1.2.0 Workflow series 🍕🍙

Thanks to everyone who helped us on this release, we're bringing you a massive update, with new features and tons of quality of life improvements!

Big thanks to @Francois-Grassard, @aditiapratama, @libreartist, @guilhermehto, @jooert, @doakey3, @Blezyn, @razcore-art and @henriiquecampos for their help on this release 😄

Yes, we're 10 developers involved in this new update! Let's keep working together to edit videos even faster with Blender's Video Sequence Editor!

Become a Contributor

Power Sequencer is made by content creators, for content creators.

Whether you are a developer, a designer, a video editor, a writer, or a tester, everyone's welcome to help move the add-on forward! With your help, we can achieve wonders.

If you want to give a hand, you can get in touch with us anytime on Discord.

Supporting GDQuest

• Follow GDquest on Twitter
• Buy one of our game creation courses for you or one of your friends. They make for a great present! ☺
• You can also become our patron on Patreon 😊

Changelog

📘 Free Tutorials

Learn to use BPSrender from the command line! We still need people to tell us that it works well everywhere before we can integrate it in Blender. Also, we need your help to design a nice render panel 😄

• Fast Blender VSE render with BPSrender
• Precise and Fast selections with Blender's Sequencer
• BPSProxies: create proxies fast with FFMPEG

Note: if you install bpsrender with pip, you can call bpsrender directly like so: bpsrender blender_file_path [options], instead of typing python -m bpsrender ...

💻 User Interface

Thanks to @aditiapratama and @libreartist, we now have a nice toolbar menu! It will show you most available tools and keyboard shortcuts.

🎥🕺 New features

• Remove crossfade: Remove crossfades in a clean way, as you'd expect! If you select one or more transition effects like Crossfade or Wipe, pressing X will now bring the sequences back together to form a precise cut.
• Remove Gaps and ignore locked strips: Blender's default tool to remove gap isn't very smart. We had to code our own to create the feature below...
• Cut with the mouse, without touching locked strips: edit to music with the add-on's fast mouse-based tools! Lock your audio strip and you're good to go 😃
• Select related strips: find and select effects related to the selection, to then cut, copy or duplicate a strip with everything that should come with it.
• Space strips based on mouse position: this is bound to the = key by default

BPSProxies

The proxy render script got serious love in this version.

• Thanks to François Grassard, a TV engineer, we now have super efficient proxy rendering presets! These proxies are designed to be easy on Blender, and they offer way smoother preview than Blender's ones 😃. They also generate way faster
• You can now use convenient presets to render proxies, thanks to @jooert. Use the --preset or -p option followed by the preset's name. This version ships with the mp4, webm, and nvenc presets
  • Nvenc is Nvidia's solution to encode MP4 with your graphics card. It requires ffmpeg 4, an nvidia GPU that supports Nvenc encoding, and I'm not sure this is available on linux! But it will work on Windows. It's especially fast with 50% and 100% sized proxies. The rendering speed difference isn't as big with 25% proxies.
• You can now render 25%, 50%, and 100% proxies! The default size is still 25%. use the --size option (-s in short form) when calling the program from the command line. E.g. -s 50 to generate 50% proxies
• The code is better organized now, easier to read and to contribute to in the future. Thanks @sudopluto for making this possible 🙂

Meta strips

• Resize to content: if you edit inside a group or meta strip, you may want to trim it to use it as a compositing group. Now you can! Works on all selected strips at once.
• UnMeta many strips: Alt G now works on all selected meta strips at once
• Auto-trim your nested timelines when you UnMeta strips: also works by default with Alt G. If you don't want this to happen, use Resize to Content first

Scenes

• Convert selection to scene strip: If you want to use the node compositor to do complex grade, or to help organize your project, you'll want to use scene strips at times, instead of meta strips.

✅ Improvements

• Auto crossfades (Ctrl Alt C) now work in a single channel by default, as in every other professional video editing program
  • You can also add multiple crossfades at a time, e.g. to create an image slideshow with fades between each picture
  • This makes it a lot easier to export Blender edits to Davinci Resolve, Premiere, or Final Cut with the EDL export add-on
  • Also now works with the Multicam strips
• Grab closest cut (Shift Alt G) now supports linked strips! It's the fastest way to select and transform the strips' handles on either side of a cut.
• Delete direct now automatically deletes the strip under the mouse cursor if there's nothing selected.
• Swap strips vertically: You can now conveniently change the order of effects or linked strips, e.g. picture overlays
• Smartly remove strips: if you press X but don't have anything selected, Power Sequencer will find and delete the strips under the mouse cursor for you!
• Jump in time with Shift ➡ and Shift ⬅: It's consistent with ⬅ and ➡ to move 1 frame on the timeline. This new tool works in seconds so the jump will be the same regardless of your project's framerate!
• Concatenate in multiple channels at a time, and concatenate linked strips! The concatenate tool got a rewrite to make better decisions based on your selection
• Concatenate towards the right: Press Alt C and Shift Alt C to respectively concatenate the previous strip towards the next one, or concatenate all strips before the selected towards the right.
• Auto-selection: If you don't have anything selected, Power Sequencer will use the strip under the cursor for concatenate, delete, and grab operators, saving your extra keystrokes and time 😄
• Edit crossfades with the grab tool: grab became smarter. If you only select cross effects, it G will select the handles on either side of the crossfade instead of trying to move it directly.

Improvements to the source code

We've reorganized and simplified many features, to make it easier for you to read and to contribute! Now, all marker-related features, fade-related features, etc. are grouped together.

🤕 Fixes

• Removed the option to swap strips with effects, as they were causing problems
• Fixed errors when adding crossfades, that could happen with different starting selections
• The add-on will now only load necessary files in Blender, making startup a little faster
• Fixed an error when trying to delete (X) without a selection
• BPSrender got a few fixes:
  • If you set your render to the /tmp\ folder, BPSrender wouldn't work. It now reads your render settings instead to properly set the render path
  • Render now works as expected when there's whitespace in the file paths
• Proxies rendered with BPSProxies should now be in sync with the original footage: the previous settings we used caused offsets in rare cases
• Fixed errors when trying to delete strips
• Fixed Concatenate not taking in account the selection if more than one strip is selected in a given channel
• Fixed strips changing channels when using Snap Selection to Cursor