 Here in the last couple of weeks, I have been experimenting with another video editor, a free and open source video editor that is not Kaden Live. For years, I have used Kaden Live to edit all of my videos or the YouTube channel. And Kaden Live, well, being fantastic, very feature rich, and certainly I would say the best free and open source video editor out there, one problem with Kaden Live is a little bit buggy, a little bit flaky. It tends to break with every update, new things break. And then the things that broke in a previous version are fixed. But it's always, it's always like moving goalpost, right? You never know what's going to work and what's not going to work in each new version of Kaden Live. And it can be frustrating because, you know, I want stability, especially as many videos as I make, I want stability in my workflow. So what I've decided to do was to experiment with a video editor that I had never actually used. And the reason I had never actually used this video editor is because it's not really strictly a video editor. And what I'm talking about is Blender. Blender is actually a 3D animation, a 3D modeling program that does have video editing capabilities built into that. And how good are these video editing capabilities? Well, I wasn't sure until a couple of weeks ago where I decided I was going to make myself start editing at least a few videos in Blender just to see how the experience was. So far, my experience has been mostly positive using the video sequencer, the video editor inside Blender. It's been mostly positive. There's a few negatives. There's some things, some weird quirks, some things it does that are quite a bit different than what most other video editors do. But I'm going to show you all that on camera today. I'm going to open up the video sequencer inside Blender. And let's edit a little video. So let me switch over to my desktop and let me go ahead and launch Blender. Now, again, Blender is mainly for 3D animation and 3D modeling, even though it does have a video editor built into it. It's not really the main focus of this particular program. So when you first launch Blender, it's going to ask you, what do you want to do? 2D animation, sculpting, VFX, video editing, click video editing, and you get this video editor layout here. And by default, you have these three panes at the top and two panes at the bottom. You have your file manager, and then you have your preview window. So if you were scrubbing through the video, this is where you could watch the video. Then you have scene information here. And this is where you can set your resolution. By default, it's set to 1920 by 1080 at 24 frames per second. Now, obviously, if I'm doing 1080p video, most people are going to want to do 60 frames per second. That's what I record in, so that's what I need to render in as well. Some people do 1080p 30 frames per second. 24 frames per second is kind of weird. I don't know why that is set as a default. But once I have 1920 by 1080, 60 frames per second as the format, I'm going to fold that frame range. I don't need to play with that. I do need to play with this section here, output. By default, when you render, your video is going to output to slash TMP. So, you know, the temporary directory in your root directory. Obviously, I want something else here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on the little folder icon to get the file picker. And what I want to do is I want this to render to my videos directory inside my home directory. So that's where I'm going to put my particular outputted file here. File format, by default, it should be set to FFMPigVideo, which is correct. If for some reason it's set to something else, you need to set it to FFMPigVideo because there are some, like, image formats in here, such as JPEG, TIFF, PING. Obviously, that's not going to work for you if you're trying to render a video. And at the bottom, we have the video sequencer here. So this is your timeline. So this is where you would, you know, drag clips down here into the timeline. I'm going to go ahead and make this full screen here. And then over on the right, we have the tool section here. So if I had some videos in the timeline, I could click on a clip and then I could perform various actions on that clip, depending on whether it was audio or video. And let's go back to the file manager because the file manager, let me widen this out if I can so we can see a few more icons here. By default, it is in our home directory. I'm going to go into my videos directory because that's where I save all of my videos. And I'm just going to pick one of my previous video projects. This is a video I did a week or two ago about Vert Manager. And let's just go ahead and play around. So I'm going to drag this particular video clip down here into the timeline. So let me go ahead and get my headphones on. And when I launched Blender for the very first time and decided to edit my first video, there were some really strange things that I noticed right away. One of them is scrubbing through the video. Obviously, I'm scrubbing through the video. I don't get any audio scrubbing, though. Like, how do I turn on the audio while I'm scrubbing? Well, you go to Playback, the menu down here, Playback, and go to Audio and tick