The Blender Velvets are finally ready for Blender 2.80!

It’s been nearly two years since Blender Foundation started preparing a whole new Blender version, which was officially launched a couple of months ago. For those who use the Video Sequence Editor, the best news is that… well, it’s still there! Some of the Blender sections such as the Game Engine haven’t made it but the VSE remains active and, as usual, came along with some specific improvements here and there.

It seems people are actually using the VSE because it’s starting to look like a video editor right away, without having to make major tweaks to the interface. The Timeline menu now shows the basic buttons for video playback and the new visuals look quite cool, feeling a lot cleaner than before. Also, some shortcuts and functions are also now officially in the program (press the Spacebar to play the video!) so Velvet Goldmine had a brush up.

Oddly, there is not a VSE dedicated tab in the main menu, meaning people who are not familiar with Blender’s interface and how to add/remove panels will struggle to find their way to the editor – even more than before. This means we’ll have to update the whole documentation on how to ‘create’ a workspace for editor and how to configure the program. Focus at the moment was to update all the addons and the website itself – not the website content though. But the documentation at the Blender Velvets’ GitHub is pretty much up-to-date so please refer to that page in the meantime.

Cheers!

The Blender Velvets are ready for Blender 2.79!

Blender 2.79 was released with few new improvements related to the Video Sequence Editor. Actually, two: (1) it’s now easier to choose between formats to export your video at the Render screen and (2) there are tabs in the panels around the VSE. That’s it.

Regarding the Velvets, here are release notes:

Shortcut for Velvet Revolver function “Proxy_Editing_ToProxy”, responsible for changing full-res videos paths to proxies paths has changed from Crtl+Alt+P to Ctrl+Shift+Alt+P.

Are you feeling brave? Velvet Revolution is being cooked in the oven and is probably almost ready. Revolution allows you to back up your projects in smaller size than if you kept all videos and audios in your computer. The addon recognizes the cuts in your timeline, then fetches only those videos, audios and images to back up, ignoring the rest. This back up will consist of your cuts, not of your original videos, reducing the backup size. You can choose a margin between the cuts (default is 2 seconds) in case you may need to do a new future render with minor differences.

This new addon is inspired by a function Final Cut has (or has had) and which name I still have to find out. Velvet Revolver at this stage is to be considered EXPERIMENTAL, so double check your cuts after using it and before discarding any of the original data. Feedback is appreciated.

How to download it? At the moment, I’m still running some tests, so you can get it directly from its the Velvet Revolution branch at the Blender Velvets GitHub. It should work fine for video, audio and image strips, but tests must be made for metastrips and effect strips. Documentation will follow up whenever time allows for it.

Este vídeo está publicado desde junho no canal do YouTube do Blender Velvets, mas só agora deu tempo de fazer o post.

Inevitavelmente, se você quiser passar seus filmes em um cinema digital, terá de gerar um DCP. É o caso da rede de salas da SP Cine, que cobre os CEUs de São Paulo, por exemplo. Nem toda gente sabe, mas os projetores digitais de cinema são conectados a um servidor, que nada mais é do que um computador onde os filmes são inseridos (ou “ingestados”, no jargão da indústria). Este servidor roda Linux. Sim, nas principais salas de cinema comerciais.

O Digital Cinema Package é um tipo de pacote composto por várias faixas – vídeo, trilhas de áudio, legendas. É o formato padrão da indústria e é o formato lido por estes servidores. Com o DCP-O-Matic, é possível transcodificar seu vídeo para DCP em casa, a partir de um computador comum. Como o programa é livre (FOSS), isso faz com que a exibição dos filmes fique um pouco mais próxima de estúdios ou videomakers independentes.

Em 2013, na época do Floresta Vermelha, este mesmo processo teve de ser feito usando o Open DCP, o que o tornava possível, mas bastante incerto. Já o DCP-O-Matic foi pensado para automatizar e simplificar todas as etapas. Ficou super fácil. =)

Este tutorial de uma hora foi criado a partir de um pedido vindo da própria SP Cine, com o objetivo de facilitar o acesso das pessoas à criação de DCPs. Junto com o especialista Thiago André, doutor pela USP, passamos por todos os passos, levantando as principais dúvidas que podem aparecer no caminho. Taí, agora é só fazer!

Se você quiser o mesmo vídeo pelo canal da SP Cine, aí vai:

The new teaser for CryptoRave 2017 is out, featuring a model created by the Blender community: Animegirl_Leadwolf, by sowrdsd. Motion capturing was made by Angelo ‘gelo’ Benetti and mocap model is Nathalia Watanabe.

The CryptoRave is a mix between a cryptoparty and a cryptography for human rights defenders conference made to last 24h. This video ends the teaser trilogy started in 2015 and shows how to acquire super powers with the use of few tools. Dematerialize yourself.

