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Comment by michaelsalim | Hacker News Reader

Blender is amazing. The other day, I needed to create a video of a rotating image so I looked around for potential software to use. Very quick and dirty job.

I didn't want to download anything large like Davinci Resolve. I saw OpenShot but was not sure it can do what I needed easily. It's not even lightweight.

Then someone mentioned that Blender can do video editing. Can you believe that blender is only around 200mb? I downloaded it, followed a quick tutorial on YouTube to figure out keyframes and how to render. 10 minutes after and I'm done.

It's great to see even more features to the video sequencer in this update. Will probably use again for my next video editing needs.

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I love Blender but NLE functionality still isn't there yet. Basic things like keeping audio in sync with video breaks all the time. I had to switch to Resolve for my little projects. I will continue to evaluate Blender, but for now it still isn't ready for primetime.

Agreed about the NLE. I tried using blender (iirc 2.9) to make a family vacation compilation and it was a lot of work and not very intuitive. I barely do any video editing though so I may just not have had a good workflow. I wasn't able to find very good workflows either, I'm assuming because blender was still awkward for this use case and others usually reach for another tool.

I'm very much looking forward to further improvements and judging from the breakneck pace of features and how much love the project gets, I'm very optimistic about the future!

I had some issues with audio syncing to variable FPS video. Which is mostly used to save some space and battery when taking videos on consumer cameras, but probably something that profesional movie makers do not use at all. Still it would be nice for home video makers if that thing just worked out of the box.

This problem is present in Premiere Pro too. The recommended solution is to convert the variable FPS video to constant FPS before using it as a source.

For a free, lightweight video editing with a UI similar to Premiere, I recommend Olive 1.0:

https://www.olivevideoeditor.org/

It's small, opens fast, and does a good job.

To be honest, the video sequencer needs heavy refactoring. Yes, it can be used, but the UI isn't the best. Text support is very basic, so for titling it's not very useful (text is a general issue with blender). Also unfortunately, one cannot use shaders directly in the video sequencer to create their own filters for instance. Same limitations with the compositor (which isn't GPU accelerated so it is really slow).

But hey, it's free.

They are remaking the compositor now to be GPU accelerated. I saw some videos and looks very impresive!!

I use Blender on macOS because it's the simplest video editor. Most importantly it supports webm.

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