on Scrubbing. And now when I scrub through the video, you can see I get the audio. Well, I get the audio. Hopefully, you guys are getting the audio. Let me make sure I have the sources set up so you guys are getting that. Yeah, you guys should be able to hear that on the video. And that's very important to be able to hear the audio when you're scrubbing through the video, because sometimes you want to make really fine cuts. And it's really nice to be able to go frame by frame and to hear exactly when you begin a sentence or when a pause, you know, first happens or ends. So that's a really nice feature to have. Another thing that bugged me compared to other video editors is watch the playhead when I play the video. Now, I'm going to move my head out of the way. Now, to play, you could either hit Spacebar on the keyboard, and that's what I recommend is getting used to Spacebar for play, pause, play, pause. So let me play with the Spacebar and let me move ahead, because I don't want to wait that long. And then I'm going to hit Space again, or I could hit the Play button down here. And it actually started back at the first frame. Ah, this is another interesting thing. You see this section here from here to here, that it is lighter gray instead of the black out here. This is the only section that we're allowed to play, because you see Start, Frame 1, and Frame 250. That's not a very big section to be able to play. So what I've done on every video that I've made so far is I just set this to some huge number, like 100,000 frames, which actually isn't that big. Like if I made a 30, 40 minute video, it might actually get to 100,000 frames, right? But for what we're doing, I'm just giving it a huge number, because I want to be able to play forever. For example, I want to be able to play out here, which was outside that initial range. Do on physical hardware, on your production machine. It makes sense sometimes just to spin up a virtual machine. Now, you see the Playhead, it disappeared on us. The Playhead was still playing, but it's playing off-screen, right? It started over here, and then it moved off-screen, and we're no longer following the Playhead at the current frame. That's annoying. So how do we change that? Well, we go into Playback, and we go to Playback, Follow Current Frame. And now when I hit Play, Virtualization programs installed on my system. It's back here. And now when it gets to the end, so if I start at the end of the timeline here, you will see once it gets to the point where it would be off-camera, basically, for us, it'll actually jump the timeline back toward the beginning. One of my videos is because I know many people that watch my content are when users are ma... Now, let me zoom out a little bit with the scroll wheel on the mouse so I can scroll, because by default, one thing about Blender is you're kind of zoomed way in. These video clips, audio clips, they're stretched way out, which is great if you're making really miniscule fine cuts and something. But for this particular clip, it's about a minute, 15 seconds. You know, there's no real cuts that I was wanting to make. One odd thing is the audio clip. We have a video clip, which is blue, and then the green clip here is the audio clip, but you can't actually see the waveform. So if you actually click on it, you can tell it's highlighted. Over in the Tools section, you have sound. You know, just clicking on it by default on an audio clip, you get sound here. Go to Display Wave Form and also click on Mono, because obviously you want sound to be to both channels, right and left speaker. Otherwise, you could have a situation where your listeners are only going to get their sound through one speaker or through one of their headphones. And obviously you don't want that. So let me put my head back into frame and let me show you some basic editing that I would do. I'm going to zoom back out just a little bit. I zoomed in way too far, probably. And then what I would do here is at the beginning here, there's a lot of silence before I start talking. I don't need that much silence. So what I could do is I could do Control and Click on the mouse. So Control-Click gets me both the audio and the video clip at the beginning selected. And then I could just grab that thick border of either clip and then just adjust, right? And then what I could do is I'll click off to the side. And then I'm just going to do a Shift-Click where I select both of them. And then if I hit G, which is a standard Blender command to move things around. Now, anywhere I move my mouse, I'm dragging that sucker around. And what I want to do is I want to move it to frame zero. You can see I can actually move it to negative frames. But obviously, probably not wanting to do that. So I'm going to get that as close to frame zero as I can. Well, I got it at frame one. And now let me hit the Spacebar to play. So I do a lot with virtual and spacebar to pause. Yeah, I like that. That was the perfect amount of pause before I started speaking, in my opinion. Now, what I would like is I would like a fade from black, right? I want to fade in. Well, what I could do is if I want to fade in on the video, select the video. So just click on it with the mouse. And then if I right click on it, I could go to this menu