3. Extra-tools

Blender’s VSE is a great video editor but of course it’s not a Swiss knife. In addition, the main focus of Blender is not on video editing but on 3D modeling. Some areas such as sound are less important in that perspective. So, some functionality is not available or up-to-date. You’ll need some extra-tools for this.

In this section, we describe some extra tools; mainly open source that you might need when editing.

Python

Blender uses the Python programming language for its scripting API (Application Programming Interface). Many internal data structures and operators can be accessed through a Python script. The official docs are well-written. In this text we provide some usefull scripts and an in-depth description of the Scripting Workspace.

FFmpeg

FFmpeg is a open-source framework to work with video and audio. Blender’s VSE uses it heavily through its libraries libavcodec, libavutil, …

As an end-use, you probably will use the command line tool ffmpeg, the mediaplayer ffplay, or the multimedia ` stream analyzer ffprobe <https://ffmpeg.org/ffprobe.html>`_.

We provide some useful scripts that you probably will need in your job as a video editor.

ExifTool

ExifTool is a platform-independent library and a command-line application command-line application for reading, writing and editing meta information in a wide variety of files (including most graphic file formats).

Some usefull scripts are provided.

• 3.1. Python
  • 3.1.1. Adding still_offset fields
• 3.2. ffmpeg
• 3.3. Script Editor
  • 3.3.1. How to use the script editor efficiently?
    • 3.3.1.1. Layout the workspace
    • 3.3.1.2. Use the Python console
    • 3.3.1.3. Use autocompletion/intellisense
  • 3.3.2. How to use VS Code efficiently?
    • 3.3.2.1. Use VS Code as a standalone editor
    • 3.3.2.2. Use VS Code as an integrated editor
• 3.4. ExifTool
  • 3.4.1. Change the creation date of a video
• 3.5. Annotating screenshots
  • 3.5.1. Embedding the screenshot in SVG
  • 3.5.2. Blender-only solution