A Video Sequence Editor workshop was held in Blender HQ on August 2024. Various topics related to VSE were discussed — some already in development, some planned to work on soon, and some others that we want to happen, but it is not sure when or who would do them. Participants were Dalai Felinto, Falk David and Sergey Sharybin from Blender, and myself as an outsider. I am Aras Pranckevičius, and I have been contributing features and improvements to VSE in Blender 4.1 and 4.2.
Previous VSE workshop was held two years ago, and while overall design and wishes for VSE features remains the same, it is clear that with the current amount of VSE contributors the “these tasks will take months to complete” bit was too optimistic (more contributors would be very welcome!). Part of this workshop was about discussing tasks that we have a clear idea that someone would actually do them “soon”. However for other parts it is still unclear what their timelines are.
Larger Picture
In trying to answer the question “why VSE exists?” or “should Blender have VSE at all?”, it helps to keep overall goal in mind. Which is: VSE is a tool to do story telling. Ideally, you’d be able to do layout work, storyboarding, grease pencil annotations directly from your sequencer space. Timeline, preview and powerful tools, without need to have a secondary Blender instance.
“Just assembling a video out of several video clips”, while possible to do with Blender, is not the primary goal. VSE interaction with grease pencil and scene strips, as well as everything being inside the same application, is something that can set Blender apart from other video editing applications.
That is the overall idea, but it needs a lot of work to make it into a polished reality.
One of the large issues is that Blender can display one scene across the whole application (the “current scene”), but VSE data lives in a scene! Which means you can not edit the VSE timeline, and edit some scene (used by a scene strip) at the same time. “Developing Grease Pencil at the SPA Studios” BCON22 talk is one example of how people approach solving this. Falk presented several possible solutions, see forum thread for details. One of the large ideas was to move VSE outside of the scene, into a “Movie” object or something similar. We discussed pros and cons of these approaches, as well as tried to make a quick prototype. No decision was made on final design, but this is something that the team will come back to.
Performance
Something that almost any area of any product would appreciate, is more performance. VSE is not an exception. In Blender Studio, largest issues are preview performance, and time taken to render daily “playblasts” (not a full movie, but a section of it for status updates of meetings). Improving performance might be a lot of technical optimization work, but it is “easy” in a sense that most of it does not require design decisions or workflow changes. If things are “just faster”, everyone benefits.
See forum thread for details. Primary things that were discussed were:
- ffmpeg related bits: reducing stalls when starting playback of new movie clip, GPU acceleration etc.,
- CPU SIMD optimizations,
- GPU usage within VSE,
- Proxies, caching and in general faster playback within Preview area,
- Scene strip optimizations.
Overall, primary goal is to make preview (playback, scrubbing) smoother, secondary goal is to make rendering faster.
Summary
Various other features and improvements were discussed: nodes, text improvements, strongly typed channels, and so on. See forum thread for details.
Many of features outlined in previous workshop (dedicated color grading editor, media bins and interactive file preview) were not explicitly talked about. We still want to have them! But realistically, with amount of people actively working on VSE even getting everything above is “uncertain when”. VSE did get improvements in 4.1 and 4.2, and we hope to keep up similar pace. This is a call for more contributors :) If you want to help, reach out in #sequencer chat channel.
