Blender Power Sequencer
The Free add-on for content creators

Blender's video sequencer has a lot of potential, but it lacks essential tools for content creators to edit videos efficiently.

I made hundreds of tutorials over the years. After working with popular yet unstable professional programs like Vegas and Resolve, I now work exclusively with Blender. It does have some limitations, but it's the most stable and versatile tool you'll find out there.

I built Power Sequencer to help us edit videos as fast as possible. The add-on is getting better month after month, and it's yours for Free.

Features

1. Instant import: finds and imports all new videos, images and sound files in your project folder
2. Render HD videos for Youtube, Twitter and Facebook in one keyboard shortcuts: Power Sequencer sets all the rendering parameters for you
3. Cut, trim and edit faster than ever in Blender with smart mouse-based tools
4. Instant fades and crossfades
5. Build better proxies with FFmpeg, using a Python script in the utils/ folder
6. And much more

To find all available tools, press Spacebar and search for 'PS.' (as in PowerSequencer).

Download the beta release

To install the add-on, head to the latest releases and follow the instructions there.

It is stable already as I use it every single day for GDquest . It ships with a separate keymap file so the many custom shortcuts won't override your existing custom mappings.

Give us a hand!

We're already working together with Davide Cristi to help more people create videos with Blender. This add-on is a living, open project, and we'd be glad to welcome new contributors! We need people to:

• Code new features
• Improve existing features
• Help solidify the code
• Write mini-tutorials on the docs repository

There's a convenient list of Good first issues to help you get started. I'm also available to help you navigate the code or if you have questions about the project.

Learn video editing with Power Sequencer and Blender

The docs are in progress. Until the dedicated website is ready, you can find them on the power-sequencer-docs repository . There's also a growing list of Free video tutorials on Youtube (14 videos at the time of writing).

These are not classical docs: on top of Power Sequencer's features, we're looking to help you improve your understanding of Blender's video editing tools too!

Docs Contents

• Import local footage
• Cut and Trim with the Mouse
  • Cut strips
  • Trim strips
  • Toggle Mute strips
• Crossfades
• Fade-in and fade-out
• Render videos for the web

Import local footage

Imports all images, videos and audios from folders named respectively: img, video and audio.

1. Create folders named img, video and audio inside your Blender project folder (where your .blend file is)
2. Put your source images, videos and audio files in the corresponding folders
3. In Blender, press CtrlShiftI (shortcut for PS.Import local footage operator)

You must save your Blender project before you use this feature.

Cut and Trim with the Mouse

You can cut and trim strips with mouse clicks using the add-on.

The cut and trim tool has two main modes:

1. The smart mode is the default. If you click on a strip, it will only cut this strip. If you click on a gap between two blocks of strips, it will remove the gap. And if you click above the strips, it will cut every strip in the sequencer on that frame.
2. The time cursor mode always cuts or trims all strips under the time cursor or on a given frame.

Cut strips

Cut a single strip at a time

1. Place the mouse cursor over the strip to cut
2. Press CtrlAction Mouse

By default Action Mouse is Left Click and Select Mouse corresponds to Right Click

Cut all strips under the time cursor

1. Place the mouse cursor on the sequencer, without hovering any strips
2. Press CtrlAction Mouse

To always cut in time cursor mode, press CtrlShiftAction Mouse instead.

You can also use this operator to cut gaps between strips. Hover a gap and press CtrlAction Mouse to remove it.

Trim strips

Trim a single strip at a time

1. Place the mouse cursor over the strip that you want to cut
2. Press CtrlSelect Mouse

Trim all strips

1. Place the mouse cursor on the sequencer, without hovering on any strips
2. Press CtrlSelect Mouse

To always trim in time cursor mode, press CtrlShiftAction Mouse instead.

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Keyobard shortcuts are the quickest way to activate these operations, but they also can be accessed by the operator search pop-up menu.

Trim to the closest cuts and cut the gap

Auto-trim a strip to the closest surrounding cuts, leave some margin and remove the newly formed gap.

Placeholder for the video demo

1. Press ShiftAltAction Mouse where you want to cut on the sequencer. You don't need to click on a strip in particular.

Use this tool when you've edited some audio out and you're left with extra footage you want to remove. It finds the closest cuts around the time cursor, cuts and trims the strips it overlaps up to the surrounding cuts and it leaves a few frames on either side.

Toggle Mute strips

Press AltAction Mouse on a strip to toggle it muted with the mouse.

This leaves the strip in the channel so when you trim audio or footage around it, the muted strip will block the rest of the edits.

It's useful when you're editing audio separately from the video which is common with tutorials and other screencasts.

