 Hi everyone. We're going to talk about the video sequence editor in Blender. Any one of you is using it or has used it? Whoa, we have a lot of people. You're crazy. The video sequence editor was meant or might have been removed in Blender 2.80, but it made it thankfully for better or for worse. So in this presentation, we're going to talk about that, about the good side of the sequence editor, the bad side about any. The recent improvements that happened in the project because it is under active development again, even if it's a little slow. We're going to talk about the future of the sequencer or what it could be at least and finally we'll talk about how it can help it become the tool it's meant to be. I'm Nathan. I founded a small social company called GD Quest, Game Design Quest. We make tutorials with and for free software that we use exclusively. Our mission is to bring people together to become game developers. Anyone has used the Godot game engine here? Yeah, a few persons. Thank you. So we make tutorials. Everything is free and the thing is, so you have a few tutorials like this one, a series that's meant to get you started creating games in 2D in this case, the three you want following. This led me to become an occasional contributor to Blender because we edit all our videos with the video sequencer or our tutorials. We created an add-on that is included in Blender 2.81 called Power Sequencer to help you create videos better. It helps to edit faster and as a result yet I'm now working on the sequencer itself, making small contributions to help push things forward. Now if you've used the sequencer, you should know one thing. The sequencer sucks. The sequencer sucks because it is slow. The cursor is always lagging behind. It's also making the UI freeze as soon as you have a little too much to render. The cuts in your footage can provoke micro-freezes as you are playing back. Even if you are using proxies or things like these, the effects are pretty demanding. And finally, the video rendering process is very long. The thing is as an editor, even if you're doing a 3D movie or anything, you need the playback to be smooth so that you can get a sense for the rhythm and the feel that the spectator will have in the end. The VSC is sucking because it is old. It looks like a very old program, the drawing you can see. I'm really talking about the sequence editor area, not the rest of Blender because it got a nice upgrade with 2.80. But the visuals of the sequencer feel behind the rest of Blender, making it feel like it's unfinished or lacks a bit of polish. The sequencer has clunky controls. You know these, the green and pink sequences you can see, are effect sequences. They are unintuitive. They get in the way. They make it hard to use the sequencer. They are confusing in general. Also, basic editing operations that are kind of standard in other video editing programs don't work exactly the same way in the sequencer and are inconsistent between tools, making it harder to use than it could be. The sequencer does not feel part of Blender. It really feels like its own program, a bit separate from the rest. You can add a 3D footage as a scene in the sequencer, but here you have an example of trying to grade a strip that you select using the compositing area and just nothing happens. Instead, you have to use the same functionality that's duplicated in the sequencer and that's specific to strips, applying a curve in this case. Audio tools are really bare bones. That's all the audio tools in the sequence editor. There is no way to preview your audio. There are no effects, no mixer, no cross fades. It's just limited. You have to use something else to do audio editing. I lied because I think that the sequencer is amazing, kind of. It has a lot of potential. First, it's the most stable free and open-source video editing tool that I've used and even commercial software tends to crash. I don't know if anyone has used Sony Vegas or Premiere. I've had lots of issues with them. Can anyone relate? Yes, a few persons. Thank you. The sequencer has crashed on me once or twice with a reproducible bug, but overall I've had a great experience using it. Another thing that's really important is that you can keep editing your projects during playback. So you can playback the video and move handles at the same time. It just works. The sequencer is part of Blender. Okay, there are connections lacking between some areas like the ability to use the node compositor to grade your shots. But it's only one new area to learn, not an entire new program. So as a Blender user, as someone working on a 3D or a 2D movie, this is great because you can use the G shortcut to grab a strip to make it move. You can add 3D scenes as strips as well. So there's some consistency with the rest of Blender and some connection with some other features in the program. It also benefits from Blender. That is, the sequence area is not a complete program, a complete project for developers to make from scratch. Instead, every improvement to the animation tools, for example, the improvements to the user interface in Blender 2.80, all the new file browser that's coming in the next version are all usable with the sequencer. It's not something separate that would take extra maintenance, giving it a lot of potential once again. The sequencer is flexible. If you have a team, if you have a developer in-house, you can use the Python programming language to add new features. You also have existing add-ons that you can use to add features like the ability to, there we go, transform strips directly from the preview. A feature that's lacking, so you can change the opacity of your footage, you can change the position, the scale, the rotation, all sorts of things. Then, I should say that the sequencer is already part of the way there. Of course, it needs improvements, but it already does a lot. It's already there and it's already used by animators, by professionals. So, it has, hopefully, its place in the program. It's been used for storyboarding and annotations by the animation studios, by the Blender animation studios. So, hopefully, the sequencer is here to stay, especially now that we have a maintainer for a very long time that was the problem. There was no one willing to dive into that very old code and make it up to date. But we have someone, even though he's working part-time at the moment, leading the work done by other contributors and helping it move forward. Now, the sequencer lacks one thing. It's lacking a vision. It's lacking some concept, some design goals, some target users that are very specific and help funnel down the development. One problem that we have on the VSC channel, on the online chat, is that you have people coming to request all kinds of features that are specific to the needs of a video editor working on movies, on TV shows, all those kinds of things. And there's not enough people to develop all that, but it would also not necessarily make sense as part of Blender itself because the sequencer is not a video editing suite. There are dedicated free software projects like the Olive editor that definitely and specifically targets professional video editors. That's very promising. There is KDN Live for people editing videos in general. So doing the same thing as part of Blender would not necessarily be meaningful. After all, it's a digital content creation tool. The sequencer is really a sequence view. So right now, as I was saying, it feels like a program of its own, a little separate from the rest. But the graph editor, the file browser and other areas just interact with other parts of Blender. You