Yesterday i finished a rough draft of a 20-minute video for my father. It was the first project I’ve done using Blender’s Video Sequence Editor (NLE), and I was fairly impressed. Using proxies, it is fast, even on my 4-year-old machine. It’s also stable — didn’t crash once! I really like the meta strips; being able to “tab” into (and out of) them is extremely powerful.

The biggest drawbacks have to do with media management. Loading 40+ clips into the timeline was a little painful, especially since I had to load each audio track in separately and then sync it with the video. The reason: While you can automatically pull in video and audio using an AVS script, Blender cannot yet proxy the audio. Thus, when you play the clip, AviSynth is still attempting to decode the AVC video in real time. This makes for extreme stuttering on my machine.

I am thinking of trying to write a Python extension which would allow an entire set of BlenderAVC clips to be sucked in at once. It would lay them out end-to-end on the timeline, sync up the audio and automatically stuff ‘em into meta strips. It would also be slick to add a strip name from a clips.xml file attribute. Stay tuned!