look correct. so fix it you just have to move the keyframes in the timeline so that the last one (0 opacity) is aligned with the end of the clip again. Another cool technique is the use of metastrips, basically groups of strips that behave as a single clip, so if you animate a property it affects all at once. I use these mainly to put clips in a certain shape. my biggest complaint with the seqencer is actually how limited the text tool is. without being able to control character spacing or even where a new line is put. and it completley breaks when I use Hebrew which is written right to left. Theres now way that i know of to add text transitions like ones you find for premiere or resolve. Kind of a bummer if you do an information video with lots of text. You can make some nice text effect in 3d blender with geo nodes but then youll have to rerender everytime you need to change the text. For simple videos its an incredible tool. Also some tips, use CTRL to snap things to the ends of clips or to the head. Use G then Y to move a clip between channels without it slipping. press numpad 0 to fit selected clip to view (useful in the text example in the vid) and numpad . to jump to the playerhead. There are a billion hotkeys but you just collect the ones most useful for you overtime (applies to blender in general lol). Aaaand of course the best thing about Blender is the community! Just reading through the comments I learnd a some new things! And the huge number of tutorials like this one!

[@CausticAscarite]

This video is so in the right time and place. I'm looking for a new video editor. I came from Windows 4 years ago and since then I always dualbooted into Windows just for the Adobe apps: specifically premiere Pro and after effects since those are the only programs I learned throughout last 10 years. Haven't watched the video yet, I hope I'll find the solution here

[@cubit404]

How's it working for ya?

[@CausticAscarite]

@@cubit404 No changes, yet.

[@frous898]

what I like about the sequencer most is the fact the preview is really fast and accurate, no laggy previews no matter what.

[@MikkoRantalainen]

4:00 You can totally render video to e.g. PNG. That's just renders each frame in a separate file! For movies, they do that to allow full image quality for every frame so that video compression doesn't mess the image quality if you want replace some frames later. Obviously this is more important to 3D rendering where single frame may take somewhere between 1 second and 17 hours so you don't want to re-render extra frames. For normal video export in most video editors, the cost of re-rendering a couple of frames is usually not important.

[@ottovonmier9385]

how do you make png into a video format? I once mistakenly rendered a short text animation into png and it's in cycles! (which was slower compared to cycle x or that's what they say since I haven't tried it yet) and I have a potato laptop. that took me overnight lol and I have to rerender it :

[@MikkoRantalainen]

@@ottovonmier9385 Import all the frames as PNG (or any other supported still image format) files to a timeline (Sequencer) in video editor (Add - Image Sequence).

[@ottovonmier9385]

@@MikkoRantalainen really?? cant believe i never knew that till now lol

[@MikkoRantalainen]

@@ottovonmier9385 It's my understanding that big movie studios do all movies this way. They render each frame as EXR and continue from that.

[@jansenheese2580]

By the way, instead of grabbing the scrollbar for panning, you can drag it by holding down the middle mouse button in the whole area. And in the View menu of the sequencer section, you’ll find the option to change the Waveform Displaying to On for all clips at once. To activate a snap grid, just toggle the magnet button in the section header.

[@haidermirza192]

Let's go was waiting for this video!

[@gamerking64]

I actually didnt expect that it will be blender!

[@thomasdoyal6000]

This is perhaps the best "how to" video I have seen. I rely on many videos to learn Pro Tools, Final Cut, Reason, and others. The instructions are clear, and concise and consider all of the things in a linear fashion. I plan to access any other content you provide and give support.

[@3rdrealm94]

You only need two pieces of software on a machine to do basically anything: Emacs and Blender Text Editing: Emacs IRC: Emacs Web: Emacs Games: Emacs WM: Emacs Notetaking: Emacs Video Editing: Blender 3d Modeling: Blender Photo Editing: Blender 3d Animations: Blender 2d Animations: Blender

[@scoringdigitsson.5194]

You can game on emacs? What?

