Blender as Video Editor
Blender is primarily a 3D modeling and animation suite, so it may seem odd to include it in this discussion. Blender was developed as an application capable of all the tasks in a CGI production pipeline, so it provides a non-linear editing mode (the “sequence editor”) capable of most video editing tasks. On Fedora Core, installation of Blender is as easy as issuing the command “sudo yum install blender”.
Blender sports some extremely compelling features. Video sequences can be cut, trimmed, overlayed, and repositioned quickly and easily with single-frame accuracy. Blender’s node based compositing system allows for extremely sophisticated effects, color correction, and transitions. The latest release includes chromakey nodes, allowing for green-screen effects.
However, there is a long list of reasons Blender may not be ideal in certain situations.
- has no video capture facilities, so Kino, dvgrab or some other utility is required to get video onto your workstation.
- has no built-in facilities for managing your video clips, so you will need to carefully organize them yourself.
- keeps track of time in terms of frame counts, quite natural for animators, but alien to video editors who primarily use SMPTE.
- does not output a true 29.97 NTSC frame rate, which may make working with sound difficult. This is not an issue if you work in 24p video.
- has only rudimentary support for sound in the sequence editor; again, quite satisfactory for animation, where sound is mastered separately, but it is not ideal for video editing.
- the user interface presents a relatively steep learning curve, though there are clear benefits to productivity.
Because of Blender’s origins in animation and its impressive image manipulation facilities, it is ideal for highly stylized video. It’s probably not the best choice for the impatient beginner or simpler, more straight forward video.

