A perspective-shifting tutorial for Blender VSE where I’m editing subtitles into the video as you watch.
Inspired by OBS
Music: Jesse Gallagher – Divine Live Society.
Blender VSE Tutorial (Basic)
Introduction
A lot of the content I post on here is related to using Blender for 3D, but I actually use it for video editing just as much as I do for 3D – all of the videos I upload are edited in the Blender VSE (Video Sequence Editor), and I wanted to make a basic guide.
- How to start a video editing project.
[File -> New -> Video Editing]
- Overview of the default VSE layout (File browser, timeline. Properties panel)
- Keyboard shortcuts.
- Transform modifier.
- Fade in/out
- Adding text frames [png / Text]
Changing font of hard subs, location x/y and size.
Exporting subtitles.
- Alpha channels.
- Frame rate consistency across different devices.
- Rendering
Portrait vs Landscape
While this isn’t a tutorial on videography, I do feel the need to stress the importance of filming your videos in landscape format.
[demonstrate the difference with portrait and landscape video]
In some cases, the source footage may not have been recorded by yourself and this is outside of your control.
If you do need to use portrait footage, there is something you can do with a Transform modifier to make the footage usable in wide-format.
Click the video footage you want to modify, and select Add -> Transform.
Set the rotation to either 90 or -90; depending on your source footage, and set the X Scale to 0.75, and the Y scale to 1.25: while this isn’t perfect – it will at least stretch the footage to a square shape without ruining the proportions too much.
You may want to include an image behind this to eliminate dead space to keep the wide-format.
Musical montage
Often, you will want to make a montage, or speed up some footage to music in the case of a speedmodel or speedpaint.
To do this, drag your audio track into your project, and line it up on the timeline of where you’d like the audio to play, and then drag the video file you’d like to use into the timeline just above it.
You’ll notice that the video is significantly longer than the audio, so you’ll need to speed up the footage.
The way I work out how much I’ll have to speed the footage up by is to bring up a calculator, and divide the total length of the video in frames by the length of the audio track in frames.
Select the video, and choose Add -> Transform -> Speed control, and set the factor to the result of our calculation we’ve just worked out.
It will help to Display Waveform on your audio track, so that you can see where the audio ends, and your video footage will display the last frame somewhere around this point.
Scrub through and find where the footage stops moving, and take a note of this frame.
This is where you’ll start the next segment from, or end your video if you’re only going to be rendering a sped up screencast.
Keyboard Shortcuts
| i | Insert animation point | Demonstrate with opacity fade, and Scale/MoveXY transform. Demonstrate with visibility. |
| g | Grab. | Move items on timeline. |
| KShift K – | Cut item on the timeline Select multiple items | Filming a segment where I turn off the camera and use shortcut to cut it out. Shift K to cut the sound too. |
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