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

Set up Render

• In the top-right preview window, you are viewing VSE output (looks like a filmstrip S shape)
• Carefully change that to Properties (remembering that the fucking toolbar will POP from bottom to top of the window - you want to set it BACK to VSE when done configuring the render properties)
• Now you can change "Render Settings"
  • Dimensions > Resolution > (default is 1920x1080, you might want 1920x1920 if you have both vertical and horizontal footage); See Add a movie, below, to use Image Offset when importing to center each one accordingly
  • Output > directory to (project)/output
  • Output > ffmpeg video, RGB
  • Encoding > Container > MPEG-4, Codec H.264
  • Encoding > Audio Codec > AAC
  • (used to have Presets > MPEG-4, Codec > H.264, Audio Codec > AAC (these codecs play on iphone + android + chrome + firefox!))

Add a movie

• 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

Rotating Video

Annoyingly Blender does not use the camera metadata to rotate the video, and it's a pain, but easiest way after much experimentation is to rotate video FIRST with ffmpeg. This will strip the metadata so make sure you rotate the raw video to the correct rotation:

# To simply remote metadata:
ffmpeg -i VID_20180712_202358.mp4 1_grandentry.mp4

# To rotate
# transpose=1 means CW 90 degrees
# transpose=2 means CCW 90 degrees
# Use -vf "transpose=2,transpose=2" for 180 degrees
ffmpeg -i VID_20180712_202358.mp4 -vf transpose=2 -codec:a copy -metadata:s:v:0 rotate=0 1a_grandentry.mp4

Important keys

• A to unselect all, then B to "box select", then drag the mouse
• 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