[Bf-funboard] VSE code

[David McSween]

I don't know coding but I can try to speak to the VSE design.

Blender's VSE was designed to string out animations, created in Blender, as
"strips" of media on a horizontal timeline. You could trim (shorten) the
strips and perform simple transitions such as fade to black or dissolve.
The VSE was also used to play sound so you could animate to it in a 3D
scene.

Now this idea of displaying the length of playable media as a strip (or
clip if you like) is not unique to Blender and it is repeated in the Action
editor as well. It lets you see how one piece of media compares to another
for timing. You can even stack strips on top of themselves if your media
has a transparent value, allowing you to see through to what is underneath.

Where Blender differs with other Non Linear Editors (NLEs) is that it
doesn't retain context information about the source animation or video
media. That is you cannot assign multiple start and end points or unique
names for elements of a strip for later use. Assigning metadata to external
media is key strength of NLEs. With this ability you can perform all sorts
of database gymnastics to shuffle the clips you have in interesting useful
ways.

Blender simply doesn't need this feature for animation string out, so you
have to hack the NLE to access similar tools (see http://easy-logging.net
for example).

Also the audio editing is, for the same reason, quite limited in
fundamental ways. Most important is the inability to link strips to each
other so that they can be moved in sync with their video twin strip.

Having said all that there have been great improvements in playback speed
and expansions of useful effect tools, like color control and masking.
Hope this helps

Cheers
David McSween
@3pointedit

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 6:02 PM, maximo remedios <maximoremedios at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I don't know anything about coding, out of curiosity I was wondering if
> anyone could explain to me in simple words how is the VSE designed? Are
> strips something specific to Blender or all softwares have a similar
> design? Is it radically different than other professional NLE softwares?Do
> you see any limitations in its code that make it difficult to evolve?
>
> Thanks
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