NOTE: In this tutorial, just like nearly all of my tutorials, I have provided what I call keystrokes lines. These are highlighted throughout the tutorial and are meant to allow you to see the actual keystrokes that I went through in order to get the results I get in the tutorial. More advanced users should be able to go through a tutorial without the keystrokes lines assuming I have explained myself sufficiently.

            For the longest time I had no idea that the sequencer in Blender ever existed. Before that time I struggled with making Windows Movie Maker work with what I wanted to do. Since then, I have not opened Windows Movie Maker once. While the sequencer has a steeper learning curve than Movie Maker, the possibilities with Blender are much greater.

            The first thing that we will want to do is change the layout of Blender into the Video Editing layout. You can change Blender into this layout by going to the top of the screen and click on the dropdown button directly to the right of the help menu button. One of the choices in the list should be 'Video Editing'. Select that one and you should see the layout change.

Change to 'Video Editing' layout

            Before we add anything, I would like to point out that there are five different types of strips you can add into the sequencer. They are Scene, Movie, Image, Sound, and Effect. Movie, Image, and Sound are strips that come from files you have already saved on your computer. Scene strips take the actual scene that you have opened in Blender and puts it into to sequencer. Lastly, Effect strips are only usable when you have placed one or more of the other strips into the scene.

            So, to start our slideshow, lets add a movie. I am just going to use a short video I found on my computer. To add a video or movie into the sequencer, just click on Add in the menu and select movie. The file browser should appear, with which you should find and open your video. When you have selected and opened your video you should see it appear in two different windows.

Add --> Movie --> Open a video file

Personally, I do not like the fact that there are two windows for the same thing. I also like to have a preview of what is going on when I am editing video. So, you should see a plus symbol in the bottom right hand corner of the top right window. When you click on it, the menu for the window will appear. If you click on the popout menu that is currently set to sequencer, you should be able to find a selection labeled Image Preview. Choose that one. Now if you use the window with our movie strip in it and click somewhere above it (this window works just like the timeline) you should see a preview of your video appear in the window we just changed.

Turn on menu in top right window, Change Sequencer to Image Preview

Now that we have our video in the sequencer and our windows all set up we can start messing around with our movie strip.

As you may have already noticed, there is a panel on the right side of the sequencer editor window. In there you can find all sorts of things to do with your strips. For instance, if you want your video to play in reverse, all you have to do is scroll down to the Filter section and check the Backwards box. For another example, lets change the overall color of our video. To do this, just check off the Use Color Balance box and you should see three different color wheels appear. The best way to figure out how these work is to just play around with them. Basically, they all change the overall coloring of your strip in different ways.

Check out the Strip Editing Panel

            Ok, let's add sound to our video. The process to adding sound is exactly the same as adding a video to the sequencer. Once you have chosen and placed your strip correctly in the sequencer, you should be able to play it along with your video. However, you may find that the audio is playing normally, while your video is lagging behind. All you need to do to solve this problem is to click on the realtime button in the timeline window and they video and the audio will run together. The only drawback is that your video may not run very well and skip a lot of frame, so depending on what you are trying to look at in the preview, you may or may not want to have this setting on.

Add-->Sound-->Select audio file, turn on Realtime button, Test your video and audio

Just like any other strips you can find ways to edit it in the right hand panel. Audio only has a few settings, the main one being the overall volume of the audio. At the time of this writing (2.5 alpha 1) we only have volume to mess around with, but considering 2.49 had a few other settings, I suspect we will see some of them back there in future 2.5 versions.

Part 2: Slideshow

            So far we have only messed with video and audio a bit, both of which alone do not show off much of what the sequencer is able to do. Considering that, we are now going to make a slideshow with a bunch of images and different effects in transitioning between the images. To get started, lets delete the video and audio strips and add a few image strips, I am going to add four images.

            If you find that you cannot see the strips while you are adding them or it does not look like they are being loaded into the sequencer, be sure to check the right hand panel to see if the Channel and Start Frame values are actually within the range that you can see. If not, just change those values until you can see then strips.

            Now we want to make the images last longer. Currently, they are only 25 frames long when they are added into the sequencer, that is only 1 second. Just to make the images last a little longer, I am going to make them 100 frames long. This will not only make the image stay up longer in our slide show, but give us some frame to work with in the transitions. You can find the length setting in the right hand panel of the video sequencer window.

Delete the video and audio strips, Add four image strips, Change strip length to 100

The next thing that we want to do is set up the positioning of all of the images. If you look in the image above you will notice that all of my images are on different channels, or layers. The highest layer will be the on that shows up in the video. However, with our setup, we do not want them all stacked like they are, otherwise we would just have one image, the top one, showing in the video. So, while keeping them in separate layers, move the strips so that they are end to end as shown in the image below.

            Ok, we can finally get to making our first effect. The effect that we are going to make is a Wipe effect. To do this transition we need two overlapping strips and to add a new effect strip. Since our first and second strip are not overlapping, we need to select the first strip and click and hold the right arrow/triangle and pull it about 20 frames to overlap with the image above it. Now, while holding down shift, select the first and then the second strip. The order you select the strips counts! The strip you select second will be the strip we will transition into, so selecting the second strip first will not give you the same results as selecting the first strip first. The last thing we need to do now is to add the Wipe effect strip. This is in the add menu under effect strip.

Pull first strip to overlap the second, select the first strip then the second strip, Add-->Effect Strip-->Wipe

If you play your slideshow now, you should be able to see the wipe effect work as you change from the first image to the second. For our next transition, lets make the second image just fade into the third one. Just like before we will need to overlap the images, so pull the right end of the second image so that it overlaps the third. Select both the second image then the third image. Instead of adding a wipe effect strip, this time we will add a cross effect strip. If you test it out you should see the second image fade into the third one.

Stretch second strip to overlap the third, select second strip then third strip, Add-->Effect Strip-->Cross

So far I have only shown you simple transitions, but Blender can also do some simple effects as well. Just like the last to stretch the third strip to overlap the fourth. With both of those strips selected add the 'Add' effect strip. As you should be able to see, the color values of the two strips will be added together. While at first glance it looks like one is faded into the other, in reality each pixel color value of the first image and added to the color value of the second image to make a new color. The same sort of thing works with Subtract and Multiply. Just like in math, the order does not matter or add or multiply, but it does matter with subtract.

Overlap third and fourth strip, select the third and fourth strips, Add-->Effect Strip-->Add

Transitions and effects are great, but one of the most common things anyone would like to do is have the end smoothly fade to black. While there is no fade to black effect, we can still easily achieve this in Blender. First we will need to add a new Effect Strip, this one called Color. Place it so that it overlaps the last image, if you want a couple of seconds of black at the end, you can stretch it beyond the end of the fourth image, however it is not absolutely necessary. Now all we have to do is use the cross effect strip to make the fourth image fade into the color generator. So, select the fourth image, then the color generator strip and the add a Cross effect strip.

Add-->Effect Strip-->Color, Place Color strip over last strip, Select the last image strip then the color strip, Add-->Effect Strip-->Cross

I think by now you should have an idea of how powerful Blender can be. Using combinations of these strips in many different ways can produce tons of different results. After you have are done playing around with the effects and everything, you then render it as a video and you are have own slideshow with effects and transitions.