[HN Gopher] I accidentally Blender VSE
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       I accidentally Blender VSE
        
       Author : bangonkeyboard
       Score  : 169 points
       Date   : 2024-02-08 18:57 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (aras-p.info)
 (TXT) w3m dump (aras-p.info)
        
       | Night_Thastus wrote:
       | This is the sort of thing I would _love_ to do to my music player
       | of choice, _Musicbee_.
       | 
       | You know, if it was open source! :(
       | 
       | The creator barely touches it anymore, and it's completely free
       | and always has been so I do not understand why it isn't open
       | source.
       | 
       | There are so many little nagging issues, little bits and bobs
       | that are broken or slow or just weird that I would absolutely
       | love fixing up in my spare time.
       | 
       | And no, transitioning at this point to something else like FooBar
       | would be way too much work. And I tried HQPlayer, its UI/UX is
       | too terrible for me to let it slide.
        
         | snitch182 wrote:
         | Writing the code for a open source project demands a lot more
         | perfection than people realize. It is a lot more work than
         | getting a programm just to work nicely.
        
           | Night_Thastus wrote:
           | Up to a point, I agree. For larger changes, it would require
           | community outreach, internal communication with other devs,
           | testing, feedback, etc.
           | 
           | But there are also a lot of small "easy wins" that require
           | none of that to be a good addition to the code.
        
         | hombre_fatal wrote:
         | > I do not understand why it isn't open source.
         | 
         | Because your software project then becomes a people management
         | project.
        
         | striking wrote:
         | > Reply #19 from Steven on: May 23, 2013, 03:28:39 PM
         | 
         | > As i have stated several times i have no near term plans to
         | open source MusicBee. When i feel i dont want to keep the
         | project going then making the source code available will be one
         | of the options i would consider. This is just a hobby project
         | done because i enjoy programming and will never be something
         | done in a professional manner. I spend enough time managing
         | people in my day job and dont want to have to do that with
         | this!
         | 
         | > I really have no idea why this should be a surprise as i have
         | never pretended otherwise.
         | 
         | > Anyone who has concerns around this (including me "being run
         | over by a bus") really should look elsewhere and use another
         | app so your concerns are addressed.
         | 
         | > Here's a link to help you out:
         | 
         | > http://alternativeto.net/software/musicbee/
         | 
         | https://web.archive.org/web/20170721042120/https://getmusicb...
        
       | charcircuit wrote:
       | >Did you know that Blender has a suite of video editing tools?
       | Yeah, me neither :)
       | 
       | I figure most people who use blender for animation know about it
       | considering that's the basic way you turn your rendered frames
       | into a video file.
        
         | beering wrote:
         | You can render frames directly to a video file (ffmpeg option),
         | which I suspect a lot of beginners or casual users do. You can
         | also use the compositor to turn a prerendered frame sequence
         | into a video file. Lastly I suspect most users prefer video
         | editing in another program such as Resolve. I get the
         | inpression the VSE is nit used much because it occupies a
         | narrow space of "need some basic cutting abilities but no
         | transforms, titles, or effects". Hopefully someone will
         | continue the work of improving transforms and effects and even
         | add 3 point editing someday
        
           | ginnungagap wrote:
           | Beginners do that exactly until the first time they have a
           | render crash halfway through, then they learn about rendering
           | each frame as an image (yes I learned this lesson the hard
           | way)
        
       | vsviridov wrote:
       | VSE needs so much love... For my podcast I wanted to use all
       | open-source tools, but rendering sequences of mp4 with some
       | chromakey in Blender took 10 hours for 1.5 hour video. I ended up
       | switching to the free version of DaVinci Resolve
        
         | unsignedint wrote:
         | Blender's VSE currently lacks GPU acceleration for video
         | rendering, which results in the CPU handling the entire
         | workload. Additionally, it performs a full frame-by-frame
         | render even when re-encoding isn't necessary, unlike DaVinci
         | Resolve which can bypass this process. Enhancements in this
         | area would be greatly beneficial for Blender's performance and
         | efficiency.
        
         | mattl wrote:
         | Used VSE for a project. It was painful but we got something out
         | of it. It was certainly the best free software video editor at
         | the time.
         | 
         | Working on a new version now, using Final Cut Pro.
        
         | AkBKukU wrote:
         | One problem is Blender's multithreaded rendering doesn't scale
         | well to VSE work because it focuses on breaking up each frame
         | and as a result doesn't well utilize multiple cores. I've
         | experimented with making a plugin [1] in the past to start
         | multiple render jobs different points in the timeline in
         | separate processes and was able to _massively_ speed up
         | renders.
         | 
         | I have since switched to Resolve on linux as well but due to
         | using Blackmagic cameras that work better with it.
         | 
         | [1] https://github.com/AkBKukU/blenderSubprocessRender
        
       | unwind wrote:
       | Very impressive, and it's of course quite clear that the OP
       | didn't just walk off the street into Blender HQ. Many years of
       | experience at Unity is probably quite helpful when it comes to
       | knowing the domain. :)
       | 
       | This change [1] was my favorite, optimizing an image processing
       | step by removing lots (and I do mean lots) of table-based
       | "optimizations" and replacing them with just straight up floating
       | point calculation, and making it ~4X faster on the OP's machine.
       | Fantastic!
       | 
       | [1]:
       | https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/115801/fi...
        
       | ykl wrote:
       | Aras just going around and dropping into various open source
       | graphics projects to produce massive speedups and improvements
       | and then going onto some other random graphics project to the
       | same is my favorite trend of the past few years.
        
       | PaulHoule wrote:
       | I'm pretty sure I could have not done this at an "actual job"
       | 
       | If there's one thing that's gone wrong in my career is that it's
       | been split between the occasional project where I figure out the
       | math for something that is absolutely unique (and not paid) in
       | which I get more done in two months than I'd usually get done in
       | two years vs projects I get paid to work on where the results I
       | get are basically average. I've never been able to split the
       | difference and not for lack of trying really hard. Having the
       | possibility of getting paid for something I was working on for
       | free last year ended up with me not working on it at all.
        
         | actionfromafar wrote:
         | Same.
        
       | jokoon wrote:
       | how didn't I know about that?
       | 
       | most serious video editors are either expensive, unusable or
       | bloated
        
       | blackle wrote:
       | I've used blender VSE for all my video editing since 2020 and
       | it's so awesome to see it improve. I already considered it to be
       | the best video editor on linux due to its stability and
       | featureset (you get to use all of blender's existing animation
       | tools!)
        
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