A lot of work has been done on the Sequence editor, below the list of highlights.
Architecture
• Sequencer is now near realtime editing, with a memory cache limiter to keep memory usage at a sane, consistent level.
• Can edit timelines of several hours now.
• Sequencer is fully float image aware. You can mix 32 bits and float freely, output then will become float too.
User Interface
• Interface visibility and usability improvements. (Strip colors are themeable)
• Preview display has a channel tuner (to indicate which channel is shown).
• The preview display can show a waveform plot and a U/V scatter plot
• The preview can be panned with the MMB
• IPOs can be locked to the framecounter.
Linux: FFMPEG support
• On disk audio tracks (hddaudio) for long timelines.
• Can open many file formats audio & video using ffmpeg
• Can render using ffmpeg into several file formats
• Can multiplex audio / video directly using ffmpeg.
• Note: FFMPEG for Windows/OS X is scheduled for next release.
And more...
• Can render using frameserver-support directly into foreign applications (like TMPGenc, plugin included) for high quality and custom encoding pipelines.
• Several color correction plugins are included.
• Tons of bugfixes and optimizations.
Implementation notes
Chroma Vectorscope
To judge the quality of the color-distribution and saturation, you can also view a U/V scatter-plot.
The picture is converted to YUV-format. The U- and V-values represent the angle of the color. For pixel of the picture, one point is plotted in the display at the U and V-value-position. If several pixels happen to have the same U/V-value the pixel in the plot gets brighter. To help you understand what color is ment, a hexagram marking the extreme positions (red, magenta, blue, cyan, green, yellow) is drawn and a red cross to mark the origin.
But what is it good for?
• If you picture looks very moody or desaturated you might want to take a look at the U/V-plot. You will most likely see all pixels building a growd at the origin. If you add saturation using the "gamma"-plugin you can see in the U/V-plot if you distort the color.
• If you do color-matching on a by hand basis you can match the angle you see of different channels monitors.
Always: remember to activate an additional control monitor of the end result. Color calibration is a matter of taste and depends on what you want.
Luma Waveform
To judge the quality of the luminance distribution across your video signal, you can view a luma-waveform instead of the usual output display on every control monitor.
The display plots for every scanline the luminance value. The lines are all drawn on top of each other. The points get brighter if the lines cross (which is very likely with several hundred scanlines). You will understand the picture most easily if you plug an oscilloscope to the Luma-video-output of your television set. It will basically look the same.
But what is it good for?
• If the waveform does not fill the whole picture you might want to play with the "setup" and "gain" master-sliders in the "gamma"-plugin until it fills the whole picture (contrast autostretch).
• With the more advanced gamma-plugin you can decide where you have to desaturate (especially in dark regions).
• You can judge if you want to dump the whole thing since it is completely distorted and clips at the top or the bottom.
The new features in Blender's Video Sequence editor have already been used in production, during Blender's pre-release phase:
• The developer, Peter Schlaile created several 2 hours movies (live-footage with 4 independent camera sources) with it using FFMPEG as input, internal color correction and TMPGenc as output-rendering.
• Elephants Dream (11min short), by the Orange Open Movie Project was edited completely in Blender
• Divine Application (3min short), by Karl Erlandsen was edited in Blender, used in conjunction with Maya and Shake.
Demo file:
Basic fade three camera sources against each other
This example show primarily the improvements in basic editing, like: locking ipo-windows to the main timeline window, watching several input channels at once using the channel tuner and controlling IPOs with frame-locking