here, Fade. And I could do a fade in, a fade out, or I could just do a fade in and a fade out on the same clip, which is sometimes what you want to do. But for this, I just need a fade in. So click the fade in and I go back to the beginning and then Spacebar. So I do a lot with virtual, a very nice little fade in effect. Another common thing I do on my videos is I add text to the screen. That's something almost everybody that does YouTube videos. Sometimes you actually have to add text to the screen. Maybe you make a mistake in the video and you want to do an annotation. Hey, I said this, but I really meant that or whatever it happens to be. So what you could do is you could do Shift capital A to get an effects menu here. You could also go up here and just click on Add. That's the same menu, but capital A, go to Add Text. And it's a very, very tiny clip by default. It's just a few frames. I don't know why it's so small by default. But let me go ahead, do the mouse wheel to zoom way back out. So I can actually do something with this very tiny clip. And now if I can actually do anything, I can drag the whole thing. But let me, again, zoom way in. You know, the video sequencer inside Blender, like I said, is a little clunky. But now once I'm zoomed in enough where I can grab one of the borders. Now I can stretch this because I want this to be at least a few seconds. Now by default, if I scroll through, you can see text in the center of the screen, right, it's centered horizontally and vertically. Well, what I want is I want something else. Maybe I want to say, by the way, I use Arch Linux exclamation point. If I hit Enter, you can see in real time it changes there in the preview. Now let me move my head. Now let's go ahead and change the font. By default, it's using an open font. I don't know what that is, but I'm going to go into user share fonts. And by default, it's actually going to look for fonts, I believe, in your home directory. Now I have my Blender setup, so it always looks for fonts in user share fonts, which is where it should on a Linux system. But to get this, so it always defaults to that directory, what you need to do is you actually need to go into edit. You need to go into preferences. And there's several preferences that I have changed here. Let me get back into a non full screen mode. One of the things I changed was the interface display resolution skill. I scaled the font up to 1.12. So I increased the font size everywhere in Blender by 12%, essentially. And the reason I did that is by default, the font size in Blender is really small. Most people are going to find it way too small. If I set this back to 1.0, that's really, really tiny font. And it's really, really tiny font, probably for a reason, because if you ever use Blender, there is a lot of stuff going on on the screen, right? And to fit all that stuff on the screen, they probably have to default to a really tiny font. But if you've got old eyes like I do, you're going to want a bigger font. So I found increasing it by 12% is about right for me. Another thing you want to do is go into File Paths and go to Data, and make sure that it looks for fonts and user share file lengths. I also changed the render output to my videos directory and my home directory, because remember, it's going to default to slash temp if you don't change that. And then go down here to this little hamburger menu and make sure you take on auto save preferences and then save preferences to close out of that. And hopefully Blender remembers them the next time you launch Blender. And those are global settings for Blender. They're not specifically just for the video editor, because the video editor is just part of Blender. So now that it's looking for fonts and user share fonts, I'm just going to go pick a font. Here's one I often use, the Antonio font. And I could adjust the size by default at 60, but we could increase it. I'll just bump it up to about 80. I could add some shadowing behind it. So this white text has, you know, a black shadow, which actually helps it stand out. That's actually a really nice touch. And we could add a box around it, the box by default. I don't really like that color. That is a light color and also has some transparency, 70% alpha. But I could adjust that. Let me go to the hex code. I'm going to make it full black and for the alpha instead of 70% to 80%. Yeah, that looks a little better in my opinion. Now let's do the layout. The location X and Y, you can see it is centered on the X and the Y axis. Well, let's play with that a little bit. So if I adjusted that instead of 0.5 to 0.2, you see I moved that off to the side. That way it's not on top of my head, right? And if I wanted to not have it centered vertically as well, I mean, I could adjust that as well. That way we get it toward the top of the screen. One other thing I want to do is I want to click on this. We'll go into a right click menu and get to fade again and fade in and out on this. And now zoom back out a little bit. Let's go to the beginning space. I do a lot with virtual machines. I install a ton of operating. That was a very nice fade in. Let's move ahead and see how the fade out on the text looks like distributions or sometimes testing out. Very smooth, very clean. And one thing I do