[@3rdrealm94]

@@scoringdigitsson.5194 kzbin.info/www/bejne/en6XYoGcaZKnh68

[@demerit5]

This is legitimately better than every paid Blender VSE tutorial on Udemy

[@PaperBenni]

Btw, blender just casually drops the biggest flex on all other software when it comes to DPI. You can hold Ctrl and middle mouse button on any panel (except where that hotkey is taken by another feature) and drag up and down to adjust the scaling. Most programs have massive problems with fractional scaling, blender is able to switch between scales 60 FREAKING TIMES PER SECOND and allows different scales for different elements of the UI.

[@yourpersonaldatadealer2239]

Blender is a real gem of open source. A gift from the gods

[@hedron1492]

I am a blender user and wanted to suggest that if you render in blender in video editor don't press that button for render as that is for color spaces and you did not change the color space so you shou!d click on opengl render that will render is very fast that is in a few seconds

[@emanuelgaff1349]

33:12 a quick tip ;) if you look at your movie strip you may notice the number of frames. In your case the number reads 4489. So, you can figure out the end frame.

[@soultracer]

What is more important and precise than scrubbing is to see waveforms. I always turn off scrubbing because it's annoying.

[@vheypreexa]

blender is all about the add ons. there are many built in that aren't turned on by default. and you can get new ones installed to expand the features

[@lordofthemound3890]

Tell us a few!

[@blvckcreativestudio]

First video I’ve ever seen from you but you’ve got yourself a new follower for sure! I was so scared to use blender it seemed so confusing but you cleared everything up and solved all the problems I was having ❤

[@welchomestudio]

To zoom in on any clip without battling, select the clip you want, press on the full stop on the numpad... bam you automatically zoom in on that element.

[@beansnrice321]

Ty for saying this. I've been trying to learn Blender and I've been noticing that it's video editor is surprisingly responsive. Extra thank for pointing out the wave form option for audio!

[@KevinBReynolds]

Excellent demo DT. Thanks!

[@MikkoRantalainen]

Blender doesn't have a lot of pre-canned effects but you can apply the input video as texture to 3D objects (or 3D object data!) and do whatever you want with the results.

[@MateuszPolkowski]

I haven't used Blender for video editing, but if you are having issues with render times being longer than in other software, I am pretty sure you can improve it in the settings. While rendering animation with cycles, enabling your GPU in OptiX or HIP (for Nvidia and Radeon respectively) and then selecting GPU in the render tab can significantly cut down render times. Maybe that works with video rendering as well.

[@Megalomaniakaal]

Cycles has nothing to do with video rendering, in essense FFmpeg is (one of)the renderer(s) for the video.

[@J.McSmithy]

if making videos for KZbin, why not instead of rendering it out just screen record the blender window as it plays ?

[@MateuszPolkowski]

@@J.McSmithy I guess this would make Blender a linear video editor. ;)

[@naolmstead]

Those random numbers it named the file are your start and end frames. If you don't tell Blender a the filename you want in the output section where it is initially set to /tmp/ it just names it after the frame count.

[@SilverC3ll]

8:33 Have you now not confused the meaning of *mono* with *stereo* ? *Mono:* Uses only one channel for sound reproduction. All sound is funneled through a single channel, regardless of the number of speakers you might be using. *Stereo:* Uses two distinct channels for sound reproduction, typically referred to as the left and right channels. This allows for a more spatial sound experience, as different sounds can be played from the two separate channels. Thank you for the great video!

[@zenmonke]

great video! I have used blender for video editing a few years back and this is a very nice and compact refresher for me as I need to edit some videos in a couple of days.

[@jenovaizquierdo]

A lot of youtube tutorials don't mention, that you can change the speed of the fading effects, by first selecting it and then going to the Graph Editor, i learn that the hard way looking for it.

[@drathscion]

24 fps by default is what movies are all filmed and played at, they made a big deal about the hobbit movies because they were filmed in high frame rate of 48 fps. It's a flim industry standard because of how flim used to work.

