Blender Video Editing Screencast No. 3
by rfquerin
Okay so it’s been about 5 months since I last posted a Blender screencast. Guilty as charged. Let’s move on.
I’ve posted my third screencast about editing video using Blender. This one is a quickie at about 9 minutes in length. It covers a few very useful keyboard commands along with an introduction to using the proxy feature to really start boosting your editing efficiency into high gear.
Also worthy of note is that I did the post processing in Blender as well. I wasn’t 100% happy with the flash video rendering output I got from Blender on this one, but this will just take some further tweaking, mostly to limit filesize and maintain quality. So for this screencast, the last step involved rendering to avi from Blender and then falling back to my mencoder script for the final conversion to Flash.
You can find this third screencast right here.
Here are the links to my previous Blender screencasts No.1 and No.2.
Expect more in the way of Blender screencasts and Blender video editing info. Troy Sobotka and I have been discussing where to go with this. Of course I’m going to try and drag Heathenx in as well so I can share the blame around. 
ps. For some weird reason, I had a helluva time trying to get the flash version to work properly for this episode. Kudos to Heathenx for doing an OGV version (for those with Firefox3.5) with a Flash fallback for those with other browsers. Heathenx, you da man! 
Drag blob in OGV applet a few times and watch it gag. Something up there maybe? It seems to be fine but a few scrub-to requests and it hangs indefinitely.
Troy,
I gave it a try over the weekend in FF3.5 and I haven’t seen the same problem. Is this after the ogv completely buffers in or while it’s still buffering? We haven’t heard any similar complaints since we moved our Inkscape stuff over to ogv.
Nice screencasts, it’s good to see some video tutorials about blender VSE. I hope there will be more! (… hmmm.. chroma key anyone?)
keep up the good work!
Awesome tips, keep them coming can’t wait for the next screencast.
Thank you for the great screencasts.
Where did you find information about the proxy feature (e.g. the necessity of setting render size to less than 100%)? I have been unable to find any useful information explaining its use.
I’m using Blender 2.49a and have not been able to successfully use proxies. I’ve built the proxy files, I can view the individual jpegs in an image viewer, but Blender just continues to choke on the high-def video instead of using the proxy files. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
@billy: It is directly related to your Blender render size. Set your preview rendering size to the proxy preview size and you should be good to go. Remember, you will need to generate more proxies for the various proxy resolutions if you intend to work at different proxy sizes within the same pipeline.
I’d add that the proxy feature is recently undergoing some growth and as such, it will is probably sailing into new waters as I type this. For example, but a couple of months ago there was only the proxy feature. Now there is added selection of size in the proxy tab. Further still, there is a proxy selection in the viewport.
Hope this helps. As always, keep poking Richard to generate more quality content such as this.
Troy, thank you for the info.
I have yet to get proxies working in 2.49a. However, I downloaded 2.48a and it worked perfectly.
Has anyone been able to use proxies in 2.49a? Maybe this is a bug or the process is slightly different (or I’m a complete dolt). I’ve tried 2.49a on two separate Linux boxes and one Windows box and was unable to use proxies on any of them.
@billy,
Actually Troy and I have kind of worked this out a little bit this afternoon. It seems that in 2.49 the viewport window has it’s own proxy percentage setting. Only by default, you don’t see the panel for the viewport.
So if you hover over the bottom edge of the viewport to get the resize arrows and right-click, you should get a choice to ‘Add Header’. Click that and you will now see a few buttons under the viewport. One of those is a Q setting. Choose the percentage that you’ve built proxies for and it should then scrub smoothly. I don’t know all the ins and outs of it yet, but it got 2.49 proxies working for me.
@billy: Apologies for misleading you. I hadn’t realized that the new appearance in the viewport actually _controls_ the proxy resolution.
After having discussed it, Rich and I tend to agree that it is actually a useful feature. As Richard rather astutely noted, proxies are part of display and _not_ rendering.
This makes sense for a few reasons. For example, it now makes it easy for work on a netbook without ever having to flip your rendering (and thus preview window) up to full resolution to render. A solid time saver.
Brilliant! Thank you both.
I’m so happy to have a stable environment for editing HD videos in Linux. I doubt I would have ever attempted using Blender for video editing if it weren’t for Richard’s screencasts. They really lowered the entry barrier to using this daunting piece of software.
I look forward to the product of your collaboration on future Blender screencasts.
Perhaps everyone that is interested in using Blender to its fullest potential with regards to motion picture and compositing work, please join the Identi.ca group blender2d. http://identi.ca/group/blender2d
Learn what you can, produce good work, and help others…
I can haz moar screencasts?
Interestingly enough, Blender changed their UI significantly in their latest release, which was 2.61.
~Ian