love about Blender is the playback is buttery smooth. Unlike almost every other video editor, free and open source video editor that I've tried. I mean, that's just smooth scrubbing. That's just buttery smooth. It's smooth playback, smooth scrubbing. And that's really important. That may be possibly the most important thing with a video editor. And it's one of those things that many video editors don't do a good job of. If you can't scrub through the video cleanly, certainly if playback is not smooth, then your video editor is almost useless to me, in my opinion. So I'm really happy with the playback and the scrubbing inside Blender. So let me go ahead. I'm going to zoom back out a little bit. Move ahead along the timeline here and go ahead and add another clip. So I drag this clip. And one thing you'll notice is the audio. We don't have the waveform. We don't have it's also not set to mono. So every single clip that has a audio that you drag into this, you actually have to take on mono and display waveform. I don't know why that's not a default for a video editor. That should just be a default. There's no reason anybody should have to take that on. If I have to take it on, it should be in settings where I should just set it one time and it should just remember it forever. I should never have to take that. But for right now, at least as far as I know of, I have to take that on every single clip that I import. And let's see where I want to put this clip. Maybe I want to have this on top of this other clip. Maybe I want some kind of transition effect. Well, remember, I could do a control click here at the beginning because I've got some extra space at the beginning of that. And then what I could do is I could do a shift click on both of them. G to move them. And I can move it on top of that. And then if I wanted to script through that, yeah, you can kind of see the transition there. Let's play it. Use vert manager. Vert manager has to be run on a Linux. I've done a previous video about. Now, obviously, that's just an example of how that works, right? Now, instead, if I didn't want one clip on top of another, maybe I wanted just a clean cut and these merged together. What I could do is I could do G again to move this around. But what I need to do is I need to get rid of all this dead space down here. Let me zoom in. Now, I could control click at the end to get both of them together, but that doesn't work. I've noticed the control at the beginning of the clip. That works selecting both. But at the end, it never works. The reason it never works is because when you're actually recording, video and audio together, oftentimes there's a frame difference. They have to be the exact same frame length. So the problem here is that the video is a few frames longer than the audio clip. So I can't actually grab them both together with the control click and adjust like I can at the beginning. Unless I just grab this one clip and try to adjust it to the exact same size and if I can get them exactly the same, then control click should work. But you see, I'm still a couple of frames off. Now, I don't do this. This is tedious trying to line them up just so I can do a control click to cut off the end. What you can do is just do a cut. And this is what I do. I do the shift click to select both. I put the playhead exactly where I want to make the cut and then hit K on the keyboard for cut. And you see, I made a clean cut. Let me move the playhead. You can see that's a clean cut there. I just click on that and hit the delete key. Click on that, hit the delete key. And now shift select these, G to move them and just move them right. You can move them past the end of the next clip. It will always bump them back to being butted up exactly where they need to be. And now let's see how that transition works. Work manager has to be run on a Linux host. Now I've done a previous video about work manager in the past. Now obviously I left a little bit too much space there on this clip here. So what I could do once again, I could do control click and adjust that a little bit and then do the shift click both of them and then G to move them. And then I'll see if that worked out on a Linux host. Now I've done a previous video. Yeah, that's a little cleaner, still a little bit too much space in there but you can see how that's done for demonstration purposes. Now let's add a picture in picture. So sometimes you want a video playing and then you want a video inside the video playing. You know, let me show you this effect. So let me just pick a clip, any clip here. I will drag this in and I don't need the audio because I won't have the audio playing in this clip. This will just be strictly a video clip. I'm just gonna pick a section out of this. What I'll do is I'll drag the play head to about here. I'm gonna hit K to cut. Now I'll get rid of all this because I just want this video here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna click on the clip here and let me move my head out of the way so you guys can see the effects over here. Go to transform. If you go into transform you have scale X, scale Y they're both set to 1.0. So 100% right meaning it takes up 100% of the screen. Well to have picture in picture I need this top clip to be smaller than the