I’ve spent the last few weeks looking for a way to edit some screen casts I created on my Mac. Although there are a couple great apps out there (iMovie and Final Cut) I couldn’t find anything that would edit my odd sized screen casts. The only solution seemed to be to scale the videos up and have big black bands to fill the void… yuch!
Then last night I decided to give Blender’s “Sequencer” a try and you know what? It ain’t half bad! All the tools I need to fade / wipe between scenes, fade titles and tweak the final result are there. Here, take a look:
This is a RTFM problem.
Final Cut can work with custom sizes and does so quite well. I agree it’s a bit of a pain to set up though - I still have a problem with that part of FC after quite a few years with it.
I admittedly only spent a couple hours with FC, the tutorials and manual before giving up. Even a google search only turned up tutorials that showed how you should scale the screencast up to DV resolution, which is not what I wanted to do. My screencasts are all 576x360 and although I did find a post in a forum that said it was possible in FC, I could never find it in the manual. At any rate, FC has a lot more depth and power than I really need to just drop some simple titles on a video clip.
In contrast, I picked up the technique in Blender in just about half an hour. I know some people say that Blender is tough to learn, but of all the video editors I’ve tried over the last few weeks, this one has been the easiest (at least IMHO), the least expensive and most importantly, it works!
Fully agree. FC is a great app, but you almost need to work with it on a fulltime basis to be really productive with it.
When I’m strapped for time and doing simpler things I usually just fire up After Effects. Although it’s not suitable for editing, I’m much faster with it and I can do some compositing tricks while I’m at it.
And to stay on topic: I had no idea Blender did video editing…
