Blender As A Video Editor? It's Actually Really Good!

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 caden live to edit all of my videos for the youtube channel and caden 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 caden live it 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 a like moving goal post right you never know what's going to work and what's not going to work in each new version of caden 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 never actually use 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 this 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 a 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 it's 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 ffmpeg video which is correct if for some reason it's set to something else you need to set it to ffmpeg video because there are some like uh image formats in here such as jpeg tiffany 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 go ahead and make this full screen here and then over on the right we have the tools 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 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 uh 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 project so 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 uh 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 [Music] you can see i 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 to be able to hear the audio when you're scrubbing through the video because sometimes you you want to make really fine cuts and it's really nice to be able to go frame by frame and to hear you know exactly when you begin a sentence or when a pause you know first happens or 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 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 space bar 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 end 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 a 100 000 frames which actually isn't that big like if i made a 30 40 minute video i 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 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 was 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 now 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 videos just because i know many people that watch my content or when their users are now let me zoom out a little bit with the scroll wheel on the mouse i can you know scroll because by default one thing about blender is your kind of zoomed way in the these video clips audio clips they're stretched way out which is great if you're making really minuscule fine cuts and something but for this particular clip that's you know 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 see 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 waveform 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 uh 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 i anywhere i move my mouse you know i'm dragging that sucker around and what i want to do is i want to move it to frame 0 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 0 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 to 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 a annotation hey i said this but i 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 i 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 scrub 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 uh 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 set up so it always looks for fonts and 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 and blender is really small most people are going to find it way too small if i set this back to 1.0 unless really really tiny font and it's really really tiny font probably for a reason because if you have ever used 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 know you're gonna want a bigger font so i found you know 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 fonts i also changed the render output to my videos directory in 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 i don't really like that color that is a light color it also has some transparency 70 alpha but i can adjust that let me go to the hex code i'm going to make it full black and for the alpha instead of 70 percent let's do 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 move 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 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 i will go into 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 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 the text looks like distributions or sometimes testing out very smooth very clean one thing i do love about blender is the playback is buttery smooth i unlike almost every other video editor for an 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 and if you can't scrub through the video cleanly and 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 let's 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 a it's also not set to mono so every single clip that has 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 tick that on every single clip that i import and let's see where i want to 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 so i could do a shift click on both of them g to move them and you know i could move it on top of that and then if i wanted to scrub through that yeah yeah you can kind of see the transition there let's play a new expert 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 uh 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 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 play head 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 uh 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 you know being butted up exactly where they need to be and now let's see how that transition works manager has to be run on a linux host now i've done a previous video about vert manager in the page 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 uh shift click both of them and then g to move them and then let's 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 uh how that's done for demonstration purposes now let's add a picture in picture so you know 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 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 going to pick a a a section out of this what i'll do is i'll drag the playhead to about here i'm going to hit k to cut and i'll get rid of all this because i just want this video here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to click on the 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 going to do is i'm going to 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 want to 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 fade out on that if i played through that previous video about vert manager in the past on how to install it and set it up on linux today i want to 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 uh you do have some some things you can do as far as color correction inside the video sequencer so what i'm going to 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 orangish hue to my particular lut 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 i could really over saturate myself or i could add no saturation at all if we wanted a black and white effect i actually i'm kind of good with what the saturation is just how it's recorded on my camera so i may not want to adjust with that but i 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 boy it adds a lot of lightness to it yeah i don't really want to play with that either i think what i want to do is i want to 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 well 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 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 easier curves we could add ucorrect 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 going to select whatever range of frames you happen to have selected down in the sequencer itself and remember the 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 a hundred thousand 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 5852 then i'm going to hit hit escape to get out of that so then i'm going to go down here 5852 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 playhead all the way to frame one and you have the ending frame selected you have start and then correct here then go to render render animation and it's going to 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 set up i'll just throw this on a different monitor and uh you can actually see on here we have a percent bar here you can see 13 14 you can actually see the playhead move as well as its 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 will render in 10 minutes or less you know that that's typical if i do a 30 minute video it might take 15 minutes right well not the case on blender a 10 minute video on blender i've noticed it's going to take me 15 20 minutes right it's going to 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 you know 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 is 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 going to like that slow render time now i think our rendering has completed if i go back this is the render screen you see it's no longer moving so i can close that if i go back to this screen you can see yeah there's no percent bar or anything so we got to the hundred percent 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 so i do a lot with virtual machines i install a ton of operating system and you can see plays just fine now one last thing i do want to just briefly mention that'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 uh panes in the separate panes here what you can do is they all have four corners and if you take this 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 uh 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 want to change it to i don't know non-linear animation i that's probably not even something that's appropriate for the video editor because uh 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 no 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 the three panes that i had up top but that's how you do that you just grab a corner and drag it and 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 it doesn't have all the whiz-bang effects right it's lacking a ton of stuff that a more mature video editor like kaden 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 that's a big deal to me because at this point i just want a video editor without all the heartache without the pain right 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 devon gabe james matt michael mitchell paul scott west hakami allen lennox ninja chuck mander angry curt yoga david dilling gregory heiko cosca lee maxim mike nitric surya and alexander p sergeant for door probably that river red prophet stephen 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 you want to see more great videos about free and open source software please support distro tube over on patreon alright guys peace it's crazy that a program that's not a video editor is a better video editor than actual video editors

Channel: DistroTube

Views: 5,692

Keywords: video editing, blender tutorial, blender animation, blender 3.0, blender for beginners, video editor, blender video editing, blender video, video editing in blender, blender vse, blender video editor, is blender good for video editing, is blender good, basic video editing in blender, free software, open source, windows, mac, linux, best free video editing software, free video editor, linux video editor, distrotube, blender vs kdenlive

Id: Qb5pge01H4Q

Length: 33min 12sec (1992 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021