at this point i think it's fair to say
that blender is one of the industry
standard tools for doing 3d modeling
and it can do a bunch of other things as
well one of those being video editing
now a lot of people don't even realize
that blender can actually do this
and there's a very good reason why it's
like this it's because it's just
not very good now that's not to say that
it's bad if you love the blender video
editor
it's not the worst thing i've tried it's
perfectly functional however it does
have a lot of
really weird design decisions that make
it kind of odd to work with
now if you're used to working with
blender as a 3d modeler
this is actually going to be pretty easy
to learn because a lot of the hotkeys
are either completely reused or are
defined in a way that just makes sense
inside of blender so let's say they
wanted to do something like
move this clip right here being a video
editor i can just go and click and drag
it
but another option we can go and do is i
can press g
and this will then lock it to my cursor
and i don't actually have to hold down
the mouse button
and while i'm doing this let's say that
i want to lock it to the y-axis
to move it up and down between the
tracks if i go and press y
that's going to go and do that and no
matter how much i move my cursor to the
left or the right
it won't actually move in those
directions and while you are doing
actions like moving
it will actually list some useful
hotkeys down the bottom here so if you
ever say
forget what they are then it's pretty
easy to spot them
now one neat little touch is any
mouse-related actions
will cause the mouse to move cyclically
so let's say that i grabbed this clip
right here
and then just drag it off the screen now
you might expect that when you see the
cursor here
you're actually going to see the clip
attached to it but that's not actually
happening and that's because
basically it's treating this as like the
second cycle of the screen
and it's gonna just keep moving the clip
and if i go and zoom out now
as you'll see it's moved it way further
along than i could actually see
on the screen and this can actually be
really useful in situations like this
and with doing things like modifying a
property it's just a nice feature to
have in basically any editor like this
now my first sort of complaint is when
it comes to the interface
the first thing is that for whatever
reason in blender
the interface is tied to the save file
rather than to blender itself so
let's say i wanted to reuse this layout
in a completely different file
i would have to then go and remake the
layout and remake it for every single
file i wanted to use it for which
doesn't make any sense there should just
be a button to say hey
save the layout reuse the layout because
you probably want to have a very similar
layout
regardless of what you're doing there's
probably windows you always want to be
in the exact same place
now there is a way you can sort of get
around this and that is by changing the
default save file so when you open up
blender normally
you'll see a tube there and it's going
to be in the 3d modeling scene
the reason it's like that is because
it's actually loading up a save file
that already exists
now blender does provide a way to go and
modify this but if you go and modify it
into a video editing scene
then you lose the 3d modeling version
which
is not really that great of a solution
if i was to use blender for doing both
of these tasks
also making new panels in here is just
really really weird so
the way it basically works this is the
way it works in blender normally as well
and i still don't like it there
is you go and grab basically the corner
here and you should be able to drag a
window out okay i can't do it there
because that's actually going to delete
the window
let's try it again okay there we go now
it actually works
i'm not sure what conditions actually
make it delete and what make it create
it's a really weird choice i don't know
why there isn't just a close button
and then you just close it like that
rather than having both the functions on
the exact same action
and then once you've actually made this
panel if you don't click in the top left
here
you can basically set it to exactly what
you want it to be that part's perfectly
fine
it's just making and deleting them which
is really weird but for me i'm not doing
any 3d modeling so i've just made this
layout my default layout
and it's basically dealt with the
problem now one other thing about
hotkeys is because this is blender
even though some of the hotkeys might be
defined in a weird way
basically every action has a hotkey so
if you want to go and rebind them
it's very easy to go and do that if we
go into edit and then preferences
and then go to key map basically we have
a list of
every single key binding in the entire
application now when it comes to doing
effects
blender doesn't seem to have as many
effects out of the box as some other
video editors
however it has basically everything i'm
going to need
and for most people it's probably going
to be everything you need as well
so the way we go and add an effect let's
say we want to add it to this clip right
here
so click on that and then if i press
shift a it's going to bring up this menu
here so let's go and add
the transform effect strip for example
so from here let's say we want to do a
keyframe movement
so if i go to this point right here add
the starting keyframe
and then go to let's go this point right
here change the
value and let's put it say there for
example
create the keyframes again on the dope
sheet we actually have two extra entries
and then over on the graph editor
there's these two extra lines in here as
well
the dope sheet is a visual
representation of where the keyframes
are located along the timeline
and then the graph editor is basically
how you go and modify your properties
so let's say we want to go and modify
the value of x
so the way we go and do that right here
this is showing the starting keyframe so
let's go to the ending keyframe that's
going to be way up here
and we have a couple of things we can go
and modify so let's go and click on this
dot here
and we have this line in here the line
is going to change how quickly the
values actually
change but the dot in the center is
going to change when the keyframe
happens
if we move it along the time axis which
is the x-axis
and it's going to modify how much is
changed if we move it along the y-axis
unlike most video editors you don't
really have a project directory you have
a place where the project
will be exported to but over on the left
hand side here we have a file picker
so from here we can go and pick things
from anywhere on our file system
not just from a list of files we've
loaded into blender which in my opinion
does make it much much easier to work
with
one other big positive i want to mention
about blender is the way that it does
text handling because it's just
so much better than every other linux
video editor i have no idea why they
don't all just copy this so
if we go and click add and click add
text
it just adds it to the timeline
it doesn't prompt us to save it anywhere
on our file system it doesn't make a png
of it
it's just right here on the timeline we
can go modify it as much as we want by
just modifying the properties here
we can change the font we can change the
color we can add a shadow
basically everything you need to be able
