[Sequencer] FFMPEG & Blender

Tin2tin · Post by **Tin2tin** » Wed Aug 13, 2008 8:23 am

This is a super addition to Blender.

@ TheNut:
Do you think it will be possible to add Avisynth scripts as plugins/transitions for Blender the way you have used lua scripts?

If this would be possible Blender would become the true NLE GUI Avisynth never had and Blender would get instant access to super advanced video processing, transitions(I have 190 avisynth transitions for my DVD slideshow GUI) and effects (like FreeFrame).

spamagnet · Post by **spamagnet** » Wed Aug 13, 2008 2:54 pm

Tin2tin wrote:This is a super addition to Blender.

Thanks! I'm very excited about it.

Tin2tin wrote:Do you think it will be possible to add Avisynth scripts as plugins/transitions for Blender...

Long-term, it would be cool for Blender to add support for Libavfilter, an FFMPEG library in development which is intended to provide a cross-platform framework for filters such as these.

TheNut · Post by **TheNut** » Thu Aug 21, 2008 2:46 am

Sorry guys, I don't frequent this board that much. Busy bee ;\

Spamagnet,
That's a cool plug-in. It would greatly simplify importing dozens of videos. One project in particular I had over 50 HDV splits. Creating duplicate avisynths scripts was tedious. I'll have to look more into this. What be great is specifying a template aviscript to use, and then use some kind of key like $VIDEO and $AUDIO, where the python script will find and then replace with the known information gathered. Then just feed that into Blender.

Tin2tin,
Blender plugins are standalone, so one does not have direct access to any Blender code, other than a couple basic functions. However, it might be possible if the plugin directly compiled in AVISynth support. I've never used AVISynth's API, but as long as you can feed it a single frame and get a black-box output, it might be possible to do what you want. But I have a better proposal.

It's high on my hit list to add some level of text/title animations + effects + transitions to Blender. Presently it can be done using scenes and composite nodes, but it's unnecessarily long and complex, especially when you compare it to editors like Vegas, Premiere, VideoStudio, etc... I'm thinking about another plugin, tool, or possibly built-in Blender interface (ideally the best way to do it) that will handle this. The whole thing would be based off XML, so effects and transitions would be really small and portable. Very much like how Microsoft's Movie Maker works. Combined with an interface to give a preview, it would make for a killer addition to Blender.

spamagnet · Post by **spamagnet** » Thu Aug 21, 2008 2:50 pm

TheNut wrote:What be great is specifying a template aviscript to use, and then use some kind of key like $VIDEO and $AUDIO, where the python script will find and then replace with the known information gathered. Then just feed that into Blender.

That's essentially what it does, except it uses an XSL transform. The Python code gathers the list of clips into a "master" XML document (clips.xml) and then runs it through the transform to generate the .AVS scripts.

I am partway through implementing HDV support. If you have a sample clip I could work with, that would help.

BTW, thanks again for uploading that Blender/AviSynth build -- it work extremely well. Could you perhaps make your project files available so I can attempt to do the same type of build?

spamagnet · Post by **spamagnet** » Thu Aug 21, 2008 9:17 pm

I released another version of BlenderAVC which supports HDV.

TheNut · Post by **TheNut** » Fri Aug 22, 2008 4:30 am

"Could you perhaps make your project files available so I can attempt to do the same type of build? "
Sure, you can download it here: http://www.nutty.ca/blog/files/source/b ... vs2008.zip

Make sure to delete your FFMPEG folder in libs/windows/ffmpeg before you extract. The zip will overwrite all your msvs_70 projects. And just a recap, I use Visual Studio 2008 Express, so all the 7.0 projects have been converted to 9.0. All optimization settings have been turned on as well. If you have access to the Intel compiler, you can generate a build almost 2-3x faster.

Compile procedure:
1) Build: blender\extern\make\msvc_7_0\extern.sln
2) Build: blender\intern\make\msvc_7_0\intern.sln
3) Build: blender\projectfiles_vc7\blender\blender.sln

spamagnet · Post by **spamagnet** » Fri Aug 22, 2008 3:07 pm

TheNut wrote:http://www.nutty.ca/blog/files/source/b ... vs2008.zip

Thanks! Unless/until the official Blender build supports AviSynth, maintaining a distribution for that purpose would be nice. I'll give it a shot.

Tin2tin · Post by **Tin2tin** » Sat Aug 23, 2008 8:33 am

I would just like to mention that there is a blog on using Blender from an external app as 3D transition and effects render:
http://gvfx.blogspot.com/
There are some transitions, effects(.blend) for download as well. I don't know how that will work with the sequencer though.

Just a thought: When working with an avs clip a nice addition could be to open(from Blender), edit and save the avs script in AvsP and then return to Blender.

jesterKing · Post by **jesterKing** » Sat Aug 23, 2008 12:00 pm

Tin2tin wrote:I would just like to mention that there is a blog on using Blender from an external app as 3D transition and effects render:
http://gvfx.blogspot.com/
There are some transitions, effects(.blend) for download as well. I don't know how that will work with the sequencer though.

Funky. I've added the blog to Planet Blender ( http://www.planetblender.org )

/Nathan

Adgarharrison · Post by **Adgarharrison** » Wed Sep 14, 2011 9:10 am

Hi there!!
When i try rendering to FFMPEG in blender 2.56 i get the error message "Error initializing video stream". anyone know about this? thanks!

Post by **stiv** » Wed Sep 14, 2011 5:24 pm

Two possibilities are setting invalid parameters for a certain format and not having codecs installed.