Blender for Video Editing: Video Transitions

hello everyone and welcome to another video today I wanted to do a quick video showing how to add transitions between your video clips in blender this is really a pretty simple topic so let's just head over to blender and jump right into it so here's a blender project that I've set up for video editing with multiple Clips I've actually also deleted the audio tracks to make things simpler now if you aren't familiar with blender for video editing or are unsure how I got here please make sure you've watched our getting started with blender for video editing tutorial where we walk through everything you'll need to get to this point now the problem with the way the current project is laid out is that there are hard cuts between the clips so the screen will simply jump from one clip to the other end the visual effect is somewhat jarring for example if I let this just run between scene 1 and scene 2 you'll see that the video just immediately cuts over to the next scene so to solve this problem we want to add some transitions between these clips to help the viewer move from one scene to the other and why don't we go ahead and start with this first clip um instead of simply jumping into this first scene let's see if we can add a gentle fade in from a black screen to eventually transition to this first clip so to do this I've gone ahead and first prepared a small JPEG file which is this one right here this black background JPEG and if I double click and open it you'll see that it's really just a small picture which is completely filled with black the reason I wanted to do that is now if I come back to my blender project and I back it all the way up a couple of frames in front of the first clip I'm gonna go ahead and now add this image and I'll go ahead and find my black background and I will go ahead and add that to the image strip and let me go ahead and grab and extend it so I'll extend this so that there's some overlap between this black background and this clip and the first clip now right now the problem is if I let this guy run you'll see that we still get this hard cut in from the black screen it goes hard on to the next screen so in order to enable a transition what I want to do is at first I got to make sure that there's some overlap between these so you see that these two frames they overlap from here to here and the frame that takes precedence in this case is the one that is the higher channel number so you see that channel number 3 is higher than channel number 2 so we start off with a black background but as soon as we hit this point it will now overlay channel number three and completely obvious skate channel number two which was that black background so to make a nice transition between them what I'm gonna do is I'm going to first click on the black background this is the true the scene that I want to start from and now I'm gonna hold shift and then select the clip one which is the city scene I want to transition to and now what I want to do is now that I've selected both of those in that specific order I'm gonna come up here and say add transitions and then either a cross or a gamma cross let's just go ahead and do cross for now okay and now what you see here is it will add this transition here on channel 4 what this is gonna do is it's gonna blend between this black background and over to clip 1 and it will use this time to do that blending and it's gonna make a nice cross blend so if I back this up and hit play we can see how that looks there it goes so you see the nice smooth fade in from black to the clip now the one thing that's a little interesting about this and I think warrants mentioning now is the order in which you select those clips matter so again this worked nicely because we selected the black background first then held shift and then select the clip we were moving to if we did it opposite let's show you what happens so let me go ahead and delete this transition so if I want to remove the transition I'll just click on the transition right click on it and delete okay and I will erase that strip ok so now we're back to the situation of just hard cut from one to the other okay what if we did it accidentally in the opposite order what if I call selected clip a first this is the first scene that I want hold shift and then click on the black box the black background excuse me now if I go here and say add transitions cross let's back this up and see what happens this is gonna look totally wrong so you see that so it went in the wrong direction so I need to fix this so again let's delete this this is the wrong one I'll right-click on the transition delete erase strip ok and now actually I think I want a little more transition that look like it wasn't quite enough time so I'm actually going to increase the amount of overlap between the black background and the neck and the clip so that the transition goes a little bit more gently so again I will click on the black background hold shift and then click on the scene I want to transition to and now that I've done that I'll come up here to add transitions cross and now let's go ahead and play this and make sure this looks correct there we go we got a nice smooth fade in from black now here you see that was a hard cut that didn't look so great so what we can do is let's go ahead and we'll forgive I actually going to move this guy up here and let's keep a hard transition just because I would like to actually compare and contrast different types of transition schemes in blender so this first one where we go from this scene to this scene is gonna be a hard cut just for comparison purposes so well let this go and you can see yep that's a jarring hard cut now what I want to do is transition from this to this but we'll use a nice smooth fade again so again we'll do the same thing so I'll take this clip I will move it and I'm gonna position them so that