Video Editing in Blender 2.8 - Part 1: Default Setup and Settings

hey everyone this is ryan king and in this blender tutorial series i'm going to be showing you guys how to do video editing with blender so as i record this the current stable version of blender is version 2.83.4 you can see right up there so this is part one of my blender video editing tutorial series and in part one i'm going to show you guys the default blender setup that i use for video editing so i've loaded up the default factory settings of blender so if you've never opened up blender before or you haven't changed many of the settings then this is what you're probably going to see so i'm just going to click on this splash screen just to close it and if you know much about blender then you'll know that blender is mainly a 3d software but blender also has a pretty awesome video editor it is a simple video editor but it does work really well and i really like to use it so there's a few way to get to blender's video editor one way that you can do it is to go up here and click on the plus and then you can add a new workspace and you can go down here and click on video editing and then over here there is video editing so i just like to click on that and you can see here it's set up all the layout for you so here's the timeline and here's render settings and here's your preview and then here is a file browser another way that you can do this is to go file and then go new and then go down here and click on video editing and that'll lead you to the same thing and then the other way to do this is if you have the splash screen open you can see it already has a video editing layout for you so you can just click on that and that'll open up video editing so if you've seen other videos on my channel you'll know that i mainly do 3d work in blender so what i like to do is to keep all these layouts here because i use them but i like to go plus right here and open up a video editing workspace so you can just open it up however you like so here we are in the video editing layout the first thing that i'm going to do is go to edit and go to preferences and this will open up the blender preferences and so there's a few things that i want to go over and these are like totally optional things whatever you want to do so the first thing i'm going to go to is go to interface and then right here there's this resolution scale so on default the this is the text size it's just set to 1. i like the text size and all the buttons and everything to be a little bit bigger so i'm just going to drag this out to make it bigger because i think that on default the size of the text is a little bit too small it's a little bit hard for me to see it just gets a little bit annoying after a while so i like to turn it up a little bit so i like to change it to maybe like 1.3 maybe a little bit less maybe not quite that much but this is totally optional whatever you want to do now let's also go down here to the key map and right here you can see there's select with mouse button and there's left and right so before blender version 2.8 the default for selecting objects and different things in blender was set to right click select and this was actually a little bit weird because most programs use left-click select so i actually got used to using right-click select and now it's just muscle memory and i'm used to it so i actually change this to right-click select but it does make sense for a lot of people to use the left click select because that's what most programs and things use so i change it to right click select but you can totally choose left click select i am going to show you though the differences of it so let me just show you that so i've just set this up so that blender is on this side of my screen and then the preferences is set on this side of the screen so i'm just going to show you the differences between uh left and right so the default is set to left and if you just click and drag in the timeline you can see it's adding this box and this is to box select different things in your timeline so maybe i have like a picture file and this is actually a render from my martian short film which i'll leave a card uh in the corner to my martian short film if you want to watch that on my channel it's a blender short film that i made so i just added in this image here and you can see if i click and drag i can select it and i'm also just going to drag in a video file so here's the video and here's the audio and you can see if i drag this it's going to select these different strips and if you want to drag around this little blue line and this is where you're currently looking at you can just drag it around by clicking up here and then if you click down here this is going to be the selection and then if you use the middle mouse wheel you can click with the middle mouse wheel and this way you can move around your timeline and then if you scroll with the middle mouse wheel if you scroll with your mouse it'll zoom in and out so that's the different stuff with the left click with the right click which i actually prefer this but you can choose whatever you want so with the right click when everywhere you drag it's going to move around this so everywhere you drag it'll just move this around on the timeline and you can also drag up here if you want but this will drag everything around and then to select video strips i can right click and that'll select these different video strips and i can also click and drag and it'll use that box select and then if you're using the left click select if you right click it's going to open up this menu with all these different settings and things that you can do and if you're on right-click select this actually isn't here because if you just click it's not going to do anything but if you want to get to these different settings they are right up here so all those different settings which were right here they're all going to be right here with the right click select so i just use this and i also have memorized a lot of the shortcut keys for these different things that i use and in part two i'm going to go over basic shortcut keys and different things like that so you can choose whatever one you want i use right-click select you can definitely use left-click select and then the next thing is this spacebar action and you can choose what you want the space bar to do when you press it so on default it's set to play and i really like that because as a video editor i like to very quickly play and pause my video editing so i just move over here let me just make the end frame longer and if i just click the space bar you can see i can very quickly play and pause things you can also change this to tools and if you change it to tools and you press the space bar it'll open up these different tools and this is mainly for when you're doing 3d work like if i go into the layout with the 3d modeling and i press the spacebar now you can see it has these different tools and there's also