Video Editing with Blender, part 1

[bnewton81]

Holy shit! I have been using blender for 2 years and never knew I could use it to edit video.

[DaAlexboiii]

what video formats are supported by blender? my phone camera's default 3gpp format isnt supported, and after converting to avi-xvid and mpeg4 it still couldnt read the video. any solutions?

[grudgeholder692]

what is this audio encoding you say at the end. i can do everything, but i cant quite get the audio to work

[OpticalVampire]

@grudgeholder692 I use mp3 as the audio encoding. You should also make sure the quality is better than the default, which I believe is 64k. 128 or 256 is much better.

[grudgeholder692]

@OpticalVampire ok, now my other issue is that the audio has far fewer frame than the video, but i cant seem to find a way to shorten the video frames without cutting. have you had this issue before? Or is it just that blender doesnt like the file formating, because the only file i can find on my computer that has the same number of frames is .mov

[OccamKant]

@grudgeholder692 if your video and audio have greatly different lengths, it's probable that the video you are importing has a different framerate than the one currently set in blender. The first step is to find your clip's framerate. There are a number of ways to do this, either by using your GUI to get info about the clip, or running ffmpeg -i on the file with no output filename, and it will tell you.

Then set your blender framerate to the same thing, and THEN import the clip

[grudgeholder692]

@OccamKant I'll try that when i need to do some editing and let you know how that works thx for the info

[ImzRivs]

Every time I open a video it shows up as a white screen. Why does it do that its pissing me off.

[OpticalVampire]

@ImzRivs It is probably the wrong format. I suggest using ffmpeg to convert it to a more blender friendly format.

On linux, the standard ffmpeg package is configured to create by default a video that works perfectly with blender.

Here is a command line you can use to convert your video:

ffmpeg -sameq -i infile -s 1280x720 -acodec libmp3lame -ab 320k -b 10M outfile

replace infile with the video's current name and outfile with the new name, ending in .avi

[OpticalVampire]

@ImzRivs For example, assuming your file is called IMG_0024.MOV

ffmpeg -sameq -i IMG_0024.MOV -s 1280x720 -acodec libmp3lame -ab 320k -b 10M IMG_0024.avi

This will take a quick time (.MOV) file and turn it into an mpeg 4 avi file (IMG_0024.avi) which blender will like.

[OpticalVampire]

@ImzRivs In the command line I mention, I have a -s parameter that scales the video to 1280x720. That is optional, but I've found that blender (at least on my machine) won't scrub 1080p full size video at full framerate. It will scrub 720 video at full speed, and I prefer that for editing. And it still looks great when you upload it to youtube.

[MisterSensational]

Check out more recent versions of Blender, there's a good chance they've fixed some of this.

[lbochtler]

pleas slow the video down, so we can see what you are doing

[harrypottterfreak]

Hi!

When i open it some 3d think come's up...it's like a cube.. or i don't know how to descripe it,it's not like in your program. Do you know what the problem is?

Thanku anyway!

[armorcp5]

Hi

And about sound editing in blender does it make possible some basic stuff as transition. keyframe volume and pan ?

[OpticalVampire]

@armorcp5 Hi - Unfortunately, Blender doesn't allow panning, but it does allow volume adjustment. If you wanted to pan, you need to do it by separating your audio into two tracks and adjusting their volume individually.

For transitioning in audio, that's generally just one channel fading out while a new one fades in, and that is easily done with volume f-curves.

[armorcp5]

Hi

Clear explanation thank s ... a bit fast but clear ...

hope you will making much more comtents

thanks

[Nadeem592]

how to save the video

[TheShockito]

I came from Sony Vegas, does blender any type of tittles or do you have to use always images as text?. this way text is not editable inside blender isn´t it?

[OccamKant]

@TheShockito You could set up a camera and text objects and do your titles that way, but unless you're going to use the text as 3D objects and take advantage of it, I'd say that that was an overly complicated way to do it.

So if you're doing some complex titling, or you want 3D characters to animate in your titles, then use Blender's text objects. But if you're just doing basic 2D titles, I would do it with an external program like the Gimp.

[TheShockito]

@OccamKant Thanks, for the reply, i wil do it that way you tell me.

[JerrysFunhouse]

Thanks for making a nice tutorial.

[meekayx3]

Great tutorial! I'm new to blender, but I want to use it more for video editing instead of modeling. Could you perhaps make a video on how to set the dimensions for the video input/output? How do you render the final product? I'm sure there's plenty more questions, but it would be great if you could answer.

[nerd637]

How do you match up the sound with the video..



[slinkeepy]

Hey, thanks for this, great tute! Super-fast, but I've been through most beginners ones and am always looking to learn something new, and this one has lots of neat tricks, and can analyze it in depth for whatever I miss :)

[OpticalVampire]

@slinkeepy You're welcome :) Gonna make a few more shortly, and if you have a question or an editing challenge, let me know and I'll see if I can come up with a solution to it.