[@EricParker]

24 FPS is probably set because it's used in movies, but it's a terrible format to use on KZbin because it doesn't divide evenly by the refresh rate of most monitors.

[@zajlord2930]

i have been using this for several years and never even tought of using it for videoediting

[@ЙенФенФыр]

02:56 - 24 frames is a very standard number, although it loses its relevance, especially when it comes to processing a ready-made video. And, if you do your animation with 3d objects, then rendering each individual frame is a big load on the computer (it can take me up to half an hour for one image if you try to squeeze out the maximum quality!). And Blender was created primarily for working with 3d 06:37 - you can set the range to the size of any strip (view - range- set frame range to strips) 11:40 - you can zoom (shift +b) or (ctrl + nunpad dot) 15:50 - it is much easier to select the desired object and manually move it around the screen. And it is worth considering the difference between the location of the text on the layout and the location of the layout on the screen. This will make a difference if you need to rotate the text, for example. 22:26 - s is a hotkey for scaling 31:07 - here you need to hold down the left mouse button on the corner of the panel that you want to expand, and then move the cursor to the side of the panel that you want to delete a little tip - if there is a white dot to the right of the value, it means that this parameter can be used for animation (for example, you can make text move around the screen, make pictures spin, and so on)

[@nicholaspostlethwaite9554]

Great to see someone covering the Blender video editor use. It is sadly lacking in the Blender tutorials community. The reason the defaults are 'small' is the Blender centric uses are for short animations, every frame of which has had to be render out as individual renders. For your viewpoint you have easy 'long' clips to use, edit etc. This is 2 years old, apparently there have been some improvement work on it recently. Note the vast majority of Blender users use Win systems. Long way Second is Linux, then Apple. Perhaps you might consider an update, aimed a little more at the Blender user community. It is likely the base frames will have been rendered out with a look, colour, etc. already.

[@lorensims4846]

Thanks! This video is just in time. I'm looking a setting up a new Mac with as few additional apps as absolutely required. I can use iMovie as a video editor but I would like to have a capable alternative. As Blender IS one of my requirements I've been counting on using its video editor as my primary video editor. I did expect it to be somewhat different from other editors but it is one I want to get well practiced with it. I'm glad you found it to be quite capable.

[@xavierthomas1980]

You should activate "zoom to mouse position" in the user preference, it would help a lot when zooming in the timeline. Edit: You can also change the setting for the render temporary windows, if you do not like blender opening a new window when rendering.

[@JB-fh1bb]

This (for me) is less of a review of Blender, and more of the missing manual for Blender’s video editing functions. Most of us would be frustrated by the playhead jumping to the beginning or moving ‘off camera’, as well as the waveform not showing, and the UI having tiny fonts. I had not idea you could edit video in Blender, and now I feel comfortable trying.

[@hellboundz]

Great video! So many lessons shared and the behind the scenes narrative was informative. Thanks for sharing!

[@reizendecamera]

I watched your video with interest and you explained a lot and helped me understand this program. Thanks for this.

[@platformingpangolin]

In regards to the "mono" audio setting, I think music and video game videos can both benefit from having that turned off. A lot of video games now have audio that will shift depending on where a player is in relation to something, and could you imagine Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon album with mono setting turned on? The gameplay I'm editing as I follow along with this video has a soundtrack that depends very heavily on sounds shifting from one side to the other; it sounds good in mono, but amazing with it turned off. All that said, this was a SUPER helpful video, and I really appreciate you taking the time to put it together and share it with us--I would *not* have figured this stuff out on my own!

[@RyanKingArt]

I use Blender for all my video editing!

[@pedr0psb]

If you hold control while dragging a clip it will align up with the context objects.

[@kidsfuntimetv-nurseryrhyme4300]

As a beginner I'm grateful for your sharing of your video editing experience with us💖

[@bobsbottomshelf]

Ive been using Kdenlive since 2017 and always heard about Blender as a video editor but was afraid it was too complicated to try. You do well making it look like something I could easily use. I might give it a try here since launching this channel.

