Movie & Image Strips

Movie

To add a movie (with or without audio) select a movie file(s) in the File Browser e.g. in the Audio-Video Interleaved format (*.avi file).

Note

Clips can be Huge

A three minute quicktime .mov file can be 140Megs. Loading it, even over a high-speed LAN can take some time. Do not assume your computer or Blender has locked up if nothing happens for awhile.

Image

Single Image

When you add a single still image (*.jpg, *.png, etc.), Blender creates a 25 frames long strip which will show this image along the strips range.

Image Sequence

In the case of (numbered) image sequences (e.g. *-0001.jpg, *-0002.jpg, *-0003.jpg, etc, of any image format), you have a choice:

Range

Navigate into the directory and RMB click and drag over a range of names to highlight multiple files. You can page down and continue RMB click-dragging to add more to the selection.

Batch

Shift-RMB click selected non-related stills for batch processing; each image will be one frame, in sort order, and can be a mix of file types (jpg, png, exr, etc.).

All

Press A to select/deselect all files in the directory.

Tip

Dealing with Different Sizes

Dealing with different sized images and different sized outputs is tricky. If you have a mis-match between the size of the input image and the render output size, the VSE will try to auto-scale the image to fit it entirely in the output. This may result in clipping. If you do not want that, use Crop and/or Offset in the Input panel to move and select a region of the image within the output. When you use Crop or Offset, the auto-scaling will be disabled and you can manually re-scale by adding the Transform effect.

Add Image Strip

Placeholder Images

Image sequences can use placeholder files. This works by enabling Use placeholders checkbox when adding an image strip. The option detects the frame range of opened images using blender’s frame naming scheme (filename + frame number + .extension) and makes an image sequence with all files in between even if they are missing. This allows you to render an image sequence with a few frames missing and still the image strip will have the correct range to account for the missing frames displayed as black. When the missing frames are rendered or placed in the same folder, you can refresh the sequencer and get the missing frames in the strip. The option is also available when using the Change Data/File operator and allows you to add more images to the range.

Example

If you scroll up the workspace, you will see an information channel (at vertical location channel 0) that gives you some helpful hints about the active strip. The example above shows a color strip from frames 1 to 25, then a mov file, and then an image strip. The info channel shows handy information about the image strip, whose name has been scrunched in the strip display, but is clearly spelled out in the information strip.