the search so if you change this to search and then press the space bar it's going to open up this search and you can just type in different things like maybe merge and you can merge images different things like that um but definitely for video editing i think the best thing to do is to press uh play and even though i do a lot of 3d work i still like using this play with the space bar because if i'm doing like a 3d animation or something it's really easy to just very quickly uh press the space bar and you can see it's playing right down there let me just move this up so you can see it a little bit better you can see if i press the spacebar it's just gonna play the animation and pause it so let me just go back over to video editing so i think play is the best thing to do but of course you can do whatever you want and if you don't want to use the space bar there are these buttons right here to play and then pause and then you can also play it backwards and pause it so they're right down there if you want to use it i like using shortcut keys though because it really speeds up your workflow so i just use the spacebar so it's really up to you what you want to do now the last thing i wanted to do in the blender preferences is go to system and this is more of like technical stuff this is uh this is a lot about how much memory or ram you have in your computer so the undo steps the default is set to 32 this is how many undo steps like when you press controls control z to undo an action this is how many undo steps it's going to remember in the blender cache so this is going to be put into your memory or your ram and your computer so you can totally leave this to 32 i actually bump it way up to like 75 i have 32 gigabytes of ram in my computer i recently built a computer and it's a pretty beefy computer so i put 32 gigabytes of ram in it so i have this set up way higher uh but you can just totally leave it to 32 if you want that's the default and then also this memory cache limit this is going to tell blender how much amount of ram you're going to let blender use so if you hover your mouse over this you can see it says memory cache limit memory cache limit in megabytes so one gigabyte is 1024 megabytes so you can see right now on default blender allows about four gigabytes so since i have 32 gigabytes in my computer i actually let blender use a lot more so i turn this up a lot higher i would probably like double it future ryan here i forgot to add in the tutorial why this even matters why you might want to turn it up so basically when you add in a video file you can see right here this orange area when you start to play this you can see it starts to add this orange thing right here and basically what is happening is blender is throwing all of the frames into your computer ram so that way it can access it really quickly so you can see if i just move this around look right up here you can see it's really really smooth so when i move this around it's very smooth because it's thrown into the memory and then if i move over here and try to move around you can see look how glitchy it is like it's because basically it's not in the memory and you can see as you move it around right here it's trying to add into the memory um but because i'm jumping around a lot it can only get a few frames but then when i play this it starts to add all this in the memory and then when i move back it's really smooth so this feature is really great um but it does depend on how much memory you allow blender to use and if you look on the very bottom of blender you might need to scroll over you can see this mem this is memory and you can see right here it says 1.4 gigabytes and if i play this you'll be able to see it's going to slowly go up so pretty soon and then if i pause it look now it's 2.79 gigabytes and that's funny because blender 2.79 was a blender version and if i keep on playing this and then you can see here now it's at three gigabytes but what you need to be aware of and careful of is that if you give blender too much of your memory and your computer all the memory in your computer gets used up your entire computer is gonna just freeze and crash at least that's what happens with me um and so if you have like a bunch of tabs open maybe you're listening to music then you have like some other programs open that's all using memory in your computer and so if this gets too high and all your computer memory fills up your computer your entire computer is going to crash and i just have to kill my computer and then turn it back on so just make sure this doesn't get too high so then if you want to save all these different preferences that we set up if you want to save these you can click on this save preferences button if i just move myself over then you can see it's right there it's the blender preferences and you can just click on this and then click on save preferences and that way when you open up a new scene in blender all these settings that you changed are going to be set to default my mouse just ran out of battery okay it's charging now so i can still use it while it's charging so now that we have that all set up i just closed the blender preferences and i just made this full screen again so now let's talk about this file browser so this is a really awesome feature in blender and this is going to allow you to get files from your computer so you can just locate to the different files on your computer here you can also search for them or you can also like go up folders or add a new folder so if you're working on a video editing project you can just navigate to where all your video files are or you can actually just drag in where they are on your computer and then it will jump to it so these are like some different files from my martian short film like i have some videos and pictures so for instance if you had a video editing project you can just drop that in and that way you can just click on different things and drag them in right here now i actually prefer to not use this and i prefer to actually just use my file browser within linux mint and of course windows and mac do also have file browsers so i have a second monitor on the side of this monitor and so what i like to do is to just drag the file browser over to the other side of my screen and then i can just drag in things just like that and i can just drag them in from my file browser so you can do that if you want or you can use this file browser up here if you don't want to use this though i'll show you how to get rid of it so what you do is you click right up here when this cross hair appears and you're going to click hold your mouse down drag it out this way and you can see it has that little arrow there and then instead of closing this view we're going to move it back so that then the arrow is over here and you can see there's this little gray arrow and then you'll let go and that way it'll close it and within blender you can do that for any of your different things so like this is a little