The Blender Velvets have finally a long video tutorial on how to edit video with Blender using the Velvets addons! The video is divided into two parts: downloading/configuring Blender and installing the addons; and the actual editing.

Thanks for João Lacerda, a friend from Rio de Janeiro, who had the patience to sit besides me and ask pertinent questions about video editing in general. We tried the approach of having someone with video editing experience in other software (Final Cut) so that the general common doubts could pop up along the explanation – this made the tutorial richer as real-world issues were raised all the time, even if we were half asleep after having a long night in São Paulo.

The tutorial is currently only in Portuguese (sorry), but it should be easy to follow along because all the shortcuts we used are on the screen, both in Portuguese and in English. We can try and do an English version or subtitle it in English if there is some help/interest of the community. Feedbacks are welcome.

New functions for Velvet Goldmine

The Blender Velvets are currently being used in training four new Jongo leaderships – most of whom come from traditional quilombo lands – and a cultural hotspot in Rio de Janeiro that has a cinema project in the favelas. If you don’t know what Jongo is, you should definitely watch this video.

For this training, we added four new functions for Velvet Goldmine/Velvet Shortcuts. Now you can Deinterlace (Ctrl+Shift+I) and Remove Deinterlace (Ctrl+Alt+I) all selected strips and Delete joining the resulting strips (Ctrl+Delete).

Videos that have been transcoded with ffmpeg such as the ones made by Velvet Revolver have exactly one audio frame more than their video strips. This makes it very inconvenient to drag them around when you import them, since you’d have to select first one, then the other – especially if you import lots of videos at once to your timeline. To correct this behaviour, select them and use Ctrl+Shift+Alt+D to remove this extra audio frame.

Changes in Space Sequencer

The Playback menu comes originally from the Timeline window in Blender. Since we don’t need to use this window with the Space Sequencer modified interface, the “Audio Scrub” and the “Follow” menu items were brought directly to the Video Sequence Editor for convenience. The “Use backdrop” function was also added to this menu to save space.

Cheers!

At the end of September 2016, Blender has released it 2.78 version, with very few updates in what concerns the Video Sequence Editor (VSE). Actually, with one update: now, when you toggle between showing/hiding the audio waveforms in the timeline (‘W’ or ‘Alt+W’ in Velvet Goldmine), Blender either shows the strip’s information or the clear waveform, without the text above.

This is great because it solves the oddity of having to zoom incredibly in to check if that cut you want to make is over any random audio you wanted in or out of the cut. Little by little, the VSE is improving!

Regarding the Velvets, there are two updates:

1. When implementing support for h264 in Velvet Revolver, I used ffmpeg’s “ultrafast” preset for the operation. It turns out that preset was skipping whatever unkown thing in the transcoding world and ProRes422 files that came from Final Cut Pro were having trouble playing in Blender, achieving lower playback FPS than they should. The “ultrafast” is dropped and now things are smooth again.

2. Some time ago, we reported a bug while changing the strip’s channel in the timeline. Even though the bug was considered fixed, well… the error was still there so I decided to solve it via re-writing the code for this function in Velvet Goldmine (“Alt+DownArrow”). Happy this is also working properly now.

Enjoy. =)

As requested long ago by Nathan, Velvet Revolver has now support for h264 encoding. This is still experimental, but should work both for proxy generation and full-res copy creation. Reasons for such change are actually simple.

Technically, the suitable formats for editing are ProRes and MJPEG. This is especially true when you want to change the speed of those videos by using the “Speed control” effect in Blender’s Video Sequence Editor.

Second, my old recycled laptop computer, a Pentium M from 2005 (!), finally died. I was never able to edit videos on it, for obvious reasons. Last month, I bought myself a newer machine, an i5 ThinkPad from 2010. Video editing there seems promising with SSD, but asking for ProRes or MJPEG is simply too much because disk space there is an issue – the files are simply too big.

Used and older computers are great because you save some electronic waste and prove, at the same time, that 2D video can be achieved at lower cost machines, which can be crucial for activist groups. If you’re in the field, you need something fast, light and at hand, so h264 makes a hell lot of sense in this scenario.

Thanks Nathan for pointing that out in the first place and encouraging it, even though time has been short here and it took way longer than expected to have the peace of mind of implementing those changes.

Beware, though! Changes with the “Speed Control” effect may not render or work as expected since h264 is not an intra-frame codec. Test whatever you want to do before assuming things will go smooth with the 30′ documentary you have to deliver in the next 2 days.

Also: as computaholic pointed out at GitHub, Velvet Revolver was having issues when converting files down from 59.94fps to 29.97fps. When Blender 2.77 was released, direct access to the project’s FPS* seemed not to be working, so I changed the code to mimic the way Blender was supposedly calculating it. It turns out the old code is actually working now, so I raised the previous version from the dead and any problems should be fixed now.

*bpy.context.scene.render.fps

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!