[@mortarmopp3919]

Two things you can do to improve rendering time: 1) Turn off the Render pane. 2) Freeze the UI. Unfortunately,, I don't remember the commands...it's been awhile. If your already doing 3D work, then learning the VS is worth it. If not, definitely go with a dedicated VE.

[@kychemclass5850]

I love these videos where you show FOSS programs. Thank you!

[@bq.studio490]

Thank for making this video, much love!

[@jackcleveland1175]

Just wanted to say thanks. It was THIS video that helped me get started. Still have a looong way to go, but this helped immensely. Thank you.

[@brushipart]

Hi Derek, thank you so much for the amazing content! Really helpful! What you can do to make you life easier its to make all configurations you want to the file, fps, timeline duration and all, and save that .blend file somewhere, and in the file menu, you go to File -> Defaults -> Save Startup File. So, all the configs you made to that .blend file will be your new default everytime when you open Blender :)

[@NerdVinTV]

24fps is mainly cartoon animation. Traditionally animators usually draw on 2s so 12 frames have to be drawn to make 24 FPS. Its easier to draw smear frames. People have A.I interpolated old animations, it turns it robotic feeling. So 24 fps for cartoon animation. Great explanation!

[@NerdVinTV]

Would you also give unreal 4 a whirl as a video editor? Both blender and unreal are being used in combination for making visual effects in post processing etc..

[@goeiecool9999]

21:56 this process can be sped up. If you hover the mouse over the preview with the clip selected you can use the normal blender transform keyboard shortcuts to move the clip.

[@MikkoRantalainen]

I would say that "Blender has some things that it does quite a bit diffferent than what most other _______ does" pretty much summarises all features of Blender. The thing that's really weird but works really well once get it is that mouse hover targets your keyboard. So the same key press may do different things depending on where your mouse cursor is. That's done to allow really fast editing because you can do stuff with both hands at the same time. You also definitely want three mouse buttons in addition to mouse wheel so forget about simple mouse usage.

[@MikkoRantalainen]

For example, you can scroll pretty much everything with grabbing the view with middle mouse button and dragging the mouse. And that works with literally anything, menus, viewports, timeline, control panels etc. You don't need to bother with scrollbars or something like that. And also try shift+middle mouse button, it does different things for nearly everything. You can copy-paste pretty much anything just by hovering something and pressing ctrl+c and hovering where you want it and press ctrl+v. Also, as e.g. G (grab) is modal action, you can press shift while you're moving stuff to position it more accurately (it makes your mouse like 20x slower for moving the item you're moving) or you can directly type the position as a number (there isn't any numeric entry box but you can see already typed value in the bottom left by default - and by default I mean that you can reposition nearly everything in the UI). You definitely want to learn basic actions such as Grab, Size, Rotate by heart so you do actions by pressing a keyboard button with left hand, adjust the value by moving the mouse and confirm the action with mouse button. And the another mouse button is cancel if you're not happy with the result so you don't often need to use undo because nearly all actions can be done with action + adjustment + confirm pattern.

[@SaneManiac_MG]

He makes video editing look so easy. 2022, gonna try a bit harder to get into it

[@NavySturmGewehr]

Thank you for this video! I had blender installed, and I edited a video and published my first edited video today. Thank you sir!

[@RotoGluOn]

To render using all your cores (and render REALLY fast on a multi cores CPU), you can use a rendering script. There's a really good tutorial with examples on how to set it up (found it on google). It's really easy and once you got it once, it's a piece of cake. What's your proxy settings? (because the scrubbing speed/smoothness is mostly related to this setting).

[@BarringtonDailey]

Great vid covering the gotachas. A little bit more on the renderer would help, for example ffmpeg and a h264 options, maybe some people are not so used to setting them all.