can use them in conjunction. The sequencer doesn't always feel that way. If you see it as a way to view your Blender project as a set of sequences that you can move back and forward in time and edit, it would make a little more sense, like the NLA editor, nonlinear animation tools. It could be a tool for virtual filmmaking. You have the example of Unity's tools right now. We discussed that with some Blender developers on the chat again. It's nothing set in stone, of course, but it's a possible direction for the tool. There is no tool in the free software world to allow you to just edit, sequence your movies where you can preview, work directly from the 3D scene, jump around your shots by moving forward in the timeline, those kinds of things. And there are some game engines that are doing that right now. The thing is, Blender 2.80 already has the EV rendering engine. That would be a perfect match for those needs. Now, there are some improvements that are being made right now and that are coming in the next versions of Blender. You have improvements to playback and rendering, let's say, in general. The prefetch is the ability for the sequencer to cache and render the frames ahead of time, just like you would see in something like After Effects, for example, so that you can then get smooth playback. So you edit a part of your video and the next frames are already pre-rendered and you can work seamlessly. It works in the memory and on the disk. It's already coming in the next version and will keep being improved moving forward. You have some tweaks being made to improve storyboarding with Blender. So this is the hero movie. You can see that it's using strips in the top right corner. There's a problem with the fact that you can't jump from a scene strip in the sequencer, so you can add some animation as a sequence in Blender, but you can't easily jump back and forth between the 2D view and the sequencer strip. There are improvements coming to the user interface. There are features in Blender that are really powerful in the sequencer. The thing is, they are more confusing than they could be. And we have Peter Fogg, a contributor working with William, who's working on UI and Blender and other contributors, simplifying everything, making it clear what works, when, what options do. So every panel is being remade right now, one by one. You're going to have some improvements to editing. You're going to see the toolbar from the rest of Blender appear with a bit of delay, but it's coming, making the tools much easier to use, much more discoverable. You also have a working progress patch to show thumbnails on the videos, that's also happening, and in general, a variety of quality of life improvements. Now let's talk about the future, a possible future. Again, there is no clear roadmap at the moment, but we have improved user experience as a goal, making it much smoother using the sequencer for the first time, for first time users, and for artists, modernizing the look maybe a little bit, moving the clunky FX trips to modifiers to be consistent with the rest of Blender, making the experience smoother in general. One thing that Richard the maintainer wants to do is a sequencer timeline API. It's getting a bit technical, but the idea is that right now you can't use footage with different frame rates in Blender. You have all kinds of issues with that. The thing is Pixar developed Open Timeline I.O., an interchange format, a data format that you can use to kind of standardize how you handle footage, the position on the board, the length of the strips, and those kinds of things. This would bring quite a few advantages and improvements in the sequencer. For you, the user being able to just put the footage in the sequencer and have it work, but it would also be much easier for developers to contribute. I'm picking up C, working on the sequencer is really hard. You would also have the ability to change the playback speed. Right now we use a hack in add-ons to do that, but you might be able to play at 20% faster, 40% faster, the kinds of things you see in general in video editing programs, and that saves you time editing videos. Now improvements coming to color management, I should say fixes. I don't have a great understanding of that, to be honest, but I saw that some bug that would prevent you from using color management in the sequencer has been fixed recently, and there are people reporting issues that they have, so hopefully this will get better moving forward. Another thing that the maintainer Richard wants is to make these features from a great add-on called the VSC transform part of the sequencer itself. I've heard that there was work being done on widgets to manipulate 2D images, and we could bring that to the sequence editor as well so that you could just move stuff, select stuff from the video preview. Finally, there's always the project to improve performances in the sequencer. When it's coming, I don't know, but at least a fair part of the operations needs to be modified to use all of your computer's power. Here you have a video being rendered in the background. It's using roughly 2 cores, 30% of the CPU power. It's not using the graphics card, and there are improvements that can be made there. Finally, as I was saying, if the idea of pushing the sequencer into the virtual filmmaking direction is taken by the team, by the developers, sequencing movies, being able to preview all the shots from the sequencer using EV could be something for the future. Now, you can help with that whether you are an experienced developer or not because there is a lot of work to do. You can make a difference by helping with code, of course, as Richard himself says, patches are always welcome. You can use C all now. You can develop in Python. Python developers are welcome to add new features to refine some existing features that are made in Python. We need help. Feedback from editors, from people using the sequencer. We are just a handful of people talking every day, every week on the VSC chat. If you are using it, please come talk to us, tell us what are the problems that you encounter so that we can improve these areas. Sometimes it's just a matter of changing how things are presented in the user interface. The feature might be there, and you might just be missing it. Finally, we need help with testing, reporting bugs. People are doing it, of course, but again, as the sequencer is not the most used area in Blender, I think it's not getting as many bug reports and as many fixes as a result as it could. As I was saying, patches are welcome. You can get in touch with us on Blender.Chat slash channel slash VSC. There is a video sequence editor channel there. We have a list of easy tasks for people who want to get started. There is Peter Fogg, Tint Wotin. You can message him on the board. He's maintaining a document with things like these, so you don't have to go through, just jump in the sequencer, jump in the source code, and all of that will help you get started to guide you with the code or whatever. I should add one last thing. It's that the maintainer was busy, so he's a guy who has a full-time job. He's quitting now. He might be working more on the sequencer. At least he's looking forward to doing some more if he can. But with that, I want to say thank you for listening to my rant. One last thing. You see the shameless plug on the screen right now if you want to get in touch, watch tutorials, learn game creation. We do a lot of free code. Finally, I will be there for the duration of the event, so come talk to me anytime. Thank you once again. Bye-bye. Enjoy the conference.