Compositing and video editing - Blender Tutorial

- [Instructor] Okay, you've gone ahead and polished this animation and you've rendered out everything to a bunch of images. Well, at least, hopefully. As I mentioned earlier in this course, I highly recommend you render out to images because if you render out to a movie and for whatever reason Blender stops or crashes, that movie will be corrupted and you'll have to re-render everything, whereas if you render to out to images, you could pick up from the last image that was completed. Now, before we get on to compositing and video editing, I do want to make one note. I went ahead and really polished this scene out for you. You can get to it by going to File, Open and opening the chapter six, video seven Solution_end.blend. Now, here's the thing. While I spent a few hours polishing it, I couldn't fit that all into a video, so I wrote a list of all the things that I did. There's a couple of major points. One, I shifted everything back by about 100 frames so I could let the simulations run a little bit longer. Two, I turned on simplify, which helped out viewport performance just a little bit. But the most significant one is the fire cache simulation. It's over 13 gigabytes and unfortunately, I can't include that in the exercise files, so you'll have to find a directory locally and bake all of that cache back out. Aside from that though, everything is virtually the same. I just went ahead and tweaked a bunch of things like the lights and the rock falling, et cetera. All right, now that we've gone ahead and rendered out all of our images, let's move on to compositing and video editing. And the first thing we need to do is go to File, New, Video Editing. Pretty simple, right? Now, click on Add. Go to Image Sequence and navigate to your Exercise Files, Rendered, Frames folder. Now, this is where I rendered out all of my images. If you rendered them out to a different directory, of course, you want to navigate to that one, with your mouse in this file view, hit A to select everything. If you don't see this gear icon on, make sure you turn it on and where you see start frame, be sure to type in the exact number that is your start frame over here on the left. In my case, it's 100, so I'll hit Enter, scroll down to the bottom and it looks like my last frame is 280, so I'll go ahead and type in 280 as well. Everything else should be good, so go ahead and click Add Strip. And that will create this nice little image strip down here at the bottom. I can drag it over and now left click and drag and see my animation play. If you hold down your left click, you can drag up or down to go to different tracks or just leave it right where it was. You should go to your last frame and set it. In my case, it's going to be 181. There we go. By the way, the reason why it's 181 is because we're starting on frame one, so we're offsetting everything just by one frame. Now, video editing in Blender is pretty simple. If you come over here to the right, you'll see a thing called Modifiers. You can add a strip modifier, such as curves, brightness, et cetera. Let's go ahead and add a curve. You can hold down your middle mouse click to drag down or just mouse wheel down and you can play with the curves. Of course, there are a bunch of other modifiers that you can add but for now, you can see that you can do some very simple video editing inside Blender. If you hit T for tools, you'll also see that there is a blade where you can left click and cut and come back up here to move and separate out these two. Now, I don't want to do that, so I'm going to Control + Z and undo all of that. There we go. So that is the basics of how to use video editing inside Blender. And when you're done, up here on the top right, you'll see the properties output and just like before, you can specify a path and this time, you actually want to use FFmpeg video. That's because we've already rendered everything out to images so the next logical step is to compress it all down into a video. Just a little heads up, be sure to specify out where you want this to go by clicking on the folder icon. I'm just going to leave it in the default directory that is wherever this Blend file is saved. And number two, open up Encoding and change your container to MPEG 4. That'll ensure that it works with most of your devices. When you're ready, you can come up to Render Animation and this'll create a movie for you. Now, before we go away, I want to show you one other way of doing this and that's called compositing. Click this plus button right here. Go to General, Compositing and you'll be greeted by a blank screen. That's okay. Go ahead and click on Use Nodes, and you want to add, and let's search for an image. Go down to the second one and hit Enter. Enter again. You'll want to drag your image all the way out to composite. Let's zoom in a little bit here. You can do that with your mouse wheel or Control + middle mouse in and out. Click on this image and go to Open. And here you'll be greeted by a very similar Blender file view so be sure to hit A to select everything. Click on your gear icon. Unlike the video editing, you don't have a start and end but it will detect the sequence for you. Go to Open Image. And now, if I just scrub at the bottom here, you'll see this little image updates. Now, unlike video editing, you'll have to zoom in to get an idea of what you're looking at but once you're ready, you can go ahead and actually render out your animation and if you come over to this little printer, known as dimensions, you can set up all the settings just like you did before, output FFmpeg, et cetera, et cetera. But the difference in compositing is you have way more freedom. For example, if I wanted to, I could type in add in outer curves, hit Enter and that'll place it right here and I could change the curve up a little bit. Now, I know it's a little hard to see this little image, so what I recommend you do is go to Render, Render Image, close that out. And then go to Add Search and type in viewer. Go to the second option, hit Enter. Bring this out over here and drag it from image to image. Now with backdrop on, you can see in the background what it would look like in real time. But because it's compositing, we can add all sorts of nodes, so I'll search, for example, for a hue, saturation value. I'll hit Enter and that'll place it right between the two. And now I can change the hue of this image. If I want to, I can hit Alt + V for violet or V again to zoom in and out. And there you have it. Two different ways of compositing and video editing all of those images that you've just rendered into a movie. When you're happy with what you have, go ahead and go to Render Animation and that'll write out a video file based on what you just made. One small little caveat by the way. If you decide to use the compositing method, go to post processing and turn off sequencer. That's because sequencer will override anything that the compositor has set. So just be careful of that. That's a common little gotcha that happens from time to time. All right, as you can see, there are a million different ways of accomplishing a similar task inside of Blender. Go ahead and start playing around and figure out how to make your next great animated movie.