[@tamoozbr]

As a blender user that memes about blender being an all-around tool, this makes me happy

[@inknpaintCW]

Super helpful video! Great to see people trying the less loved aspects of Blender. I use it for modeling and animation but export everything to composite and edit elsewhere...maybe I'll give the internal option a try! I know you got A LOT of people chiming in about FPS...some of them are right...some of them. 60fps is more a sports and video game thing. 30 (29.97) is the US broadcast tv standard (despite some shows being shot in 24fps...they get upscaled to 29.97) True 24 fps is a cinema thing - and most closely emulates the persistence of vision in the human eye while also being cost effective in film production. Higher frame rates get used but it is rare. 60 is only necessary for detailed high speed action - otherwise you are capturing and processing frames you really don't need to. The strobe effect of the refresh in a digital screen is the only reason we can see the 60fps and the reason it looks unnatural - it makes us see more clearly than we normally do, hence the frequent comparison to soaps that are overly clear and overly lit.

[@danidotexe_]

in this video, DT basically sets a bunch of reasonable defaults for blender's video editor that make it function like what most professional video production software does. why can't more FOSS, including blender, just be set up with "reasonable defaults" like this? it feels like everything has a base (or no) configuration that pretty much no user would use, and the developers just expect you to do *all* of the configuration yourself. additionally, if there weren't resources (like this video) to show you how to configure blender in this manner, you might not even know where to look, despite having the documentation, and deem the software as unusable - which it clearly isn't as we're watching a video edited in it currently. if you're expected to do the configuration yourself, why not just set the defaults to something thatresembles the industry-standard software to the greatest degree possible and then let the user do the rest of the configuration themselves to personalize this? it would make user adoption a lot more hassle-free, even for the tinkering-types.

[@ghost-user559]

Exactly that. Exactly.

[@MarcelRobitaille]

Wow, that actually seems way better than kdenlive. Especially the text features (kdenlive's ones always annoyed me)

[@MikkoRantalainen]

For more control over text you actually want to use text as 3D objects and position those over the video. And when you learn to use Blender effectively, rendering text as 3D objects appears easier than doing it like in this video. This is especially true if you want to start moving (animate) the text. Rendering such text as real objects allows rendering physically correct motion blur which looks better and smoother than the usual jittery you get with moving text with lesser methods.

[@NoirpoolSea]

Very educational video.. as is the feedback here. I've been looking to see which Linux editor I should use and you had me at "buttery smooth scrubbing"! I had been doing some work for a friend proofing subtitling for him and after going through the film and making notes, we sat together and he made changes in the project. The very frustrating thing I had noticed when going through was that the lip syncing was not accurate at all to which he replied that in the render everything would be ok. He was using a professional video editor in Windows with an extremely performant computer and I could not understand how he could work with such a defective tool. Blender is a very professionally done tool and because of your work I'll be investing time into finally learning about this software.

[@Demonskunk]

I used blender to put together my Kickstarter video. It has some weirdness when dealing with moving and scaling elements around. Sometimes it would just… wiggle things around while tweening them, which was infuriating. And the text tools are extremely basic to the point of frustration (can’t even do text with an outline) But it worked. And it was free. I think the biggest problem is the fact that no one uses it, so no one is there to help when you’re having weird issues.

[@dzulrashdi6689]

You can use text from 3d space. You can even animate text.

[@XanTheXanadul]

Nice, I used blender a few times for 3D editing, but never knew it could decently cut videos. Will try it out when needing to cut a video in the future!

[@TripTilt]

the K shortcut for cutting is the Knife tool in the 3d editor parts of blender so I call it Knife in VSE too. and I made a video about the VSE tools addon in blender, check it out, it should boost your workflow a lot :)

[@hammerheadcorvette4]

Shotcut is severely overlooked. I use it and while not perfect, it is extremely deep and functional.

[@ElveraViljoen]

I have used it.

[@shamaiahellis8810]

Just to clarify 24fps is standard for animation and films, especially if you want realistic motion blur.

[@guiller2371]

For stability, people should donate. Most stability problems are probably changes in Graphic libraries. Large proprietary companies patents have plenty to do with. Even reverse engineering has been prosecuted making open source weaker.