thing right here if you want to close that but i'm just going to press escape not to close that but all of these different little modules in blender that's how you can close it and also if you want to open up like a new window you can also click and drag this way and that'll open up another one so i'm just going to click and drag and close that now right up here is your video preview so when you're moving it around you can just see the video preview and then if you want to get rid of this big gray thing right here this has a few different settings but we're not going to be using any of these things for this you can just other click on it and then click on show header and that way it'll remove it and you have a bit more space and if you want to zoom this in you can just use your middle mouse wheel and just zoom that in and if you want to get that back for some reason there is this arrow here you can click and drag that down but i don't want that because i'm not going to be using it and then right down here obviously is the sequence editor so this is where you're going to do all your different video editing and cutting and cropping and different things like that and then right over here this is a side panel so to open and close this you can press n and this is going to have a lot of different uses this has a lot of different tools and things so i like to keep this open if i'm not using it sometimes i'll press n to close it but normally i'll just leave it open and then also you can press t and that'll open up this panel over here i don't really use this because this is like the cutting tool but i just use a shortcut key which i'll show you in part two all the shortcut keys but i don't actually use this so i just press t and that'll just close that panel you can also just drag it out but i don't use these because i just use the shortcut keys and then the last thing is this area right over here and this is all your different render settings so this is like the resolution of the video so right now it's just set to 1920x1080 and if you know that you're going to be using a different resolution you can change this uh this webcam is 1920x1080 it's pretty uh pretty standard and then also the video camera that i have is uh 1080p so 1920x1080 and then also usually when i render out like blender animations and stuff i usually just render it out to 1080p so i'm just going to leave these at the default but you can definitely change these if you want for instance if you do video editing in like 4k maybe you have a phone camera and it has 4k resolution or something like that you can definitely change this i'm just going to leave it to the default for now and then over here is the frame rate i'm just going to leave this to 24 fps that's frames per second the video camera i use renders at 59.94 frames per second and then the screen recording software i have set to 60 frames per second so that's obs which is the program that i use to screencast this that's at 60 and then usually if i'm doing like a blender animation i'll just have it at 24. if you took a video on your phone or something and you drag the video file into the sequence editor blender will usually automatically detect the frames per second within the video and so it will usually automatically set the frame rate that you need i'm just going to leave this at 24 for now though and then right here you can set the output so this is going to be where your final video file is rendered to on your computer so i like to change this to the desktop but you can change it to wherever you want so just click on this file right here so for this example i just set it on my desktop in a new folder but you can set it to wherever you want i like to set it to my desktop and then just click accept and that way whenever you render out a video file it'll automatically put it on the desktop or in that folder or wherever you told it to render out your video files the next thing is the file format so on default it's set to png and i leave this as default because i mostly do 3d work in blender but i'm going to show you what i use when i do video editing so when i'm rendering out a video i change this to ffmpeg video and then right down here open up the encoding i change this to mpeg4 and this is going to mean that when you render out your video file it's going to render it out as an as a mp4 file so that's what i like to use and then down here on video i just leave these as default i think these work pretty well you can obviously change them or research that and change things if you want but i just like to leave these at default so h.264 medium quality and good and then right down here on the audio on default it's set to no audio so even if you have like audio files down here if you render out the video file it's not going to have any audio so i either change it to mp3 or acc so i really like using the mp3 format for rendering out videos but the problem with this is apple devices like a mac laptop or a mac computer or like an iphone or an ipad they actually can't hear the mp3 audio codec so like if i render out a video file and i send it to one of my friends and they're looking at the video on their iphone they actually can't hear anything and then also if i send like a video file to my friend who has like a mac computer he opens up the video file and he can't hear anything so most of the time i actually set this to acc just so that ecc just seems to work out pretty well for most things so i just set this to acc normally but the problem with acc is that when i'm uploading a video to youtube youtube will finish uploading it and then when it goes to the processing stage on the youtube servers it can't finish processing it so just something with the acc format doesn't work well so one time i did this where i uploaded a youtube video using acc and it finished uploading but then youtube couldn't process it it just continued to process and process and it was just going for hours and it never finished processing so i changed it to mp3 and tried uploading it and then it processed it great and i was able to post the video so if you're uploading videos to youtube then i would suggest you use the mp3 format but if you're an apple user or you have like an iphone or maybe you're sending the video file to someone who has like an iphone or an ipad or like a mac computer then i would suggest using acc and if you guys have any other suggestions to other ones i think the mp3 and acc are probably the best but you could definitely research these and just try these other formats out okay so now that i've explained that i'm just going to close these and then if you mainly just do video editing with blender you can leave this as ffmpeg video as the default i'm going to change it back to png because i mainly do 3d work in blender but then if i'm doing video editing i can just change it to ffmpeg video and you can open this up and you can see it's already saved it so i don't have to go back and do that i can just change it