Blender

Blender IS FUCKING LIT. But deep as hell.

Video Editing

• Start blender, change the "screen block" (first dropdown to the right of the File-Render-Window menu in the far top-left corner) to Video Editing
• Now you have three areas, what I'll call top-left "graph", top-right "video preview", middle "video sequence", bottom "video playback"; each has a viewbar at the bottom of the area; in the "graph" area, select the area type dropdown (far left) and change it to "properties"; note that strangely, the properties ares has its area type dropdown at the TOP of the area, doh
• In the "video sequence" area, click Add > Movie to get a file browser and pick a movie file; I like to change the view to list and sort to by date by using the toolbar
• Set the End frame in the video sequence to give enough width to fit the videos, eg 250 > 25000; use the scrollwheel to zoom out, and ctrl-scrollwheel to center the sequence
• Set up smaller "proxy" videos for each video strip you import; right-click video strips to select them, in the properties to the right select [x] use proxy 25%, then click rebuild; hover over the clip, press N, select Proxy render size 25%; repeat for all strips
• When rendering output, use top-right properties to change output > directory to (project)/output, Encoding > Presets > MPEG-4, Codec > H.264, Audio Codec > AAC (these codecs play on iphone + android + chrome + firefox!)

Important keys

• On a strip...
  • press K to cut it
  • press X to delete it
  • press G to move it left/right/across tracks
• Click in the video sequence to set the current position; press M to leave a Marker there that can be returned to using the Marker menu