one underneath it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna adjust that to 0.3 and then of course I need to do the same for Y as well. And now you can see we have adjusted the size. I also need to adjust the position in the screen. I'll move it over and I'll move it toward the top a little bit. I think that's a good spot for it. And then by default when we're playing or scrubbing you can see we have the top clip but we do not have the bottom because what we need to do is we need to add some alpha effects to this. So under compositing you see blend. By default it's set to cross. You wanna go and do alpha over. And you see now everything underneath that top clip shows through right? So that is how you get that. And if I actually wanted to add a fade in and a fade out just to be even more fancy I could have a fade in and a fade out on that if I played through that. I got a previous video about Vert Manager in the past on how to install it and set it up on Linux. Today I wanna dive a little deeper and you see I've got the video playing inside the video right? So that is a common effect that a lot of people need to know how to do. Now let's talk a little bit about color correction. So you do have some things you can do as far as color correction inside the video sequencer. So what I'm gonna do is let's take this clip the underneath clip here. So that'll be me here. And you can see it's got a little bit of a orangeish hue to my particular look that I'm using here. Let's go ahead and see if we can, I don't know add some different color effects maybe some different saturation or maybe even a lack of saturation if we wanted to do maybe some black and white effects or something. So let me move my head out of the way and I collapsed compositing and transform we don't want those right now. We want color and you have saturation and multiply. And if I wanted to I could actually you know I could really over saturate myself or I could add no saturation at all if we wanted a black and white effect. I actually kind of good with what the saturation is just how it's recorded on my camera. So I may not wanna adjust with that but I could adjust multiply which multiply it's more of like a compositing effect. You can see we actually add transparency as we decrease it and as we increase it it adds a lot of lightness to it. Yeah I don't really wanna play with that either. I think what I wanna do is I wanna go over here to this modifiers tab. Click on modifiers and if I go to add strip modifier we have things we can add as effects. They're not here by default but if I wanted to I could add color balance. You know and then I get color wheels that I could play with. I scrolled too far down here. Let me go back to modifiers here. Scroll down you see lift, gamma, gain. If I wanted to play with this you know add some blue to that that actually was a nice correction for something kind of random. If I wanted to play around with the gamma oh yeah probably should have left that alone and of course the gain. Yeah let me put that back toward the center there. So that is a little bit of what you can do other modifiers that we could have added we could add strip modifier. We could add curves which is the busier curves. We could add you correct brightness and contrast, mask, white balance and a tone map. That's just a very basic cursory look at the video editing itself inside Blender. Now let's talk a little bit about rendering. How do you render a video? Well you go up here to render and you need to select render animation but if you just select render animation typically it's gonna select whatever range of frames you happen to have selected down in the sequencer itself and remember you could also have an issue where you didn't have the entire selection of frames because remember if I move my head again down here at the bottom right start one frame and then the ending frame is 100,000 that's just what I set. What you need to do is you need to get this exact. So start should always be frame one but end what I would do is I would go to the last frame and I would click on it to select it. Hit E for end and you could actually move this. You can see that the cursor changed where if I could actually drag this around if I wanted to but I don't actually want to move it. What I want to do is I just want to select it, hit E just so I could get that frame. Well I messed it up again, click it, hit E and you can see the ending frame is 5,852. Then I'm gonna hit escape to get out of that. So then I'm gonna go down here, 5,852 for the frame and you can see right there that is our frame range. If I zoom out here what you need to do make sure you put the play head all the way to frame one and you have the ending frame selected. You have start and end correct here then go to render, render animation and it's gonna render this in a separate window. Let me make this full screen. Do not close this window. This window has to remain open. If you close this window it will kill the rendering. You could put this on a different monitor which is what I do having a triple monitor setup. I'll just throw this on a different monitor and you can actually see on here we have a percent bar here. You can see 13%, 14%, you can actually see the play head move as well as it's rendering. You