Video effects interface
Blender has too few Video effect for our videos. A lot of them can be done in a 3D view converting a video to plane and playing with it.
But it would be cool to have a VSE effects addons for example: grain and artifacts, mosaic images, waves, burn, lens effect, paper effects, puzzle... well some effects may be simple, some of them silly, but I think you have the idea.
I know some of you have suggested some effects, but the problem is: bundling tons of effects within Blender may make this program giant and there will be improvements and things other people would do in another way. So I'm thinking about how could Blender accept such addons.
Having a Python interface for that could take advantage of hundreds of imaging and video libs, and could let us share effects online, for example, but can make Blender VSE much slower (I've tested it). Or having a dynamic lib interface could make some effects non portable to other platforms if anyone uses dependent libs to code the effect. (I think Blender in the past had this type of interface)
So, I think Blender should have some bundled effects in the core, as it has right now, but the option to import effects could give us a whole new world of possibilities.
4 Comments
As much as I love the VSE, I think this is really out of scope for Blender's main purpose. The VSE is a great "cuts only" editor. I'd be wary of building too much else into it.
That said, the VSE did have a C API in the past that allowed people to write custom plugin effects. The problem is that no one really took advantage of the feature and it became a maintenance liability. I'm personally not convinced that anything has changed in that regard.
me too and it's much more important to improve the vse in other ways like caching, metastrips and things that actually make sense, effects and transitions when it comes to editing 99.9% of the users use only cut and fade and they are already working nicely.
That was my idea. Don't build too much into Blender and let other programmers build more things: Gaussian Blur? Glow? Text? Wipe? White Balance? Masks? Tone Map? Multiply/Add/Substract Blend modes? I think these are out of a "cuts only", even a Cross may be improved, but I have no way to do it without having to touch Blender's core.
I don't know the design discussion (tried to find it, I still have a lot of message to read) to get rid de C API, I know it wasn't complete enough but there were some interesting plugins and it could be integrated using third party libraries.
One thing I really like from Blender is that I don't have to render everything before doing the final render. I mean, making a scene with some effects, I don't have to render them separately and then make a final render again, but I must do it to apply some image effect and it's hard to change the animation of that effect because I have to re-render them in a external program again.
I'm not saying this is the most important thing to do right now. I'm not sure of your statisticts of 99.9% of the users... I think people could work even better. Just search for a silly video on Youtube, I'm sure I can find (without searching so much) something really hard to do in the actual Blender that forces me to use another video editing program (and GNU/Linux for example is not very advanced in that field)