Category: updates

Blender 2.74 is out + thank you!

splash274

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!

Velvet Goldmine and Velvet Shortcuts are ready for Blender 2.73a + bugfixes

Velvet Goldmine and Velvet Shortcuts are now ready for Blender versions 2.73 and 2.73a.

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.

Blue Velvet tested OK for Blender 2.73a

Blue Velvet tested OK for Blender version 2.73a with Ardour 3.5.403 and FFmpeg 2.5.3.

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.

Modified Space Sequencer is ready for Blender 2.73 and 2.73a

Modified Space Sequencer is now ready for Blender versions 2.73 and 2.73a.

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:

space_sequencer_273a

Major update on Velvet Revolver

Major update on Velvet Revolver: now you can have any combination of extensions you want for full_res and proxy files as long as they are recognized as video extensions by Blender.

Currently, they are the following: ‘.mov’, ‘.flc’, ‘.mpg2’, ‘.xvid’, ‘.avi’, ‘.mp4’, ‘.mpeg’, ‘.m2v’, ‘.flv’, ‘.m4v’, ‘.m2t’, ‘.mv’, ‘.vob’, ‘.mkv’, ‘.ts’, ‘.divx’, ‘.avs’, ‘.wmv’, ‘.ogg’, ‘.mpg’, ‘.ogv’, ‘.dv’, ‘.movie’, ‘.webm’, ‘.mts’, ‘.mxf’, ‘.m2ts’, ‘.r3d’.

This means you can mix a full_res.mkv with a proxy.avi proxy file, for example and all should go well.

Of course, as described at Velvet Revolver’s page, it is always recommended to stick to ProRes422 or MJPEG codecs when editing (for both full_res and proxy files) because using any intra-frame codec can be tricky – especially while mixing them. Theoretically, there’s great chance of losing frame precision when toggling between the proxy and/or full_res files, so be warned. If you’re going to do that, make tests before trying to edit a monster video.

Updating Velvet Revolver is recommended.

Blender 2.73 is out

splash_273

Blender version 2.73 is out with some interesting changes to the Sequencer. The Blender Velvets addons will be updated soon to reflect those changes, but while you wait there are some other news.

The Gooseberry Open Movie Project published a video showing new updates in Blender VSE that are being made for the project and that will be incorporated on the main version. Check out below.

Update on Blue Velvet

Blue Velvet has been tested and works succesfully with Blender 2.72b and Ardour 3.5.403.

Even though this is the first time Blue Velvet is tested in a year, this is just a routine update check. There’s no need to reinstall the addon.

With this, all of the Blender Velvets addons have been checked and/or readapted for Blender 2.72b, finishing the updates for this version.