want to actually watch the video render you can watch it. Now one thing to notice is the video is clearly rendering slower than it plays in real time which my machine is a beefy machine and in Caden live for example, my videos render faster than they play in real time. Like meaning if I do a 15 minute video typically that sucker all render in 10 minutes or less. You know that's typical. I do a 30 minute video at my tight 15 minutes, right? Well, not the case on Blender. A 10 minute video on Blender I've noticed is gonna take me 15, 20 minutes, right? This is gonna take more than the length of the video so it actually renders a bit slower on my machine and again my machine's kind of a beefy machine. If you're on a machine that is really underpowered then the rendering time could be an issue with Blender because again it's a little slower time in many cases time is money, right? Now for me because it's not a huge difference it's not a problem because it's not like while it's rendering I can't be doing something else because I've got enough RAM and my processor's good and everything where while this is rendering I could actually be making my thumbnail for this video. So those extra few minutes that it takes to render I can be multitasking while it's rendering I can be doing other stuff. So it's not a big deal for me personally but I know some people are not gonna like that slow render time. Now I think our rendering has completed. If I go back this is the render screen you can see it's no longer moving so I can close that. If I go back to the screen you can see yeah there's no percent bar or anything so we got to the 100%. I'm sure the video rendered fine if I wanted to check it out I could open my file manager and actually navigate to where we rendered that and it named it just a random set of numbers here if I click on it. So I do a lot with virtual machines I install a ton of operating systems and you can see it plays just fine. Now one last thing I do wanna just briefly mention it's not something I play around with but I know some people will want to adjust the layout because a lot of people like to have different things on their screen as far as video editing different kind of widgets and things and you can adjust the layout of everything here. On these panes, the separate panes here what you can do is they all have four corners and if you take this bottom corner for example in the preview window here if I can grab it I can just grab it and drag it. Right, oh and magically another pane appears basically a duplicate of the one we were grabbing on, right? But you can then go and change it to whatever it is you wanna change it to, I don't know, non-linear animation. That's probably not even something that's appropriate for the video editor because there's a lot of course 3D animation stuff built into Blender but that's how you would add a new frame basically if you wanted the frame to go away I believe I could just well know that created a new one. Maybe I actually have to go in here and go to if I right click on the title bar, close area. All right, that did it. Of course now we end up still with this area, close area and now I'm back to just having the three panes that I had up top but that's how you do that. You just grab a corner and drag it and I magically a new pane will appear. So that's just a little bit of what you can do with Blender as far as a video editor. The things it does, it does really well. The scrubbing through the video, the playback is all buttery smooth and that's a big thing for me so I was really impressed with that. Also, you know, some of the basic effects like adding text and color correction and things like that. I mean it has a lot of the really basic fundamental features you'd expect a video editor to have, it doesn't have all the whizbang effects right, it's lacking a ton of stuff that a more mature video editor like Kate and live would have but if you don't necessarily need those effects and I can get by without those effects as long as I have something stable that the limited set of features it has will always work without crashes. That's a big deal to me because at this point I just want a video editor without all the heartache, without the pain, without the frustrations and so far, again I have edited five, six videos now with Blender and so far it's been lovely. Now before I go I want to thank a few special people. I want to thank the producers of this episode. I'm talking about Devin Gabe James, Matt Michael Mitchell, Paul Scott West, Hikami Allen, Lennox Ninja Chuck, Mandarangri Kurt, Diokai, David Dillon Gregory, Haiko Kaskali, Max and Mike, Nitrix Suriyan, Allie Xander, Peacarton Fodor, Palletette Raver, Red Prophet, Steven and Willie, these guys. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at Blender as a video editor would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen, this ever growing list of names. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. It's just me and you guys, the community. If you like my work and you want to see more great videos about free and open source software, please support DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace. It's crazy that a program that's not a video editor is a better video editor than actual video editors.