to this if i'm doing video editing and then i just leave it as this for my 3d modeling and 3d rendering but for the video editing purpose i'm just going to turn this to ffmpeg video and then i'm just going to close this again and i'll close this again i just had to open up a new blender file while i was video editing this and then there's a few more settings that i'm going to do so right down here on the playback on default it's set to no sync i like to use avsync and what this is going to do is if your playback is falling a little bit behind it's going to kind of jump it up and make sure that the audio and video are always synced up for your playback so i'm just going to add in this like tutorial this is my first tutorial that i did actually and i'm just going to press the space bar to play this and you can see when it turns red that's when it's getting a little bit behind so with raw footage like footage that you've just filmed with your camera i've found that it gets behind a lot more this is doing pretty well but sometimes it gets behind and so when it does it can really mess up your video editing because uh the audio looks like it's off so when you click on the playback and turn on the av sync whenever you play this it's gonna keep jumping it forward and make sure that the audio and video are synced up so i like to use that i think it's really good but one note here if you are doing like simulations in blender this actually doesn't work very well so i actually turn this off when i'm doing like particle simulations or different things like that because it can make it a little bit weird so i just leave this on most of the time but if i'm doing a simulation then i'll turn it off and then another thing i like to turn on is audio scrubbing and so let me just show you what this does so i've turned on my computer audio so you should be able to hear this now if i move this around this what this does uh is when you move it you can hear little bits of audio so i really like this just for like kind of a feedback thing i really like to turn it on you can definitely leave it off if you want to but i like to turn that on welcome to my very first and you can hear uh what it's doing and then another setting that i like to turn on is to go here and click on show seconds and that way you can see the amount of seconds up here and then another thing that i like to turn on is to click up to this view up here and i can go up right here and you can see there's this waveform displaying i like to turn it on and what this does when it finishes the strip previews what it will do is you can actually see little waveforms on the video so you can see here it is let me just make this bigger and you can see right here so i really like using this feature this is really good for like syncing up two audio files or something so i really like to use this so i just turn that on okay and then let me just delete these and over here i'm gonna change this to frame one and that way it'll move where we are to frame one and then the start frame is set to one this is where the video starts and then this end frame here this is set to 250 and with 24 frames per second that should be about 10 seconds of video so you can just leave that on default or you can set it to a lot bigger if you want i just leave that at 250 and then when i'm video editing i can just turn it up and then there's one last really important thing that we need to check so i'm going to go up here to these render preferences i'm going to go down and over here on color management and we need to make sure that the view transform is set to standard so on default it's set to filmic because filmic is a more accurate color space for 3d rendering and so using filmic actually results in more photorealistic rendering but because we're doing video editing it's actually going to change the colors a little bit and it's actually going to make the footage look a little bit weird so just to show you what i mean i've added in this video file of my martian short film and right now this is set to standard and this is the accurate colors of the video but if i set this to filmic you can see it gets brighter and everything's kind of gets more gray and just the colors don't look very good and this is because when you're doing 3d stuff in blender it actually looks a lot more realistic and it helps to get more accurate lighting and stuff like that but when you're doing video editing it's going to mess up the colors so set this back to standard and that way the colors are going to be accurate and then the look just leave that at none and exposure and gamma just zero and one just to leave that as the defaults so that was just the last thing i'll go back over to here this render tab over here i'm just going to set it to this and then i'll just delete this go back to frame one and 250. so now everything is finally set up so these are all my preferences and this is what i like to do for video editing so i'm going to go file and go down here to default and i'm going to click save startup file now i'm actually not going to press this because i've already set up my default settings in blender but if you mainly do video editing in blender you can click save startup file and then when you open up a new scene in blender it'll open up all your different preferences these are my preferences but what i do is i have a video editing tab right here so i can just click on this and then it opens up so just set up your blender scene however you want and then go file and go to default and save startup file and that way when you open up a new blender scene it'll be set up how you've set it up so this has been part one of my blender video editing tutorial series i hope it was helpful and in part two we're gonna be doing like basic editing we're gonna be adding in some sound effects and music and then we're gonna be doing some basic like cutting of video files and stuff like that and then i'm gonna render together just a simple little uh video edit if you'd like to support me and this channel i do have a blender market store and i also have a gumroad store where i'm selling in 3d models and assets and tutorials and on my patreon i have all these 3d models and assets and tutorials that you can get and i also have all the tutorial files on my patreon so these are some great ways to support me if you'd like to help out but even just following me on youtube and watching my videos are a really great way to help out so thank you for your support so join me in part two it should be up on the screen and there's also a link in the video description so i hope this tutorial was helpful and i'll see you in part two [Music] you

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 65,478

Keywords: Video Editing, Blender, Tutorial, Ryan King, Ryan King Art, video, editing, tutorial, blender, blender video, blender 2.8, video editing in blender

Id: zh6tKdhThME

Length: 26min 13sec (1573 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 17 2020