The Blender Velvets are ready for the recent Blender 2.77 release! An important note is that there are some internal changes in the new Blender update, so the Velvets for Blender 2.76 are not compatible with 2.77 – just download the new versions and reinstall the ones you use.

New features in VSE

Blender 2.77 has introduced two interesting features this time: the first is that new projects change their FPS according to the first video you insert on your timeline. Cool stuff. =)

The second and most important one is that you can add whole nested scenes to your timeline using Shift+A and chosing “Scene” – remember that with Velvet Goldmine, you can navigate through your Scenes using Shift+Tab.This is probably a very expected addition so many kudos to the Blender team, that has been improving the VSE steadly these last years!

The bad news. Thing is if you try to use Velvet Revolver to toggle between full res and proxies, you’ll realise it won’t affect the nested scene, even though the code has been recently reviewed to affect metastrips (thanks Nathan for pointing that out!).

This issue will probably addressed by the Velvets in the near future but until then, in case you want to use the new “Import Scene” function with Velvet Revolver, you’ll have to run the shortcuts in all the scenes you’re using: Shift+Tab to navigate to them, then Ctrl+Alt+P/Ctrl+Shift+P to toggle between proxies/fullres in each scene.

Also, there is a small change in one of the Velvet Shortcuts. The function “Set Timeline start to frame one” has now a new shortcut, since Alt+S is now taken for “Swap Inputs”, so use Alt+1 instead.

Blender bugfix?

Blender 2.77 also brings a bugfix of an error that ocurred especially when using Ctrl+UpArrow and Ctrl+DownArrow with the strips in the timeline. Unfortunately, the new behaviour is not as it used to be in Blender 2.73 (long ago!). If you Ctrl+DownArrow your strips until they get over the ones on the channel right below them, they’ll be thrown to the end of that strip, messing up completely your edit. A new bug report has to be added or the Velvet code will have to be rewritten – until then, watch out.

Community rises

The community around the Blender Velvets is starting to sprout. Thanks Nathan, Magali and mentat-fr for help with the code, documentation and thrown out ideas. Things have been rushy, but hopefully all email answering and code reviewing will be done soon.

Some video

This is a somewhat strange video as teaser for the Cryptorave 2016. The Cryptorave is a huge crypto party conference in São Paulo and since Brazil is now all about politics (and the rise of NeoFascism), the audio is loud and messed up with the bombs (just in case no one has ever blown teargas in your face). Just don’t take it too seriously and things will be fine.

New features in VSE

Two new interesting features regarding the Video Sequence Editor (VSE) are worthy noticing.

First, it is now possible to insert simple texts into the video directly from the VSE, and even exporting those to .srt format. It’s a cool addition and a very requested one by video editors, but to me this is not the main thing to notice.  The text effect seems the first implementation (which is great!) of something that probably will evolve and become more complex with time.

The second one is something anyone who has finished editing and started color grading for final render using modifiers will recognize immediately as extremely useful.

You can now select one single strip, add your modifiers to it (say, curves or color balance) and… copy those modifiers to all other selected strips you want! This is just awesome and incredibly time-saving. No more trying to find that exact spot on your curve to correct the white balance on similar footage to the one you just corrected!

Actually, this addition is so incredible for video makers that it’s surprising it’s not even listed on the overall list of new features.

Well, now you know it. Have fun!

The Space_Sequencer is pretty much specific to each Blender version, so you should always update it along with the program. Velvet Goldmine had a minor change in one of its shortcuts: now, to toggle between different Resolution Percentages, use Ctrl+Alt+R instead of the former Ctrl+Alt+Shift+R. Also, both Velvet Revolver and Blue Velvet have been tested with FFmpeg 2.7.1 and the new Ardour 4.1.0 (for the latter).

Here are the links for the download sections: English, Portuguese, French, Spanish.

Rock on!

This is just a compatibility update, because Blender has just released their 2.75 version, so I’ll update the Velvets right away for it.

Blender 2.74 is out and, as usual, with many cool new features which you can check here. As for the Sequencer (VSE), the improvements are: “Slip tool, Setting proxies improved; preview individual strips (feature back from Blender 2.4x)”.

This, of course, brings us to the fundamental question: when will the Blender Velvets be updated? Hopefully, soon. Things have been very rushy here, but as soon as I have some time, they will be. =)

Also, let me use this post to say thank you to everyone.

In a bit more than 3 months, this website has had almost 11.000 views. The download link for the Blender Velvets addons has also been hit over 350 times – this particular piece of information being actually the reason the whole website has been created. A special thanks goes to Alban Sanz, who has not only translated the site to French and Spanish but also managed to spread the word (and the glitter) in Europe about it. Glow!

A copyleft video for a noble cause.

Changelog

Bugfixes

“Markers – Delete Closest” now recognizes markers that have been moved in the timeline (for example, when “View > Sync Markers” is turned on) and/or that had their names changed. This bug goes all the way back from the early days of Velvet Goldmine but I was finally able to track it down and reproduce it, so it’s now fixed.

Major changes from previous version

• “Metastrip – Make Direct” is now deprecated. Behaviour has been incorporated into Blender itself so the function became useless.

• “Strips – Jump to Next” and “Strip – Jump to Previous” (former Ctrl + PgUp/PgDown shortcuts) are deprecated. Recognition of the end of the strips (instead of just their start) has been incorporated into Blender 2.73, so the functions became useless.

• “Strips – Concatenate selected” (shortcut Shift + C) is still active and on the code, but in most cases the recently added “Insert Gaps” (shortcut Shift + =) and “Remove Gaps” (shortcut Backspace) will do what you expect of this function. I left it there for the time being, but it may suddenly vanish from the code if it proves pointless.

Velvet Shortcuts note

Blender comes with an odd “non-shortcut” for screen.screen_full_area by default – basically, if you press the mouse button on the screen, the screen will become fullscreen and hide all the buttons. Curiously, this does not seem to affect Blender when the set of shortcuts is set to default, but manages to screw up everything when you add other shortcuts such as the Velvet Shortcuts. So the code for this part is commented here to prevent this odd behaviour and for the sake of user sanity.

Update of Velvet Goldmine and Velvet Shortcuts is recommended.

Addon update is not necessary.

There’s also an improvement on the way the addon reads the strips on the timeline – if user would have changed the strip’s name to anything that didn’t have an extension (such as “my_audio” instead of audio.wav or audio_repeated.002), the script would throw the error “ValueError: need more than 1 value to unpack”. This behaviour is now fixed. Thanks Bilka from France for pointing this out!

Updating Blue Velvet is recommended.

There is also change on the way Effects are shown on the monitor view – they had been previously incorporated on the “Strip Data” panel nut now they have their own section. Order of the sections on the panel has also changed for viewing improvement. They are now shown as Strip Data > Effect Strips > Sequencer Modifiers > etc. See the differences below: