Image (1)
Movie (2)
Transform (4)
Multicam (5)
Add (6)
Speed (7)
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Blender's Video Sequence Editor Ideas

Thank you for your interest. Here you'll find some ideas about Blender's interface. They will be showed and commented, but be free to hide this bar anytime and explore by yourself.

Strips, Tabs and some options are interactive and they change the interface like they would do in real Blender. A blue effect will blink when hovering an interactive item.

Click Next to start.

Tabs by Workflow: Strip

Strip tab contains strip related options and info.

Type is not longer a button and was moved to the bottom Info text block, because it is not editable, so its function is only informative.

Trim options are closer to other time related options like Start and Length.

The bottom Info text block is adaptable, it shows only relevant info for each strip type.

This tab is used to do strip control during the Edit production step.

Tabs by Workflow: Input

Input tab contains input related options and another options that affects the input processing, like Backwards, Strobe, Flip X, and Flip Y. These options are likely used to do an initial setup, preparing the strip to edit.

Position (was "Offset") and Crop are placed using the column pattern from another parts of Blender's UI. Check them to see.

Proxy is also an option to take care before to start Edit working, and its options was rearranged and optimized to take less space.

This tab is the place to do pre Edit work.

Tabs by Workflow: Filters

Filters tab contains options related to how the strip will look visually, its mood and feel.

Options related to color grading and color correction, like Saturation, Multiply, Convert to Float and Modifiers, or related to the export format, like De-Interlace.

This tab serves to post and between Edit work.

Relevant Information

One of few ideas that is not completely implemented yet, is the Input Info showed right after adding files.

Resolution information was already in Strip section, but it related most to Input and more meaningful information could be added too.

So each input type has its own relevant information: Image, Movie, and Sound.

Also as some buttons and options are applicable only for some strip types, they are hidden where they aren't needed.

The Timecode option, for instance, seems to be only available for Movie strips. If so it should be showed only for Movie strips.

Sound Strip

Volume replaces Opacity in Sound strip, making easier to find its most important configuration.

Pan is near to Volume, and should be displayed as disabled for non mono sound sources. The best would be if stereo tracks could be panned, but let's keep it for now.

As well as Opacity, many useless options left the Sound strip interface. Like the Frame Still in bottom Info text block, not applicable to Sound strips.

Take a careful look and you will miss the Filters tab.

Effect Strips: Effect Tab

For Effect strips, the Input tab becomes the Effect tab.

Type option is now easily editable by using the same function than the "Change Effect Type" option from Strip menu.

Inputs are now selectable, by using the same behavior from Mask field selection from Modifiers, and by using the same function than the existing "Reassign Inputs" option.

The input channel comes right after the strip name, making easier to locate it. This is the pattern for strip selection fields like Input.

Proxy options are not available for Effect strips, so they are not showing here.

Effect Strips: Strip Tab

The Strip tab was cleaned up from useless time options for Effect strips, like Start, Lenght and Trim.

The Info text block now presents such information along the Input strips info.

Only effects that don't inherit time limits from input, like Multicam Selector and Adjustement Layer, do have Start and Length options. But not Trim, since they have no input data to cut and work above another channels output.

Transform Effect Strip

In Transform effect strip, Interpolation is called Anti-Aliasing to keep consistency to another parts of Blender.

Position and Scale, and its options are regrouped and take much less space.

The "Translation Unit" option is now the checkbox Use Pixels, following the pattern seen on another effects interface.

Uniform Scale doesn't replace the UI controls anymore, avoiding to making the user to think XY and Uniform scale are controlled apart.

As a matter of fact, Uniform Scale is the X value applied for both X and Y. Disabling the Y field and making a "fake" Y value (to avoid losing the actual Y) synchronized with X is enough to show the behavior for this option.

Multicam Selector: Effect

Multicam Selector is one of the most useful effects in Blender's VSE.

Sometimes is hard to select the exact cut moment, so it was added two navigation buttons close to the Play button.

Previous Cut and Next Cut copy the functionality from Jump To Cut addon and are very helpful to work with Multicam, becoming a crutial part of its workflow.

But still there are 2 new features they could give it flexibility and increase Blender's potential.

They are Set Channels and Set Time.

Multicam: Set Channels

Set Channels makes Channel value relative.

Currently the Channel value is absolute, which make it impossible to change channel of the source strips without losing edition.

The new option sets a range to Channel value to be mapped in. It also sets the Cut buttons.

To move source strips, you just need to set the channel range, with no need to change the Channel value manually of each Multicam strip.

To apply the new channel range to all Multicam cuts, you just need to select them and use the "Copy to Selected" from left mouse menu to copy the values.

For backward compatibility, 0 means the default behavior: Min channel is 1, and Max channel is the one below the current.

I suppose the maximum value of Max still needs to be limited to the one below the current channel to prevent recursion errors.

Multicam: Set Time

Set Time allows to define the time interval used of the source channel.

It's useful in many situations, like when you need to create a gap between a sequence.

After the gap, you wanna resume editing from the time that sequence has stop.

Start sets the initial frame seen by Multicam. So you can use it to offset frames until you get the desired part.

End limits the last frame seen by Multicam. After that, it starts playing from the frame set in Start Time. It's very useful to create loop sequences, a powerful feature.

You could use Speed Control, but keeping these two effects in sync isn't easy.

But luckily, part of the Speed Control code could be enough to implement this feature.

Note: Cutting the source strip is not an option because you'd lost all benefits of MultiCam.

Blend Effects

The Add effect, as well as Subtract, Multiply, Alpha Over and Alpha Under, have no option to control the effect intensity, making them useless.

They are not different from using the Blend option on the top strip. No need of a new strip.

Cross and Gamma Cross are different. They have a very handy Fade option.

So here it is the same Fade option added to Add and similars, with the same behavior.

0 means 100% Input 1, 0.5 means 100% the effect, and 1 means 100% the Input 2.

None is to backward compatibitiy. Default is to fade from 0 to 1. Custom exposes the value.

This would make these effects actually useful.

Speed Control

Speed Control options was arranged to make it easier to new users to understand what it can do, and how to use it.

Their functionality are the same, but they use less space, and it take less clicks to achieve the same target.

Meta Strip

If a Meta strip could control the volume of its sound strips, certainly this option would be found in Strip tab.

This is a very wanted feature when handling large collections of strips with voice and soundtrack put in meta strips.

Meta Strip: Input

An option to edit Meta strips is missing in Blender user interface.

Until you had figure the TAB shortcut, it's painful trying to discover how to edit a Meta

So aside the also new and useful Undo button, you got the Edit button. Click it to show another missing option in Blender interface.

The Back to Previous is being on UI for maximized editors and here is showed when editing a Meta strip.

There's no trouble to use the TAB shortcut to go back, but it's still a problem to have no visual feedback of being inside a Meta strip.

Then it solves two issues. As the most of these suggestions, no functionality implementation is needed, just UI changes.

Meta Strip: Volume Mixer

Another desirable feature is to be able to control the volume of sound strips inside a Meta, without the need to edit it, losing the reference of anothers sound strip volumes outside the Meta.

David McSween gave the idea to expose the sound strips volume property directly in the Meta painel, like a Volume Mixer.

To improve the user feedback and help it to decide what strip to edit, it just enables available strips in the current time. The strips are abled/disabled when scrubbing.

I'm not sure if it could be better to hide not available sound strips, or to keep them for reference. Maybe an option should let the user to decide.

Bonus: Scroll Tabs

Scroll over the tabs area to change of tab.

This is not a Sequencer related feature, but it's already available for menus and usual lists.

I think Tabs usability could be very improved with this feature.

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Proposal v0.2 Date: 2014-02-20 @ Paulo José