there's some overlap and then I'm gonna select the clip I will started transition too and then come up here and add across okay and let's do this for this clip as well and now just for comparison's sake I will do my selecting and let's go ahead and add a gamma cross theoretically these two things are different um but I really can't tell the difference in fact let me flash up a screenshot from some blender documentation and you can see that it claims that the gamma cross is a little bit nicer viewers seem to like it a little more but again I really can't tell the difference let me just show you so this first one here is gonna be a normal cross and then we'll hit a gamma cross and let me play this and you tell me if you can tell what's the difference that looks pretty darn great and now let's do the same thing here that also looked great so yeah again I can't tell the difference between these two a cross and a gamma cross seam that seemed pretty much to me they both look nice and they both gently fade from one to another so again let me just arrange some more of these clips so that they're all overlapping so we have these nice areas that were able to do the transition so you can see I've just stacked up all of my clips and I've had a non zero or a finite amount of overlap between each of them so now let's again let's look at a different type of transition we're not just limited to these crosses and gamma crosses so again I'll select the clip I'm starting from hold shift select the clip I'm going to come up here to add transitions and if you notice there's this other thing called wipe so let's click on wipe and you can see what this wipe does it's going to go basically wipe from the top to the bottom of the screen to get to the next scene um what's interesting about the wipe type of transition is you can actually modify some of these parameters so for example let me let me go from this clip to this clip so again select the two clips in the proper order come here to add transition wipe and now for giggles here in wipe if you come over here to the strip out so you select the wipe transition come over to the strip come down to effects strip and then if you come down here to see transition type by default it's set to single so single is that white boy we're gonna see coming from the top to the bottom of the screen if you change this you can change it to double so now we see what does a double look like a double comes in from the center and that gives you a nice other option so we can actually explore the rest of those just to make an exhaustive study of this so I'm add another wipe I'll come over here to strip effect strip let's change this guy to an iris and have this guy run again so an iris comes in from the middle and the last option if I add a transition and let's go ahead and take a look at the clock so the clock is going to do basically it looks like a clock and it comes around there we go and that's my last clip and that's pretty much I think a fairly exhaustive list of all the transitions that are natively available one other thing let's let's sort of do the opposite we're at the end of the clip remember at the beginning of the clip we faded in from a nice black background and started our our Eclipse now at the very end of this of the movie that I'm making let's go ahead and do a nice fade out to to like a white background so it's a very similar procedure so again what I've done is I've gone ahead and made myself a white JPEG so this again is a very small it looks like it's a hundred and seventy three by 132 pixel rule this the dimensions really doesn't matter blender will stretch this to fill the screen I just need a little bit of a constant white background so again I'll come up here where I want it I'll go ahead and now add that image and I'll click the white background add this to the strip out where did it decide to jam it put it down here so let me let me move this guy up just so everything looks nice and again let's grab and drag this guy so there's some nice overlap and again I'm going to now do the exact same thing click the strip that I'm starting from hold shift click the the scene that I'm going to and then I'll come up here and add transitions and sure let's use a nice gamma cross and now when we run this guy it should now fade out to white so that's beautiful so tell you what let me add maybe I'll add a soundtrack to this and then I will render this out and we can take you to take a look at what the final movie looks like [Music] [Music] [Music] so to summarize adding video transitions in blender is surprisingly easy first you add video clip a and then you add video clip be on a separate channel in position with the appropriate amount of overlap with video clip a now this is the only place where it might get a little bit tricky you have to select the clips in the proper order so first click on video clip a and then hold shift and click on video clip B once you've done that you can go ahead and just select add transitions and pick which ones you want so if you wanted to use a cross or a gamma cross unfortunately there are no additional options that you can use to tweak the effect however if you do pick a wipe you can then go to the strip effect strip and basically choose what type of transition type you would like for that wipe effect so with that being said I think this is a great spot to leave it I hope you enjoyed the video and if so I also hope you'll consider subscribing to the channel I plan to have a lot more videos focusing on blender for video editing in the future and I hope to catch you at one of them so until I hear from you again I think I'll sign off bye

Channel: Christopher Lum

Views: 31,944

Keywords: Blender video editor, Blender transitions, video transitions, fade effect, wipe effect, Blender 2.80, free video editor

Id: 0wuU-7BmtVE

Length: 11min 54sec (714 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 06 2020