Editing Video In Blender

Get familiar with blender VSE

So you've shot your scenes and now you have lots of video-files that you want to put together into one single video with audio and maybe some background music. GNU/Linux offers a wide variety of software to do this. A very popular one is KDEnlive. Although Blender being primarily known as a 3D software it is equiped with an excellent Video Sequence Editor that is perfect for this task. What I find interesting with blender is that it is an OS-agnostic program, meaning you can open, save and edit your project on any computer with sufficient hardware specifications, hence collaborate with anybody on the source files of the project, regardless what Operative System your collaborators are using! Let's do this!

Preparing the interface

A one-time step that saves a lot of time

Interface basics

Cuts, Transitions, Effects, Compositing

Preparing for your project

Understanding Frame rates

For this tutorial, I will be assuming that like me, you have a rather limited budget. It would be nice to have several angles of one shot, but you have only one camera. But wait a minute, do you? Maybe you have a cellphone with a video-camera built in. Maybe one of your actors have? Maybe your parents have? If yes, that would sum it up to at least 3 cameras. The problem with this type of set-up, is that probably all of these cameras record video to different formats, with different codecs and frame rates. The video files maight even have a very different look and feel to themselves. But fear not, we can work this around.

Video codecs are a dense jungle that we will look into a little later on, but for now, let's focus on the frame rate. Frame Rate is measured in FPS which is an acronym for "Frames per seconds". This means that 1 second of a video in a video-file at 12 FPS is going to be made up of a sequence of 12 images. Respectivley, 1 second of a video in a video-file at 30 FPS is going to be made up of a sequence of 30 images. A video-file is best rendered when this frame-rate is constant. This means that in blender, you have to set a frame-rate to your project. You can be very free in this, but it is good to know, hat most video platform out there on the world wide web prefer to have videos at 30fps. So why not just set it to 30 and rock on you may ask? It would be so simple if all the cameras involved in your shooting did record in 30fps. But what if they didn't? Lets imagine you used your HD-camera recording at 25fps for the main scenes, but that you used your cousins cell-phone recording at 12fps to shoot a few close-ups of the same scene. This means that you have 2 different Frame-rates in your raw video material. Now lets imagine you've set blender to render video at 30fps, when you add video from these cameras to blender, they will appear as if they were speed-up and the audio track will be off-synchronization. To understand this better, try the following:

- Import a video-file to the blender VSE time-line.

You will notice that 2 strips have been placed in the sequencer; a blue and a green one. The blue is the video-data, and the green is the audio-data. If this is the first video file you import to a fresh blender project, blender will set itself to the same frame rate as your video file. Now try this:

- increase the fps in blender.

You will see how the video-strip appears to become shorter than the audio-strip, it will read more frames per second. And if a 24fps video file is played at 30fps it appears to be speed up.

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Preparing video-files with ffmpeg

Make sure all your files will be working nice and smooth

FFMPEG commands

Some basics that help a lot.

Render your project

Dimensions

Video Formats