It also works during playback and leaves the time cursor running.

Techniques

You can resize mute strips to add space between 2 other strips. Grab the mute sequence's handle, and keep the alt key down to ripple the edit.

Want to shorten it instead? Mouse trim it with Ctrl Right Click, and let Power Sequencer remove the gap.

Add a muted sound strip to leave some space in your edits

Select and drag the left handle of the sequence to the right of a cut to extend it while you keep the Alt key down. This will ripple the edit, or push the sequence to the right.

CtrlAction Mouse to cut the extra audio or footage, and AltAction Mouse the new small sound sequence. You now have a block that will leave some time between the 2 sequences, even when you remove all gaps!

Quickly cut and mute bad sounds with the mouse

It's common to have pops, or little coughs in the audio. Often the speaker is so fast you don't want to trim them. Instead, you'd rather keep the strip around as a spacer but you may want to mute them.

1. CtrlAction Mouse before and after the incriminated sound on the waveform to cut a new strip.
2. AltAction Mouse on the new sound strip to mute it.

Crossfades

Crossfades or dissolves are smooth transitions from one video or image strip to another. To achieve a crossfade in Blender you add a cross or gamma cross effect strip that stacks on top of two video or image strips.

Add a crossfade

1. Select one strip to fade from
2. Press CtrlAltc (shortcut for PS.Add Crossfade operator)

Power Sequencer finds the closest strip to fade to for you. It looks from strips that start after the active selected strip end frame. If the strip already overlaps with your selection Power Sequencer will ignore it and move to the next one in the editor. It will also first look for strips in the same channel or neighboring channels.

Slide a crossfade

1. Select the Gamma Cross effect strip
2. Press Altc (shortcut for PS.Edit crossfade operator)

This tool finds and selects the handles of the effect's input strips. Then it fires the grab mode. It's a shortcut to move a gamma cross effect faster.

Fade-in and fade-out

Fade-in and fade-out are gradual opacity transitions.

Add fade-in and fade-out

1. Select one or more strips
2. Press f

Add fade-in

1. Select one or more strips
2. Press Ctrlf (shortcut for operator: PS.Fade strips)

Add fade-out

1. Select one or more strips
2. Press Altf

General fade tips

When you apply a fade, its transition function will appear in the Blender graph editor. You can edit individual key frames to adjust the fade as you like.

Try to add fades at the very end of your video editing process otherwise you can encounter caveats that can create slowdowns; if you want to know more, see the documentation video "Power Sequencer: Fade in, fade out".

Add a fade with operator

By default PS.Fade strips will use the Fade-in, but you can also use other types with these steps:

1. Select one or more strips
2. Use the PS.Fade strips operator (Ctrlf)
3. Press F6 to access operator properties
4. Change Fade Type

Techniques

Dim a strip

1. Add a color strip above on che channel above the strip you want to dim
   1. Press Shifta
   2. Select Effect Strip -> Color
2. Select the color strip
3. Set blend to alpha over
4. Adjust the length of the color strip
5. Adjust the opacity (this value is used as the max opacity of the strip, so pick a value < 1.0)
6. Press f

Render videos for the web

Renders a video using the preset options specified in the preferences.

Render the video

1. Place the mouse cursor over the Video Sequencer Editor
2. Press AltF12 (shortcut for PS.Render video for the web operator)

Blender uses only one CPU core for the rendering. This means that it's possible to do other things during the rendering: you can also open another Blender instance and start editing a new video, withouth major slowdowns.

Change rendering preferences

1. Press CtrlAltU to access User Preferences
2. Select the Input tab
3. Search for PS.Render video for the web
4. Click the arrow to expand details of the keymap

You will see something like:

Preset

The preset contains rendering options such as resolution, container, and codecs.

At the moment there are only two presets available.

Preset	Resolution	Container	Video codec	Audio codec
youtube	1080p	mp4	h264	AAC
twitter	720p	mp4	h264	AAC

Filename

Filename of the rendered video. It can be one of:

• Blender file: the name of the main .blend file
• Current scene: the name of the current Blender scene
• Folder: the name of the folder containing the main .blend file

Auto render

If checked (it's the default setting), the PS.Render video for the web operator will automatically start the rendering.

If unchecked, it will only update rendering settings, but it will not start rendering: to start the render, you will need to click on the Animation button in the Properties Editor.

Other add-ons

Here are other recommended add-ons for a better editing workflow:

1. VSE transform tools: Move and animate transform effects visually, on the image preview area. The addon auto-registers shortcuts, especially the T key, to add a Transform effect to selected sequences.
2. Easy logging: Adds tools to derush and tag footage.

Credits

• davcri
• Nathan Lovato