to do to font and it just
does it in blender without going to some
weird extra window or trying to save it
somewhere weird
it's just better handled here but that's
not to say that everything
is better handled in blender one of the
things that isn't is the audio scrubbing
doesn't seem to exist
and what i'm trying to find clips for
like the podcast and things like that
audio scrubbing is really really useful
to have
another thing is that by default when
you import a clip
it doesn't actually display the waveform
here and the waveform is very very
useful to find where there's a break or
find where i'm like repeating myself you
can go and enable it by clicking this
button right here but
there's no way to go and mass enable it
for everything you have to go
and click on one of these click display
waveform then
select everything then copy this to
everything else
and you have to do that every single
time you do a project which is
a little bit annoying to deal with also
i've had a bit of a bug where the audio
quality will just
massively drop now it doesn't drop
inside of the project itself
if i go and export the project and
listen to it in something like mpv it's
working perfectly fine it's just playing
the wrong
audio quality in the preview i don't
know how to fix it i try to restart
blender
it just keeps doing that and really the
only way i can work how to fix it is
just restarting my computer so
i don't know if it's a pulse problem or
a blender problem but
this problem has only ever happened in
blender so i have to assume it's a
problem with blender
and this right here is a clip from the
video that i'm recording right now
so the blue track is the video track and
the green track is the audio track
it's supposed to have two audio tracks
the reason why it doesn't is because
blender is hard coded to only
import the first track and there is no
way to change this
if i want to have all the audio tracks i
have to import them separately
and i'm not gonna do that because every
single other video editor that's worth
looking at
does it automatically now you may have
noticed as i'm doing things like
scrubbing through the video
and moving clips around the blender is
really
really laggy and that's basically
because blender is the least optimized
video editor
on the entire planet i am running this
with a 25
proxy a proxy is basically when you take
a video
and then you basically run it at a lower
resolution
so 25 proxy is 25 of 1080p
and this is the sort of lag that i'm
getting and if i have it without a proxy
it's actually impossible to use one of
the really weird annoyances with this is
you can go
and manually set the end of the timeline
so down on the bottom right hand corner
here
it shows you a time that shows where
you're at and this number right here
is this point right here now
i don't understand what the point of
this is because i'd want my timeline to
end
at the end of my last clip that's
pretty normal for a video editor so what
i end up having to do is set this number
to some ridiculous number
and then when i'm done actually editing
the video i just
set it to the end of this clip right
here but even more amusingly you can
actually have clips that go
after the end of the timeline so let's
say i set this like fifteen thousand
i actually can't go and preview any of
this stuff because it thinks it's after
the end of the timeline
now luckily in this video blender has
been pretty
stable but i realized after about
an hour or so that i have to make sure
i'm saving very
very frequently because the video editor
isn't the most stable thing i think i
had about
14 or so crashes over the two weeks i
was using it which doesn't seem like a
lot
but i edit my videos in bulk so over the
four days that i edit videos
i had 14 crashes which can get pretty
annoying
especially because the auto save doesn't
work
basically if you forget to save just
expect you've lost the entire project
you may have noticed in my recent videos
i haven't had the subscribe animation at
the start of the video
the reason why it's like that is because
blender sort of freaks out when you
chuck a 60fps clip
into a 30fps project what it's basically
gone and done is kept the audio
at the exact same length but because the
video clip is running at 60 fps
it's actually halving the speed of it to
make it match 30 fps
in the case of say like anything else
it will maintain the exact same length
and then modify the frame rate
i don't know why blenders decided to do
it like this though
being able to snap your clips together
is really really useful
and it doesn't really work consistently
inside of blender so let's say i wanted
to grab this clip here
and i want to snap it to this side or
this side here so let's try to snap it
okay it's decided to put it all the way
on top of that one instead of
right next to it and here here it's
going to snap fine okay
i don't know why it's like that
sometimes it does it the opposite way as
well so let's see if we can go and
force that to happen okay now it's
snapping there just fine and it's not
snapping over here
and the last really really big thing for
me is that audio and video tracks
are not grouped together so if i go and
say click this video right here
it doesn't actually grab the audio
associated with it because inside of
blender
they're not actually associated together
so if i actually want to go and say you
know
cut some clips the way you have to go
and do that is you have to go and
highlight both of them
and then you can cut them together and
you have to do this every single time
you want to do any sort of cuts
now there is a way you can go and merge
these together by going and making a
meta clip
the problem is we don't actually have
waveforms now and waveforms are really
really useful and there's no way to
enable them
on a meta strip now even though i do
have a lot of complaints about this
that's not to say that blender is a bad
video editor
it's just that i'd much rather use
something like even caden live at this
point
but it is better than things like say
flow blade and it's worth checking out
the problem is that with the video out
of the side a lot of things that really
need to be worked on like say
importing audio tracks properly get put
on the to-do list
and then never get worked on that's one
thing that could be done very very
quickly
and has been on the to-do list for i
think four or so
years and i don't expect it to ever be
worked on because blender is mainly a 3d
modeler
and that's where most resources are
spent on so if you do want to check this
out
blender is available in most standard
repos and once you've got it installed
all you do is click new video editing
project and
off you go so i think that's gonna be
pretty much everything for me but before
i go
i would like to thank my supporters so a
special thank you to chris
joachim donald michael andre nathan
david monster will
brennan chico bento jamie joseph
mitchell peter the 22 shah
and all of my two-dollar supporters if
you'd like to go support my work in the
links
down below to my patreon subscribe style
library all that sort of stuff i've got
my podcast tech
over t available basically anywhere and
then this channel is available on
odyssey
library and bitshoot if you wanna watch
on a platform that isn't youtube
next time i'm gonna be using olive from
what i've tried out so far it is
actually really good so until then
i'm out