A little while ago, Heathenx and I decided to investigate the use of Blender for editing video. I’ve played around with Kino, Kdenlive, and Cinelerra among other things for basic video editing on Linux, none of them has worked for me as well as Blender. If there is one area where Linux currently falls short, it is in the area of video editing. Although I don’t doubt that this will change, I have found that Blender is what gives me the most stable and intuitive way to accomplish what I want in this area.

And what I want, is to be able to do some basic edits of the video from my Flip camera. By ‘basic’ I mean that I want to be able to edit clips, splice them together with some basic fades, add a music track, maybe add a title and a fade-to-black or two. Nothing earth-shattering, but that’s what I’m after.

I’ve used it now on two or three of my Flip videos with great success. Now while it’s fresh in my mind, and after @tmray asked me about how I did it, I thought I’d put together a quick screencast on a whim. A couple of notes first:

1. Yes, Blender is a bit daunting at first. Sure, there is a learning curve. But it’s not all that steep for what we’re trying to accomplish, but it’s there. I won’t lie to you. But I think there is a learning curve with any video editing application regardless of platform.

2. I am no Blender expert. I am well and truly a Blender newb. So if you watch this and have any Blender experience, you’ll likely find things that I’m doing wrong, or things that could be done much quicker. Don’t hesitate to post suggestions in the comments. I’m all about the learning. ;)

3. In this screencast I cover only a couple of basic things: How to import videos into Blender, how to shorten and move them, how to create a cross fade between clips and how to output the final video. I may do a couple more screencasts on this to cover things like creating a title screen, fading to black and adding and editing a soundtrack.

Anyway, enough of the blather. You’ll find the screencast right here.
Update: I’ve now done 3 Blender screencasts. Here are the posts with part 2 and part3.