Blender as a Video Editor

Software & Operating Systems Open Source & Web-Based
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(Now that everything has settled down and been decided I'm posting this back up. I initially took it down deciding that I'd put it back up where ever we all ended up)

For the last couple of months I have been using Blender to make an Anime Music Video (AMV) since I stopped using Sony Vegas and intended to switch to Linux. Quick note before I go into to much detail, This is not intended as a tutorial, I will not be talking about how to use Blender but rather what it's like to use.

Just for reference I will be talking about my experiences making this video:

I decided to make an AMV because I had always planned on making one and thought it'd be one of the best ways to learn blender as it'd be a challenge.
The first thing I want to clear up about using Blender as a video editor is that it supposedly has a step learning curve but I personally think that's inaccurate. I actually found Blender much more intuitive to use than the likes of Sony Vegas and Adobe premier (I have used both but I have more experience with Vegas) especially when first jumping into it. Adobe Premier was actually hard for me to understand and learn and I ended up dropping it. Blender was much easier to understand and the workflow was great once I set it up for video editing.

That's not to say it's perfect though, it definitely has it's quirks since the program is first and for most a 3D Modelling and Animating software. One of these such quirks, that I personally got kind of frustrated with, was that moving the header was considered a "change", so, for example, if I was making some changes, moving the header around a lot and then decided I wanted to undo it all I would have to undo the individual header movements I made (Including Frame by Frame movements, so like 50 moves to undo) and Blender also takes 10-20 seconds to undo something so it took a lot of time when I first started. The easiest way around that problem though is to save before doing major changes and then if you decide you want to keep the changes you save, if not you just re-open the save before the changes and voilà.

Something else that I really like about Blender was it's ability to work across OS's with minimal problems. When I first started making the video above I was in Windows 10, in the middle of working on it I switched to Ubuntu Gnome and had absolutely no problems. When finishing it I had to switch back to Windows because of problems with my Ubuntu install (I haven't gotten around to reinstalling Linux yet if anyone is wondering, it broke right as I was moving xD). And for this reason I think Blender is the only video editing solution for a muliti OS work flow. For example, if multiple people are working on one project and they use different OS's Blender has no problems working in that situation.

When it came time to render I did get a little confused and kept rendering without sound, it was easy enough to find out how to render properly though, no problems there. Now in terms of rendering performance Blender is actually pretty good. I'm using a system with 4 cores, 8 threads CPU that turbo's consistently to 3.06 Ghz and a AMD Radeon 7670M and I was rendering at around 1.5-2 frames/second on a 720p video at 24.98 fps. GPU rendering is still in early stages for AMD as they've only recently added support for it but Cuda rendering support has been there for a while and is pretty reliable and consistent from what I've heard (Can not personally comment on it though as I don't have any Nvidia GPU's).

This is what my work flow looked like:

Those are my current thoughts on Blender as a Video Editor, not a step of a learning curve as people seem to suggest, great for working across OS's and reasonable rendering performance.

There is a follow up to this thread that'll help anyone who's interested in using Blender to edit videos. You can find it here:

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As someone also interested in using Blender for video editing I'd like to know if you found any useful resources online that you might share?

Also, how powerful/versatile is it for effects (e.g. chroma key, keyframe animation etc)?

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I'm just surprised AMVs are still a thing

I'm using Movie studio platinum 13 atm, things like photoshop/video editing ease of use keep me off of GNU/Linux, in addition to the games

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I don't have any specific resources. I'd recommend searching for some YouTube videos. This is probably a good place to start:

While I've never used some of the more advanced features I hear they're pretty good and versatile, comparable to After Effects. The effects system is built on a node and compositor editor and a bunch of nodes do different things. If you learn this system well enough you can get some pretty potent effects.
I think they can be a little bit fiddly to use though, but there are some pretty nice plugins out there that improve the usability and functionality.

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The hardest part about video editing in Blender is getting it set up for video editing use, as the default interface is a mess. After that though it's really easy to use for the basic stuff you'd use the most.
It works great on Linux as well.

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I tried a while back and live preview just did not run well at all, like 5fps, was unworkable for me, I'm sure I just didn't do the proper settings change to optimized it

would just be nice if adobe cared about Linux, adoption would be heavily boosted if premier/photoshop worked 100% on it

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I guess it is unfortunate that they aren't developing for it. I like blender more than Adobe/Sony offerings anyway. So I'm sticking with it myself in defiantly

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Would it be easy to change between a video setup and a 3D setup? I already mess with 3D in blender and I hope i wouldnt have to install 2 copies or something.

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Yeah, that's something that's built into blender, it already has a bunch of pre-made interfaces that you can switch between.

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Off topic a bit. Since you are video editing you might have done some photo editing as well. Have you tried any open source photo editing softwares? I know GIMP is popular but I don't know if there are other ones out there.

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Blender works very well for making videos, except for rendering them once done. Rendering takes SO MUCH TIME compared to Sony Vegas or Kdenlive.

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I use GIMP for general stuff and then Krita for digital art. You can actually do some photo editing in blender though depending on what you want to do exactly.

This video shows a little bit but not a lot of what you can do. You can do some pretty cool stuff with Blender if you are able to get familiar with the node and compositor editors that are in the program.

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What are your specs? I find blender to be a faster, especially if you aren't using GPU acceleration.

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I watched a blender tutorial and found it pretty powerful. I dont do video editing much it opened my eye on whats involved.
Blender Tutirial

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Yeah, Blender is a pretty amazing program. The thing that I like the most is just how versatile it is while still being good at everything it does.

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I started using blender as my main video editor and I absolutely love it.

( I used premier before that )

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ONE OF US! ONE OF US! :P Good to see there are some people on here that have actually used it :D

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This is the latest thing I edited with blender.
It took about 4hr to go from raw footage to final render.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbqRvyuH9F0

edit: I didn't bother doing any color correcting

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If anyone wants a post on where to get started when video editing in Blender, you can just ask. If enough people want it I'll get some stuff together that should make the learning experience a little easier.

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I wanted to get into Blender for video editing (I need something for my dual xeon machine to flex its muscles on once it's done ripping DVDs), but I never really got around to figuring it out. Nice to see that there are some resources on it :D will be checking them out. TYYYYYYY x3

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